An island odyssey
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Tags: archaeology, centenary-edition, discovery, history, SBS
The east coast of Tiga Island
Living in primitive surrounds with no proper shower or bed for a month would have many people on the first flight back to Australia, but for UQ’s Professor Ian Lilley, the search for a breakthrough find is too overpowering to ignore.
For days on end, the archaeologist can be found confined to a small pit in some of the world’s most remote and undeveloped destinations.
“You’re living in very close and usually very public quarters with people and it can be extremely basic, no shower for a month, no toilet for a month, no proper bed for a month,” Professor Lilley said.
“My kids wonder why we don’t camp for leisure – you’ve got to be kidding!”
Most of the time, a single dirt airstrip is his only escape back to civilisation – a reassurance as his travels can sometimes take him through regional conflicts.
A graduate of UQ’s School of Social Sciences, Professor Lilley has worked in archaeology and cultural heritage management in Australia and the surrounding region for nearly 30 years, and is currently based in the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies Unit (ATSIS).
A recent project saw him pack up his tool kit and set flight for Tiga Island, a rugged speck of raised coral in the South Pacific – commonly referred to as the “lopsided wedding cake”.
Last year was the fifth year he had visited Tiga, first on a pilot study jointly funded by the French and Australian Governments and since 2007 on an ARC Discovery project he directs.
Professor Lilley (centre) with Jacques Bole and UQ student Silas Piotrowski on Tiga Island
One aspect of the work has been the discovery of a unique ancient water harvesting system, found deep within the island’s many caves.
“When whites first went there, there were probably 200 to 300 people living on this tiny island with no water,” Professor Lilley said.
“There is no surface water on Tiga Island…though you can occasionally find water leaking out of the bottom of the coral cliffs at low tide.”
Professor Lilley was captivated by the intelligence of the harvesting system, which in some caves included structures that resembled modern-day bathroom basins.
Along with the water systems, the team also discovered Lapita and other pottery, human remains and ash mounds from fire torches used by the caves’ previous occupants.
“Lapita pottery is highly distinctive and was used by the first humans to colonise the remote Pacific beyond the end of the main Solomon Islands. It is found from New Britain near New Guinea out to Samoa and Tonga,” Professor Lilley said.
“The earliest Lapita dates from 3300 years ago in New Britain to around 2900 years ago in Tonga, tracking the west-east movement of the colonisers.
“The human remains are being studied by specialists with the permission of the Tiga community. This work will reveal a great deal about diet, disease, social relationships and migration patterns.”
The thrill of helping piece together the history of ancient civilisations is the “elixir” that keeps the World Heritage Assessor searching.
“There’s always some little quirk…there’s always the unexpected, it usually always comes on the last day of the trip,” he said.
“The work I did in New Britain in the early 80s with the Australian Museum…it was the whole Indiana Jones trip, it was 20 people carrying big boxes on their heads walking through the jungle for days.
“We were taken off to a cave deep in the mountains…just as we were finishing up we found this very thin little layer and it turned out to be from the end of the last Ice Age.
“It was the first time anyone had found evidence that old beyond mainland New Guinea. There are lots of sites in the islands much older than that now, but at the time it was very impressive, especially to a 22-year-old.
“Not long afterwards I was part of a big international National Geographic project on Pacific colonisation. We hired a sailing boat from Dick Smith and went cruising through the islands.
“I was by far the most junior person involved as a team leader. I took time out of my PhD…it was all pretty thrilling.”
Professor Lilley has reached several career milestones, including being elected a Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries of London, the UK’s second most ancient Royal scientific society, and becoming Secretary General of the ICOMOS International Committee on Archaeological Heritage Management. ICOMOS is the statutory advisory body to UNESCO on cultural heritage.
“I remember two of my very senior colleagues being elected as Fellows of the Society of Antiquaries when I was doing my PhD at ANU. It was really quite a big deal and it’s been in the back of my mind since then as something that you aspire to,” he said.
In late 2007, Professor Lilley was chosen by ICOMOS to assess Papua New Guinea’s first World Heritage nomination, at Kuk in the highlands near Mt Hagen.
“Kuk is a site of immense importance because it demonstrates that people in New Guinea independently invented agriculture at the same time as people in the Middle East,” he said.
“Although I worked in PNG for many years, I was last in Mt Hagen when I was about nine-years-old, so it was a fascinating trip!”
Professor Lilley works with research assistant Michelle Langley sieving sediment in a cave
Professor Lilley is currently working with his New Caledonian and French colleagues on two bilingual publications about Tiga, one in French and English, and the other in French and Maré, the language of Tiga.
He is also co-authoring a new book on Australian archaeology for Cambridge University Press.
By Eliza Plant
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Which peoples(e.g. Melanesian, polynesian) seem to have been earliest migrants to the area?.
and the now Tigans are what or whom). Congratulations for your efforts
Ron Peebles
Thanks for your question, Ron. The categories of ‘Melanesian’ and ‘Polynesian’ don’t apply back that far, and ‘Melanesian’ in particular is pretty dubious even now.
Biologically and culturally, the initial setlers of Tiga (and all the other islands beyond the Solomons) were from a group of people which very probably had no self-conscious identity as anything at all, or even thought of themselves as a group, let alone as Melanesian or Polynesian. These are just recently-coined geographical terms. This colonising group, as we define it , included the ancestors of people now called both Melanesian and Polynesian. Descendants of this ancestral stock only became what we would recognise as “Polynesians” very much later in the piece. What’s more, despite how it might look, ‘Melanesians” are actually highly differentiated biologically and culturally. An early French explorer lumped them all together just because they were all ‘black ‘(Melanesia means “black islands”). Some modern people, especially in the islands between New Guinea and Fiji (and most particularly beyond the Solomons) share certain fundamental biological characteristics with Polynesians, having descended in part from the same ancestors (amongst others). Certain other modern people, especially on mainland New Guinea (and particularly in the Highlands) but some also in New Britain and the Solomons, share few if any biological (ie genetic) characteristics with either Polynesians or even other Melanesians.
This is a complex situation! It has been made even more complicated by the persistence of pre-scientific labels such as “Polynesian” and “Melanesian” and scientifically unfounded ideas concerning mass migration of supposed racial groups. The fact is that lots of people were moving round a large area extending back into SE Asia for a very (very!) long time, mixing biologically and culturally all the while. The many people today who still use terms coined by early explorers or even early scientists to identify this group or that, thinking the group has some sort of stable long-term biological and cultural identity, are profoundly mistaken.
The “ethic” or “racial” picture observed by Europeans as they expanded round the world (and by earlier groups, such as the Chinese, Arabs, Greeks or Romans) was very rarely evidence for the existence of distinctive “peoples” with ancient roots, but rather just a snap-shot of the state of the biological and cultural flux of humanity at the time. For instance, many people who would regard themselves and be regarded by others as deeply (White) European actually came from Asia not very long ago in historical terms. Even within Europe (or Africa or wherever), people who identify as one thing or another a very likely to originate from somewhere else – and I am not talking about recent migrants. Northern Italians, numbers of whom are in a highly nationalistic political party, are actually originally from Germany. Hungarians don’t speak an European language, but rather one (like Finnish) which originates in Asia. And so on. In short, terms like Melanesian and Polynesian are not very useful, scientifically-speaking, for thinking about human origins in the Pacific.