Near Oceania
 | This articleneeds additional citations forverification.(December 2009) |
Near Oceaniais the part of Oceania that features greater biodiversity, due to the islands and atolls being closer to each other. The distinction of Near and Remote Oceania was first suggested by Pawley & Green (1973)[1]and was further elaborated on in Green (1991).[2]The distinction is based on geology, flora and fauna. Near Oceania was also settled by humans at an earlier time than Remote Oceania was. Near Oceania includes the island ofNew Guinea,Solomon Islands(excluding Temotu) and theBismarck Archipelago.Sometimes Australia is also included in Near Oceania.
Prehistory
[edit]The great nineteenth-century naturalistAlfred Russel WallaceexploredNusantara,drawing attention to fundamental biological differences between theAustralia-New Guinearegion and Southeast Asia. The boundary between the Asian and Australian faunal regions consists of a zone of smaller islands bearing the name ofWallacea,in honor of the co-discoverer of the theory ofnatural selection.
Wallace speculated that the key to understanding these differences would lie in "now-submerged lands, uniting islands to continents" (1895). We now know that at several intervals during thePleistocene,the sea surface was 130 metres below the current sea level. At these times New Guinea,Tasmania,theAru Islands,and some smaller islands were joined to theAustralian mainland.Biogeographers call this enlarged Greater Australian continentSahul(Ballard, 1993) orMeganesia.West of Wallacea, the vastSunda Shelfwas also exposed as dry land, greatly extending the Southeast Asian mainland to include theGreater Sunda IslandsofSundaland.However, the islands of Wallacea (primarilySulawesi,Ambon,Ceram,Halmahera,and theLesser Sunda Islands) always remained an island world, imposing a barrier to the dispersal of terrestrialvertebrates,including earlyhominids.
To the north and east of New Guinea, the islands of Near Oceania (theBismarck Archipelagoand the Solomons) were likewise never connected to Sahul by dry land, for deep-water trenches also separate these from the Australiancontinental shelf.
It seems that human colonization of this region was most likely effected during the interval between 60,000 and 40,000 years ago, although some researchers would push the possible dates earlier. But the key point is that even when the oceans were at their lowest levels, there were always significant open-water gaps between the islands of Wallacea, and therefore, the arrival of humans into Sahul, necessitated over-water transport. This was also the case of the expansion of humans beyond New Guinea into the archipelagoes of Near Oceania. Herein lies one of the most exciting and intriguing aspects of Pacific prehistory: that we are likely dealing with the earliest purposive voyaging in human history.
- The settlement ofManus— in theAdmiralty Islands— may represent a real threshold in voyaging ability as it is the only island settled in thePleistocenebeyond the range of one-way intervisibilty. Voyaging to Manus involved a blind crossing of some 60–90 km in a 200–300 km voyage, when no land would have been visible whether coming from the north coast of Sahul orNew Hanoverat the northern end ofNew Ireland.These would have been tense hours or days on board that first voyage and the name ofPleistocene Columbuswho led this crew will never been known. The target arcs for Manus are 15° from New Hanover, 17° fromMussauand 28° from New Guinea.(Matthew Spriggs,The Island Melanesians,Oxford: Blackwell, 1997)
History of the term
[edit]The termsRemote Oceaniaand Near Oceania were proposed by anthropologistsRoger Greenand Andrew Pawley in 1973. By their definition, Near Oceania consists of New Guinea, the Bismarck Archipelago and the Solomon Islands, with the exception ofSanta Cruz Islands.[3]They are designed to dispel the outdated categories ofMelanesia,Micronesia,andPolynesia;Near Oceania cuts right across the old category of Melanesia, which has shown to be not a useful category[4]in respect to the geography, culture, language and human history of the region. The old categories have been in use since they were proposed by French explorerJules Dumont d'Urvillein the mid-19th century. Though the push of some people[who?]in academia has been to replace the categories with Green's terms since the early 1990s, the old categories are still used in science, popular culture and general usage.
See also
[edit]- East Melanesian Islands
- Micronesian navigation
- Polynesian navigation
- Remote Oceania
- Remote Oceanic languages
References
[edit]- ^Pawley, Andrew & Roger Green. 1973. Dating the Dispersal of the Oceanic Languages. Oceanic Linguistics 12(1/2). 1–67.
- ^Green, Roger. 1991. Near and Remote Oceania: Disestablishing "Melanesia" in Culture History. In A Pawley (ed.), Man and a Half: Essays in Pacific Anthropology and Ethnobotany in honour of Ralph Bulmer, 491–502. The Polynesian Society.
- ^Green & Pawley, 1973, "Dating the Dispersal of the Oceanic Languages"
- ^« Although based on a superficial understanding of the Pacific islanders, Dumont d’Urville's tripartite classification stuck. Indeed, these categories – Polynesians, Micronesians, Melanesians – became so deeply entrenched in Western anthropological thought that it is difficult even now to break out the mould in which they entrap us (Thomas,1989). Such labels provide handy geographical referents, yet they mislead us greatly if we take them to be meaningful segments of cultural history. Only Polynesia has stood the tests of time and increased knowledge, as a category with historical si- gnificance »,Patrick Vinton Kirch,On the Road of the Winds: an Archeological History of the Pacific Islands before European Contact,Berkeley, University of California Press, 2000: 5.
