It's also an especially
valued moment
for myself and the museum,
as it is Dr. Spriggs's work
and his laureate project
at the University
that directly led to the
development of the Uncovering
Pacific Paths exhibit
that just opened,
that Jane mentioned
a moment ago.
It's co-curated by myself
and Dr. Tristan Jones, who's
a research assistant
on a project,
as well as with
research contributions
of another, ANU scholar,
William Scates Frances.
And this Uncovering
Pacific Pasts exhibit
is part of a much, much larger
international exhibition that's
going on that explores the
ideas, the people, the networks
that were pivotal in the
development of the discipline
of archaeology,
and that continue
to affect the ways
in which we all
engage with the deep
history of the Pacific.
There's an impressive over
30 different institutions
across the world
that are contributing
to this global exhibition,
from the Solomon Islands
to Stockholm and New Zealand.
And each institution,
each museum, each exhibit
gets an opportunity
to tell their own part
of the story that reveals
the interconnected
history of these objects,
these collections, that
have been interpreted
and reinterpreted
by collectors, by
anthropologists,
by archaeologists in the
past and ongoing today.
And this global
exhibition, I should say,
is really just one
of the products,
if you want to call it a
product, that's come out
of Dr. Spriggs's five-year
laureate program, which
is called "Collective Biography
of Archaeology in the Pacific,"
which aims to reflect
upon and rewrite
the history of archaeology
in the region and its links
to earlier social and
linguistic anthropology.
And in my humble opinion,
investigations like these
are really particularly
critical in these times,
as we consider and we
reconsider the role
of anthropology museums.
And they provide an
opportunity for us
to think about our own
intellectual histories,
our knowledge inheritance
and ideas that essentially
get passed down to us.
They're almost like
these genealogies
that we need to interrogate
and reckon with.
And for some of you,
Harvard may perhaps
be an unexpected
player in the history
of oceanic anthropology,
but it shouldn't be.
It was the first institution
in the United States
to offer a course on Pacific
ethnology, and prior to that,
led many scientific
expeditions to the region.
And if you unravel just a
couple of those threads,
you reveal a much
earlier legacy of contact
in the Pacific that dates
back to the 1780s, when
post-revolutionary Massachusetts
and New England settlers were
adventuring out into the
South Seas and Northwest
coast and the shores of Canton
or Guangzhou in their efforts
to repair the American
economy and test out
expansionist desires.
At Harvard, very specifically,
the Peabody Museum
and the anthropology,
when they were first
developed and designed
in 1860s, were really
developed to kind of investigate
the origins of the Indigenous
peoples of the Americas.
But very large and significant
collections from the Pacific
immediately flooded the
doors of this museum.
And it really is those
collections and the people
that studied them
that have played
an integral role into the
development of the discipline.
From very early on, you
got philosophers, thinkers,
scholars that are
obsessed with how
these seemingly remote
and vastly separated
islands could've been populated.
So you have these people
swapping theories, methods,
musings, sending articles,
letters, and materials
across continents to
discuss this very theory,
"the problem of Polynesia,"
as sometimes it's called.
And so sitting
within museum walls,
they inspired each
other to advance science
by examining material
objects and cultural traits.
So while this particular
exhibit that some of you
will come and see, either
tonight or in the future,
it doesn't feature material
from archaeological collections
and excavations, but it
does highlight the thinkers
and the debates over things
like diffusion and evolution
that were the precursors to what
we now call modern archaeology.
And this intellectual
history, this genealogy
of ideas and practices and
their players and figures
is really a big part
of what Dr. Spriggs's
work over the past decade
has been all about.
In fact, one of his
most recent articles
is delightfully
entitled "Everything
you've been told
about the history
of Australian
archaeology is wrong,"
and it directly interrogates how
we've invented and perpetuated
an inaccurate version of
the discipline's history,
one that forges a divide between
skull-collecting misadventures
of amateurs and those
of professionals,
and often ignores the
contributions of the breadth
of early researchers, including
Indigenous peoples that
were integral to this work.
Now Matthew Spriggs
is undoubtedly
in the camp of professional
archaeologists,
not an amateur by any means.
He's worked in this discipline
region for over 45 years.
He's a Brit by birth.
He's Cambridge-educated,
"the real Cambridge,"
as he likes to say.
But he received his doctorate
in the Southern Hemisphere,
at the Australian National
University, my own alma mater.
And it is where he
continues to now serve
as the professor of archaeology.
His doctoral research,
a few decades ago,
investigated traditional
taro irrigation
in Vanuatu, which directly led
to some revival projects, which
is pretty exciting.
He will tell you--
he will point out
that his first job
after graduating
was actually here in
the United States,
at the University
of Hawai'i at Manoa.
He spent about six years
there before giving up
on us Americans and
heading back to Australia.
Over the decades,
many decades now,
he's worked in the Pacific
Islands and Southeast Asia,
having undertaken many
archaeological research
projects in Indonesia, East
Timor, New Guinea, Bismarck
Archipelago, Solomon Islands,
New Caledonia, Hawai'i,
and of course, Vanuatu, a place
that he calls home part time
and acts as the honorary curator
at the Vanuatu Cultural Center,
and where he was recently
awarded a Distinguished Service
Medal just last year, the
third highest honor in Vanuatu,
the order of Vanuatu.
And which, of course, I've
been told if Vanuatu carried on
with the British honor system
from their colonial past,
we would all be calling
him "Sir Matthew."
So you can keep that in mind
when you direct questions
to him later.
Now Matthew, with
over 250 publications,
his research has significantly
advanced the field of Pacific
archaeology, and in particular,
our understanding of the Lapita
Cultural Complex from the group
of seafaring ancestors that
settled the region,
which I imagine Matthew
will touch upon today, perhaps.
I must say, it's been
an honor and a joy
to get to know
Matthew personally
over the past few years
and to swap stories
from our shared fervor for
this discipline and the region.
His academic rigor is
matched only by his wit.
And I should note, he's
no stranger to Harvard.
He's conducted research
here several times
and has, therefore, a direct
intellectual genealogical link
to the forebears
that are actually
featured in this exhibit.
His mentor was Dr.
Roger Green, who
was taught by Douglas Oliver.
Douglas Oliver was a Harvard
student and professor here,
who followed directly in
the footsteps of a man named
Roland B. Dixon, who was the
first person to teach Pacific
ethnology here.
Douglas Oliver is also the last
curator of oceanic collections
before myself.
So Matthew, whether you like
it or not, we are, in a way,
family.
And I'm like your
weird second cousin.
[LAUGHTER]
So much of his
recent work reflects
on these intellectual histories
that I've been talking about,
interrogating what we know and
what theories we've inherited.
Over the past five
years, that has
taken the form of this
large international project,
as well as other
collaborations here at Harvard.
Together with
geneticist David Reich,
most recently, they've been
recovering and analyzing
ancient DNA from the region.
And this work has
revised and refined
the history of
migration in the Pacific
and has been featured in
many major publications,
including Nature.
And so, as one of most
prolific and well-respected
archaeologists in the region,
we are truly in for a treat
tonight.
And so without further
ado, please join me
in warmly welcoming
Dr. Matthew Spriggs.
[APPLAUSE]
OK.
I should say, first of
all, [NON-ENGLISH SPEECH]
Now I say this--
it's just saying
"Good evening, folks,"
in my wife's language of
Raga of North Pentecost.
I say it partly to get
us into a Pacific mood
and have some Pacific language,
and also because I'm sure
this is the first time
in Harvard's history
that the language Raga
of North Pentecost
has been heard in public
in a lecture theater.
So it's a great
thing for Vanuatu.
Now I'll give an
outline of my talk,
because it kind of
wanders around a bit.
I thought, first of all,
that I will need to explain--
I'm not going to give you
a lecture about Pacific
archaeology and its results.
But I need to
explain particularly
about the Lapita culture, which
Ingrid mentioned, before I get
onto the actual project,
because we keep referring back
to it in the rest of the talk.
As she mentioned, my project,
the "Collective Biography
of Archaeology in the Pacific,"
involves various aspects to it,
and one is the Uncovering
Pacific Pasts exhibits,
one of which, as you've heard
mentioned, is here at Harvard.
Then I wanted to really
give just an example--
it's not exactly
a random example;
it's one of the better ones
I've been able to find--
of kind of reading
against the grain,
looking at the history
of Pacific archaeology
but finding out that the
story that has been told of it
is often not actually
what was going on.
And a classic
example that I found
related to Edward Gifford's
1947 expedition to Fiji--
he was at University of
California at Berkeley--
and I realized in
reading through the notes
and the archives, and with a bit
of knowledge of general Pacific
history, that his
entire expedition had
been directed by native
Fijians, and he had no idea
that this was the case.
That's why I called that "covert
control" of Edward Gifford's
expedition.
This leads on to the
discussion of someone
who was involved in that
expedition, an Indigenous
archaeologist and
his legacy, a man
called Ratu Rabici Logavatu.
And towards the end, we
meet the Logavatu family,
as I did a few months ago.
And then also, I just wanted to
mention a few potential future
projects and collaborations
in the field of the history
of Pacific archaeology
that people at Harvard
may hopefully be involved in as
we carry this project forward.
Now the Lapita culture
of 3,000 years ago
is basically the
extension eastwards
of the island's Southeast
Asian Neolithic,
bringing pottery and a whole
range of new material culture
into the region.
And one of the most
notable things about it
is that it's a culture which
3,000 years ago bridged
geographical Melanesia
and Polynesia.
So it stretches from
the Bismarck Archipelago
and the neighboring
coast of Papua New Guinea
and is found out as
far as Tonga, Samoa,
and Wallis and Futuna.
Beyond the main Solomon
Islands, the area
there near Oceania, Lapita
represents the first people out
into the Pacific.
So Lapita are very much the
ancestors of, certainly,
in island of Melanesia, places
like Vanuatu and New Caledonia,
and into Polynesia,
the ancestors
of all current Pacific
Islanders in those regions.
Micronesia is a bit
more complicated.
That would be a
whole other talk.
But Lapita is a wonderful
culture for an archaeologist,
because you can recognize if
you're on a Lapita culture site
if you find a piece
of pottery that's
the size of your fingernail,
because it has this very
distinctive decoration.
You can see there some examples
from the island of Watom, which
is in the Bismarck Archipelago,
dug up in 1909 by a past
Catholic priest,
Father Otto Meyer.
And it's very
distinctively decorated
using tooth stamps which
were impressed into the clay.
And you never see
this style of pottery
ever again in the Pacific.
So you just need one
tiny piece, and you
could say, yep, we're
about 3,000 years old here.
And there aren't many parts of
the world where you can really
pin things down very closely.
So that's Lapita pottery.
And much of the history
of Pacific archaeology--
because the Lapita culture,
being the founding culture
of parts of island
Melanesia and of Polynesia
is obviously an important part
of the story of the settlement
of the Pacific.
And in part, we've been
tracking with the project
how this idea of the
Lapita culture developed.
Again, you read things about
it which are probably not
quite true.
It is true that there
was a site called Lapita,
and it was excavated by our
friend Edward Gifford, again,
in 1952, in New Caledonia.
But nobody actually called the
Lapita culture until sometime
around 1964.
And nobody knows who first
came up with it as a concept.
I'm still tracking it
down, but in itself,
it's something we
all know--yeah,
many people in the
Pacific, you ask them,
have you heard of
the Lapita culture?
Yeah, of course I have.
But OK, well, who first
called it the Lapita culture?
We don't actually know.
So that is enough on that.
But our project, why
did we start doing this?
Although the history of
archaeology across the--
in places like Europe or
in the Americas, has been--
a lot of people have
done research on it.
But in the Pacific,
this is not the case.
It's been a strange
sort of lack.
I think the New Zealanders,
they've kind of done a--
there's histories they've
written of the development
of archaeology in New Zealand.
But they're rather
parochial, a bit
like some of the histories
of Australia in archaeology.
They just stay
within their country.
And very little
has actually been
done trying to synthesize how
the story that we understand
today of Pacific settlement
was put together,
and who put it together.
So in a way, I was
setting out to create
what's almost a new
subfield within Pacific
archaeology, which is an
appreciation of its history.
And part of the aim
that I had there
was to really look at
our current theories--
where did they come from?--
and evaluate them.
Also, although there hasn't
been much history of Pacific
archaeology, there are many
histories social anthropology,
sociocultural anthropology,
where the Pacific features
extremely strongly in them.
And part of what I
realized is that if you
read the early histories of
sociocultural anthropology,
often based on early
anthropologists who
worked in the
Pacific, the people
who are being held up
as the great ancestors
of sociocultural
anthropologists are as much
the ancestors of the
archaeologists who
work in the Pacific.
Many of them were
ethnologists before there
was kind of sociocultural
anthropology or archaeology
in forms in which we
understand it today.
So doing a lot of
this stuff, it kind of
is sort of rewriting,
reminding the anthropologists
that some of their
story is also our story.
But when you read
their histories,
we're just not there
as archaeologists.
Also, it was mentioned, my
rather polemical article that I
published from this last week--
"Everything You've Been
Told about the history
of Australian
Archaeology Is Wrong."
But I didn't start off
to write that article.
I started off to
write an article that
was trying to get away
from the parochial
nature of the history of
Australian archaeology,
which quite a bit
has been written,
and to point out that many of
these early archaeologists who
worked in Australia also
worked in the Pacific as well,
or island Southeast Asia.
But then I found that, actually,
the whole way that we've
discussed the history of the
development of archaeology
in Australia has been wrong,
not least really writing out
of that history the heavy
involvement of Indigenous
people from at
least 1830 onwards
in the development
of the theories
and the interpretations
of Australian archaeology.
So we've done a bit on that.
And then also, I
didn't want it to be
the dead white Anglo-Saxon male
history of Pacific archaeology.
So the two postdocs that I
hired, one is a Francophone,
and the other is a
German-speaking scholar.
And so I wanted to bring in
the contribution of people
from countries which are
not called the United
States, Australia, or England.
And I think that's something
we've attempted to do.
And several of these little
illustrations here, this is a--
let's see.
Let's get this right.
Is that right?
Several of these
illustrations are, in fact,
from the one I've
just-- you can see there
from the New Hebrides.
This is a stratigraphic diagram
that was done in 1889 by a man
called Gustav Glenmore,
probably the earliest example
of stratigraphic analysis
done in Melanesia.
Down below, we have
Otto Finsch there,
and he was excavating sites
in Hawai'i in the 1870s.
Again, you won't read about
this in the history books yet.
And I just had that
one, the "Building
of British social
anthropology" is really
just an example of
the kind of works
that socialist
anthropologists write,
which I think are really
a sort of false history.
And I couldn't resist
sticking up Edward Gifford's--
his driving license
from New Caledonia
when he found the
site of Lapita.
His granddaughter allowed me
to take a photograph of it
in Chico, California.
OK, now there's the other aims.
I had a feeling that
there'd actually
been a lot more archaeology
done in the Pacific
than had been written about, or
specialists had talked about.
And in fact, there's a lot
of archaeological excavation
that's done from at
least the 1870s onwards,
until World War II.
Usually, it's thought
that excavation
of sites in the Pacific
really began after the war,
and Edward Gifford is a
key member of that team.
But in fact, a lot of good work
was being done and published,
but perhaps not so much in
English, before that time.
Also, one thing we often find
is that the collections are
in one institution, but the
field notes that relate to them
are in another one.
A classic example is
Katherine Routledge, worked
on Easter Island around 1914.
And her field notes are in the
Royal Geographical Society.
And the artifacts
that she collected
are in the Pitt Rivers
Museum in Oxford.
And in Oxford, they
labeled things like,
"Site 10, six inches," which
doesn't make any sense,
unless you have
access to the field
notes that tell you
where site 10 was
and what was found in
the level at six inches.
Also, we're going to have a
look at this perennial issue
that comes up all
the time that, ah, so
wasn't the Pacific settled
from South America,
or even sometimes North America.
And this has been
a perennial issue.
It was first raised--
well, it was actually raised
by the Spanish chroniclers
in the 16th century, who talked
about expeditions of the Incas
into the Pacific.
But it really became
popular after about 1803,
but it's been a
longstanding idea.
Now I don't know if anyone
knows who that chap is.
Any idea?
He's dressed very nicely.
It's Thor Heyerdahl,
who, of course,
in 1947 sailed a balsa
wood-- well, "sailed"--
he kind of drifted on a
balsa wood raft and banged
into the Tuamoto Islands.
And we have to thank him.
Even though all of his
ideas were completely wrong,
he inspired generations of
people to work in the Pacific.
And I remember when
I was a little kid.
I think my copy of
one of these books,
Aku-Aku, I think it was,
about his expedition
to Easter Island after the
Kon-Tiki expedition itself,
I think I got it when I
was about 11 or something.
It's got a date in it.
So certainly, he's
someone who inspired me,
even though his ideas--
Polynesia was not actually
settled from South America.
Also, one of the
things in the project
was there didn't seem
to be any women involved
in Pacific archaeology.
And of course, you think,
that can't actually be true.
And in fact, we
have found evidence
of lots of women in
Pacific archaeology.
One of my postdocs has now got
on further postdoc particularly
to concentrate on the role of
women in Pacific archaeology.
And there's Katherine
Routledge there,
who was very prominent
in some of the early work
on interpreting the
settlement of the Pacific.
And finally, also, I
wanted to restore knowledge
of the agency and contribution
of Indigenous scholars
and interlocutors.
And here we have a man
I've mentioned before,
Ratu Rabici Logavatu from
Fiji, who worked with Gifford.
And his story is one that, apart
from a line of acknowledgment
in Gifford's 1951 monograph,
was completely unknown
until this project, even
to his own family, who
had no idea he'd been
an archaeologist.
But we shall get on to that.
Part of what we've
also done is we've
been involved where it seemed
appropriate to the institutions
we were dealing with in
repatriating collections.
And these tend to be-- these
aren't our old collections.
They're collections where
archaeologists went out
to Pacific Islands,
said they were going
to return everything,
but then kind of forgot
about it for 40 or 50 years.
So we've, in some cases,
reminded the museums [CHUCKLES]
that the actual permits
that they originally had did
involve returning the material.
And this is at Simon
Fraser University,
where some very nice Malakula
Vanuatu Naamboi pots--
and this was without
any pressure,
actually, from us at all.
But their focus isn't
really the Pacific,
and their anthropology
museum there, they just said,
do you want these things?
And we said absolutely.
So Shutler's collections from
his work in Vanuatu in '63 to
about '68 have now
all been returned
to the Vanuatu National Museum.
Also, we have been tracking
down old and sometimes ill
archaeologists, or even
dead archaeologists,
and extracting their archives
from them or their families.
And we have managed
to build up--
save quite a few
archives, some of which
are going to places like the
Vanuatu National Archives,
where appropriate,
or are being--
we have a dedicated Pacific
archivist at the ANU,
and we're building
up a good collection
of primary documentation
field notes and such
and photographs there, at the
ANU, of past archaeologists.
In fact, my whole
project really started
when a very old archaeologist,
when the second oldest
person to get a PhD at the
ANU, he died, and there
was a misunderstanding
between people
in the university
and his family.
And all of his field notes, 45
boxes, were taken to the tip
and dumped.
And that actually was one of
the real inspirations for me
to try and get some
money to do this project,
so it doesn't happen again.
And we can just see some
archivists and museum
staff at the Vanuatu
National Museum
when I'm returning some books
and documentation that we've
been given by people
during the project.
OK, well, after five years
of having a wonderful time,
I'm afraid it's over.
It's time to say goodbye.
It finishes on
the 31st of March,
and then I'll have
to find something
else to do at the University.
We have had-- we're
meant to be having
a Histories of Archaeology
International Conference.
Already, some people
have had to withdraw
because their countries,
France in particular,
simply won't let them travel.
Whether it's going to
happen, whether people
will be sending perhaps
videotaped papers,
I don't know.
Filipino colleagues, again,
have been not allowed to come.
So it's a bit of a disastrous
time to be finishing a project
and having international
conferences.
But what can you do?
Also, we have a
workshop planned, again,
which may or may
not happen, or may
have to be delayed, particularly
to convey to Pacific Island
Museum and archives personnel
the kind of resources
that we've gathered together
during the project and the kind
of collaborations
which are possible
and which they may
be interested in.
And we are
collaborating directly
with many of these institutions
through the Uncovering Pacific
Pasts, with our exhibitions
at a whole 35, 37,
something like
that, institutions
in 19 countries
around the world,
which are all
happening right now.
And many of these are
in the Pacific Islands,
so we have been collaborating
with them on that.
These are just some of
the wonderful people
on the project.
I won't name them all, but
I've been basically running
a team of 11 people
with four PhD
students, a couple of postdocs,
various research associates.
And it has been a
wonderful five years.
And there is a website where--
it's still under
construction, but--
if you just type in
uncoveringpacificpasts.org,
you will get some information
on most of the exhibitions
that we've been having.
And here's just a
couple of examples.
My trip here has been to visit
three of the exhibitions,
so I was privileged to be
present at the installation
of the exhibit at the
Bishop Museum in Honolulu.
That's Dr. Jillian Swift,
who collaborated on it.
And this was a particularly
nice one for me,
because it's an exhibition about
a very early archaeologist,
probably the first
person in the Pacific
who could be described as a
professional archaeologist
in terms of that
was his main job,
a man called JFG Stokes, who,
of course, was an Australian,
but lived much of
his life in Hawai'i,
and did a very key excavation
on the island of Kahoolawe
in the Hawaiian
chain in 1913, 1914.
And so the exhibits
in each place
are usually just one case.
But when you add up 37 cases,
that's quite a big exhibition.
So around the world,
it all adds up.
So the story at the
Bishop Museum was of him.
Another one of the
exhibitions, it's actually
only a virtual exhibition,
but it's at museums--
Victoria and Melbourne
Museum in Australia.
And there, they're exhibiting
some of the Lapita pottery
that I showed you in
that earlier slide,
the dentate stamp pottery.
And I had the
greatest difficulty
getting ahold of people from
this island of Watom, which
is in the Bismarck Archipelago,
off the island of New Britain.
But finally, about a week
ago, through a businessman
from Watom, who's based in
Papua New Guinea's capital, Port
Moresby, but travels
there frequently,
I was able to connect
with the community there,
and I'll be working
to make sure that they
have as much information about
the Watom and Lapita pottery
collected by Father
Meyer in 1909,
and various people since, as
people outside of Watom have.
And so this is very
nice, some pictures
that Kepas Paon sent me
last week and a statement
from the Watom people that had
a meeting after church, Sunday
before last, and expressed
their pride in having Lapita
pottery having been found,
one of the first places it was
found, on their island, and
also signaling that they'd like
to know a lot more about it.
So that's rather nice.
There, my second stop was at
Berkeley, the Hearst Museum.
And again, it's a Lapita theme.
This is the first Lapita
pottery that was found in Fiji.
And it was found after
Gifford had left in 1947.
It was found in 1948 by a local
doctor called Lindsay Verrier
and by Ratu Rabici
Logavatu, again.
And this is Dr. Adam Nilsen,
who curated the exhibition.
So it's about these few
pottery chards that were found.
Rabici was key because he
had worked with Gifford
on Gifford's other excavations.
They never found
any Lapita pottery.
So he could say, this
doesn't look like anything
we ever found, and that led to
a whole series of discoveries
and discussions
which really helped
shape our current knowledge of
the geographical distribution
of Lapita.
So again, it's just a single
case, but a nice thing.
OK, moving on to the
next theme is really
that, what did we find out
that we didn't know before?
Well, one of the
things we found out
was this very interesting
case, probably
the first major
archaeological expedition
after World War
II in the Pacific,
led by Edward Gifford,
who was ended up-- he
was a curator of
what's now called
the Hearst Museum in Berkeley,
always accompanied by Delila.
So this is a fairly
constant theme.
The archaeologists
who will go there,
their names are
on all the books,
but it looks like their wife's
doing a lot of the work in it.
Why are we surprised?
But Delila, I
really went looking
for Delila in the archives,
and she's very hard to find.
It may just be that
what she was doing
was what she had done on all
of these previous expeditions,
including many in
California, that she just
lugged the equipment around.
She took the photographs.
So in his field notes,
there's no need to say,
"Delila took the photographs,"
because she always took
the photographs and
had been doing so
for the last 30-plus years.
But there's virtually no mention
of her in his notes, let alone
in his publications, apart
from the usual perfunctory,
thanks to my wife.
She was a conchologist,
a shell expert.
And she also was doing her
own stuff when she was there.
She was collecting marine
shells for various museums,
California Academy of
Sciences, and places like that.
But she only gets her
name on one publication
during his entire
life, and that was
his work he did on Yap in
Micronesia, his last published
monograph.
And that was because
he died, and she
had to see it to the press.
And that's the
only one that says,
"Edward and Delila Gifford."
So she finally did get
her name on a publication.
Now they were there in 1947.
Basically, he goes to it.
He excavates two sites,
and both of these sites
are absolutely key in oral
traditions that really
go to the heart of which clans
own which particular piece
of land in Fiji.
And when you get
into the archive,
you see that, well,
his publication,
he's thanked a couple of people.
Navatu is one of
these key sites.
He goes and excavates
there, has deposits
that go back about
2,000 years, so
a bit after Lapita,
another cycle,
Vunda, which was a bit later.
But both of these
are very important
in Fijian oral traditions.
And he gives his
acknowledgments.
He thanks various people, the
acting governor, Ratu Rabici,
a picture of him standing
at one of the excavations.
This amazing man, of whom
I knew very little before,
Ratu Sir Lala Sukuna, and also
Ratu Sir Lala Sukuna's deputy,
Kingsley Roth, who is
a noted anthropologist
and came from an anthropological
family of some renown.
Ratu Sir Lala Sukuna was
an absolutely incredible
character.
And in 1943, the
height of the war,
he persuades the
governor of Fiji
to completely change the
administration of the colony.
And basically, the
British district officers
are told to butt out of anything
to do with native Fijians,
and a parallel
administration is set up.
They called the native
Fijian administration
the Office of Natve Affairs,
and Lala Sukuna runs it.
And it's essentially a
state within a state,
and this lasts until Fiji's
independence in 1970,
so quite different than the
usual idea of a colony being
run by a bunch of white people.
This guy is really
running many things.
He's vastly famous in Fiji.
There's a park in
Suva named after him.
A friend of mine, Deryck
Scarr, did a biography of him.
And I love the quotation from
Scarr of Ratu Sir Lala Sukuna.
"He was just below
God and the king,
with only the
governor intervening.
As one who dealt
authoritatively with land,
he was practically
a god himself."
And he was really the secret
king of Fiji during this time.
He really ran the place.
And he was an amazing character.
He got a degree from
Wadham College, Oxford,
just before World War I. He
tried to join the British Army,
but on racial grounds,
they wouldn't let him join.
So he jumped over the channel,
joined the French Foreign
Legion.
He won the Médaille Militaire.
And if you read the citation,
it would have won him a Victoria
Cross if he had been in the--
the highest military
honor in Britain.
It's interesting that
he was the first Fijian
to graduate with a degree
before World War I,
because there were
no others, apart
from arguably some medical
doctors, into the 1950s.
And the reason that there were
none between him and the 1950s
was because he didn't
want there to be anybody
else with a university degree.
He liked to be in charge.
And eventually, it was some
well-meaning local residents
who raised the money for
scholarships for native Fijians
to attend universities
in the 1950s.
And they were the first
generation of graduates.
So he's a complex character.
And his assistant was
George Kingsley Roth,
from the Roth family who
are famous anthropologists.
In the acknowledgments,
he says, "Son
of the anthropologists of
Tasmanian fame, H. Ling Roth."
I think H. Ling Roth's main
fame in regard to Indigenous
Tasmanians was that
he never met one,
but he wrote extensively
about them from some source.
Also when doing the
research, I loved--
this seemed to me to be a
very American kind of thing--
botanist Otto Degener's
advice to Gifford.
"May I suggest that if you do in
Rome as the Romans do, namely,
treat the natives like dirt
the way the colonials do,
they will shut up like clams.
I treated them as equals and
got the greatest cooperation.
You can give my greetings
to all of the above.
But in the eyes of
the imperialist,
I was very much of a pest.
Being an American, I can't
help being democratic."
So I thought it was a lovely
piece from the archives.
The point about Sukuna is that
when you read all the notes,
he's the one who tells
Gifford to dig at Navatu.
He's the one who suggests
that Gifford dig at Vunda.
And the reason he's
doing it is that he
has this idea that perhaps
archaeology can solve the land
problems and say who really owns
the different parts of land.
Well, of course, it can't,
as every archaeologist knows.
But it's a sort of folk
belief in much of the Pacific
that archaeologists somehow
will dig up something
with somebody's name on
that shows that it's really
my land and not their land.
As soon as Sir Lala
Sakuna realized
that, in fact, archaeology's
promise was not that good,
it couldn't do what he
thought it was going to be,
what he thought it
was going to do,
he completely lost interest.
And it's quite interesting that
in his annual report for 1947
to the British government,
there's no mention of Gifford
at all, even though he
helped Gifford tremendously.
And part of his help was
to provide an assistant
to Gifford, who was this young
man of chiefly rank, Ratu
Rabici Vuikandavu Logavatu.
And Logavatu, to Gifford, was
just this extremely helpful
assistant, extremely helpful.
He was running his
own excavations
after some training
from Gifford.
He was excavating
in different places
than Gifford was
excavating in 1947.
He did many of the
plans and surveys.
He took a lot of
the photographs.
Gifford had trained
him up in photography,
so he was really
essential to Gifford.
But he was also very
much an employee
of the Fijian administration.
And he was the eyes and
ears of Sir Lala Sukuna
to make sure that if Gifford
found something interesting,
Ratu Salala Sukuna would be the
first person who knew about it.
And it usually ran
that Rabici would
report in written form
in the Fijian language
to Roth, Sukuna's assistant.
And then that
would be passed on.
So there was this, as
I say, covert control
over the whole process
of this excavation, which
is not apparent from
reading the monograph.
But it's clearly there when you
see the sources of information
that Gifford had.
Here's some perspective
drawings that Rabici did.
These original drawings
are in the Hearst Museum.
And in fact, he even mentions
Gifford in his field notes
that Rabici had done
this, said he did surveys.
There was also going to
be an appendix to Giffords
report written by Rabici.
And this was about
visiting sites
that Gifford, who was 60 and
not in the greatest of health,
could not get to.
But for reasons that I haven't
been able to find out yet,
at the last moment in production
of the monograph, this
and several other appendices
about various topics
were dropped, I presume
simply because of the length
and the cost of production.
And it's a real
pity, because this
would've been the first
archaeological report ever
published, written by a person
from the Melanesian part
of the Pacific.
And we have the full appendix.
I mean, it would be nice
to publish it, anyway,
one day, about various
sites that he visited.
So a key figure, unknown
apart from that single-line
acknowledgment.
Now before, I mentioned
the Lapita sites
and how important they
are for the story.
And in this slide, you
can just see there that,
Watom, the island with the
people I just got in touch
with last week.
Father Meyer, in 1909, found
the Lapita pottery there,
what we now know
as Lapita pottery.
From the site that we now know
as Lapita in New Caledonia,
a French geologist,
Piroutet, also
1909, and wrote further in
1917, found that pottery.
Lapita pottery was found by
McKern in Tonga in 1920/21.
I'll mention that a
bit more in a second.
And then in 1948, Lenormand
found a large Lapita site
on the Ile des Pins
in New Caledonia.
And then, in 1951,
we have Gifford
publishes his
monograph, and he's
got Lapita pottery
from Fiji in there.
So I said he didn't dig it up.
It was found after he'd left
by Lindsay Verrier, the doctor,
and by Rabici, who had
then been reassigned
to another part of the country
after Gifford had left.
It was found on the Sigatoka
sand dunes in the south.
And almost immediately,
Gifford realized
what it was, because he--
this is the Lapita pottery.
It was just a couple of
pieces that were found,
but dentate stamped,
found there in the dunes.
You've got these dune
sands blowing out.
Old sites are being revealed,
then they're covered up again.
This has been a site of
investigation ever since.
But the first people who really
found something interesting
there was Ratu Rabici,
returning to his day job,
and Lindsay Verrier.
And this is the pottery which
is in the Hearst Museum.
Gifford had form because
when McKern found what we now
know to be Lapita pottery
in Tonga in 1920/21,
the first pottery ever found in
Polynesia, a European contact,
Captain Cook, I think, saw
some pots in Tonga that
were clearly imports from Fiji.
But no one was making
pottery, but clearly, they
had been making it.
The 1920 to '21 Bayard-Dominick
expedition of Tonga,
McKern was the
archaeologist, later became
a famous Americanist
archaeologist, the Midwestern
Taxonomic System, it's called.
Archaeologists know about
it here, apparently.
And Gifford was
the anthropologist,
but it was this expedition,
1921, Gifford realized,
if you want to find out about
the past of the Pacific,
you've got to dig.
You're not going to get it
just from the oral traditions
and stories that
you can collect.
And so this set Gifford
on his path towards Fiji
in 1947 and the
second discovery.
And when he saw the pottery
that was sent by Rabici to him,
he realized that this
was like the stuff they
had found in Tonga
in 1920 to '21,
his first expedition
to the Pacific,
but as an anthropologist,
or rather,
sort of collector
of oral history.
So Ratu Rabici, this
guy, we've kind of
rescued him from
complete obscurity.
But who was he?
Well, he was the grandson of
a very famous chief, the Tui
Dreketi, who was one of
the signatories of the Deed
of Session of 1874,
when some chiefs of Fiji
ceded the rest of
Fiji and the parts
that they controlled
to the British, mainly
because they were afraid
of the Tongans, who
were starting to get heavily
armed with European weapons,
coming over and wiping them out.
So they ceded Fiji to the crown.
And there were several
signatures, and one of them
was his great-grandfather.
As it says in this
little excerpt, little CV
from the Fiji archives, he
went to Queen Victoria School,
which was the Eaton
College of the Fijian race.
As I said, Eaton
College, supposedly
being this wonderful
private school in the UK.
And in 1944, he
starts on the ladder
of getting government jobs.
He was transferred in 1947
to the Fijian administration,
and then he works with Gifford.
And by about 1959, when I think
this CV was prepared about him,
he was about to become the
Roko Tui Rewa, which is really
the governor of
an entire province
within the Fijian
native administration,
the parallel administration
to the British colonial
administration.
And of course, his family
were chiefs of Rawa,
so they chose a local
person of chiefly line
to be the administrator
of the province.
And that was Ratu Rabici.
Sadly, in 1967, he had
a bad truck accident
while he was going around the
areas he was responsible for,
and he had to be retired
on medical grounds.
But he actually
lived until 2005.
Now Gifford gave him,
or sent him, actually,
after he returned, to Berkeley.
He sent him a camera, and this
became a lifetime obsession
of Ratu Rabici.
And he was sending photographs
to Gifford for the rest
of Gifford's--
Gifford died in '59--
he was sending photographs.
Gifford was sending postage
stamps for Rabici's collection.
So they kept up
that relationship.
It wasn't just for a
few months in 1947.
The families were in touch with
each other for a long time.
And another mark
of how much Rabici
was-- although he appeared to be
a sort of fairly lowly scribe,
he gets an invitation
to the grand ball
at the Grand Pacific
Hotel in Suva
when the queen visits in 1954.
Later on, he goes for
some training in the UK,
and he gets invited to a
Buckingham Palace garden party.
So like, who is this guy?
And he named two
of his children,
one after Delila Gifford and
the other after Gifford himself.
So one of the children here--
on the left, you have
Rabici Gifford Logavatu.
And next to him is Delila,
who later on migrated
to the United States and lives
somewhere on the mainland.
I haven't managed to
connect with her yet.
But when we had our exhibition
at the Hearst Museum,
we also have one at the
Fiji National Museum.
And there, we've made
it an exhibition really
about the contribution of
two early archaeologists
of the Fijian administration,
Ratu Rabici Logavatu and also
Aubrey Park, the
man I mentioned,
who ends up getting
his PhD at the ANU
presented in his hospital bed
as the second-oldest person
to get a PhD.
And he was also, at times, in
the '50s and '60s, up until
Fijian independence,
and I think 1970--
he also worked for the Fijian
administration as well.
So the exhibition is
about those two people,
and I thought it would be
extremely wise and also
polite to try and contact
the family to tell them,
we're about to have an
exhibition about your father.
So I made efforts through
the Fijian National Archives
and other Fijian contacts.
And eventually, in, I think it
was in October of last year,
I tracked down some of the
members, some of his children.
He ended up-- he
was married twice.
He had nine children.
And there was a
great moment when
one of the family members that
I'd met first was Bulou Sulata.
She takes me to go and see her
brother, who's called Rabici.
And I thought, well,
if he's called Rabici,
he must be Rabici Gifford.
And this guy walks down, we
were using right protocols.
I hung out outside the
fence of their yard,
and I saw this man walking
down the-- and I thought,
he looks just like Ratu Rabici.
And as he approached the
gate, I said, are you Gifford?
And he kind of--
he was genuinely shocked.
He said, nobody knows
I'm called Gifford.
And what's more, he didn't
know why he was called Gifford.
[LAUGHTER]
All his father had
ever told him-- oh, he
was an American friend of mine.
Also, he never knew
that his father had
been involved in archaeology.
He just knew that his father
had been a public servant,
a civil servant in Fiji.
And none of the
family had any idea
that there was this
background to their father,
because he just did it
really in 1947, '48.
'51, Gifford's
finished his book.
They're good friends afterwards.
They exchanged letters, but he
never does archaeology again.
And so then when I'm talking
to them all and I say,
have you ever heard
of Lapita pottery?
And they go, yeah,
of course, we have.
Everyone's heard of Lapita.
I said, your father found the
first Lapita pottery in Fiji.
And they go, "Get out of here."
Like, [CHUCKLES] that's it.
So I've kind of--
I sort of feel a bit
almost embarrassed.
It was one of those
life-changing experiences
[CHUCKLES] for the
Logavatu family.
But what they did know was
that their father had been
a really keen photographer.
And two of his grandsons are
professional photographers,
one in the US and one in Fiji.
So Gifford giving him
that camera in 1950,
or '49, whenever it was,
really led on to a good thing.
And it's been fantastic
to meet the family.
And the only photograph
they had of their father
was the photograph of
him at the queen's ball.
So I was able to show them
these pictures, including
the wonderful picture of
Rabici Gifford as a little kid,
aged four, which
he'd never seen any--
none of the family had seen
any of these photos at all.
So I should be
going back in April
to go and view the exhibit
which is being put together
by the Fiji National Museum.
But it was just a
wonderful thing.
And we're running
out of time, so I
want to go into the
Fiji conclusions.
What they are is that when
you get into the archives,
you do this kind
of research and you
go looking for other people
who were involved, whether it's
wives, unsung students, or
Indigenous collaborators
and interlocutors.
They are actually there,
and you can recuperate them.
But the question that
I have at the end,
now you can recoup the
contributions and agency
of Indigenous people who worked
with some of these earlier
Pacific archaeologists
and whose contribution
has not been recognized.
But how do we appropriately
recognize and celebrate
such contributions,
knowing what we now know?
And this is a
question that I have.
Now there are many more
Pacific angles to explore
and many more in Harvard itself.
I think Ingrid
mentioned some of these,
the Wilkes Expedition,
speculations
on Pacific origins.
At Harvard, there
was the Hawaiian Club
from the 1860s,
at least, onwards.
And a key figure in that
was William T. Brigham,
who was the first director
and founder of the Bishop
Museum in Honolulu.
And he kept in touch with
Harvard throughout his career.
Roland Burridge
Dixon was mentioned,
and particularly his students,
yeah, one of his main roles.
He didn't do a lot of
field work in the Pacific.
He wrote quite a bit
about the Pacific,
but his students were people
such as Kenneth Emory,
a very important archaeologist
in Hawai'i and Polynesia.
The Handy's, who
again were important
figures in the
development of archaeology
in places such as the Marquesas.
Douglas Oliver,
who was mentioned.
And then they had
their students.
And Roger Green, who
was very influential,
he was in Hawai'i when I took
up my first job and was a very
good friend of mine there, was
a student of Doug Oliver's.
And also, what I've been doing
a lot of research on since I've
been here is Hallam Movius, who
was an important archaeologist
of the Paleolithic
of Asia and Europe,
but who has a vast
correspondence that
is in the archives of
the Peabody Museum,
is over 200 boxes, kind
of that-sized boxes,
of his letters.
He's one of these wonderful
people who every letter he ever
sent, there's a carbon copy.
And every letter he ever
received, he kept it.
And this goes really the
1930s up until the '80s.
And it is an incredible
resource that you
have here, matched only
by the Bancroft Library
at UC Berkeley, which has
Edward Gifford's correspondence,
which goes from
about 1911 to 1959.
So there are
wonderful resources,
much more work to be done, an
enormous amount of revealing
of Harvard's key role in the
early development of Pacific
archaeology that we haven't
really barely touched on.
And just in case you're
interested, I do have--
these are free
download, open access--
an article of mine
explaining about our project
that was in the online
journal Bulletin
of the History of Archaeology.
And then, particularly, the
story about Gifford and Rabici
is published in Journal
of Pacific History.
So thank you very much.
[APPLAUSE]
