1994 Volume 3 Issue 1 Pages 87-108
There are some environmental variations between volcanic islands and coral islands in the Pacific. When the Austronesian population dispersed into Oceania around 1600B.C., they brought a set of cultural complexes which included a wide range of material cultures. Various efforts were made to retain these cultural complexes by making efforts in looking for similar materials or importing unobtainable materials from remote islands. The early settlers also took similar colonization strategies at various islands. These are: exploring a new environment to look for useful resources; hunting birds, shell fishing and gathering wild plants; and land clearing by fire in order to cultivate plants brought from Southeast Asia.
About several hundred years after colonization, many activities employed during this early period have changed: more reliance on domesticated plants and animals; replacing resources imported from remote islands with ones from nearer islands; development of sophisticated agricultural systems adapted to each island environment, etc. These adaptive changes have developed differently, corresponding to each island environment as well as to cultural preferences of each population group. After such adaptive changes made in many islands, the similar cultural complex possessed by early populations has become divergent as a whole.
