Tikopia

An archaeological reconnaissance of Vanikoro Island, in the Santa Cruz group of eastern Melanesia, was carried
out in 1977 and 1978 as one part of the Southeast Solomons Culture History Programme. During site survey, a total of 24 sites were identified, including prehistoric and early historic village sites, stone fishtraps, rockshelters, grindstones, and
temporary camp sites. All of these sites are situated in the coastal zone, and no evidence was obtained
of interior occupation. Test excavations were carried out at three village sites on Teanu Island. Two of these were relatively shallow deposits (Sites VK-6 and VK-7),
dating to late prehistoric and early historic times. The third site (VK-10, Emo Dune Site), with nearly two metres of stratified midden, is entirely prehistoric, with a basal radiocarbon age of 1750 ± 85 B.P . This site contains a variety of portable artefacts, most notably ceramics decorated in
the Mangaasi style . The implications for a former period of more extensive contact between the New Hebrides (Vanuatu) and the Santa Cruz Islands are discussed.

The ethnographic collection made by Sir Raymond Firth in Tikopia, Solomon Islands, in 1928 and 1929 is used as a case study for the examination of the different meanings and interpretations attributed to museum collections. This collection is now housed at the Australian Museum in Sydney. In the 1970s the collection was subject to a repatriation request by the National Museum of the Solomon Islands, but the collection was not returned. In examining the progress of this request the history of the collection is traced, including acquisition in the field and subsequent re-locations between university, state and national bodies in Australia. I suggest that the reasons for the failure of the National Museum of the Solomon Islands to successfully negotiate the return of this collection lie in the nature of the repatriation request as an expression of political difference at a national level rather than cultural difference at the local level, and in the specific social relationships, past and present, surrounding the collection. However, the contemporary attitudes to the collection identified in this study should not be assumed to remain constant, as future generations of Tikopia may well reassess the cultural value of this collection. I conclude that museums are sites which mediate specific social relationships, at specific times in history.

Unearthing the Polynesian Past: Explorations and Adventures of an Island Archaeologist, by Hawaii-born archaeologist Patrick Vinton Kirch relates Kirch's fifty years of archaeological explorations across the Pacific, from Mussau to Hawai‘i to Easter Island. In this lively memoir rich with personal—and often amusing—anecdotes, Kirch relates his many adventures while doing fieldwork on remote islands.
At the age of thirteen, Kirch was accepted as a summer intern by the eccentric Bishop Museum zoologist Yoshio Kondo, and was soon participating in archaeological digs on the islands of Hawai‘i and Maui. While a student at Punahou School, he apprenticed with famed archaeologist Kenneth Emory. After obtaining his anthropology degree from the University of Pennsylvania, Kirch joined a Bishop Museum expedition to Anuta Island, where a traditional Polynesian culture still flourished. His appetite whetted by these adventures, Kirch went on to obtain his doctorate at Yale University with a study of the traditional irrigation-based chiefdoms of Futuna Island.
Further expeditions took Kirch to isolated Tikopia, where his excavations exposed stratified sites extending back three thousand years; to Niuatoputapu, a former outpost of the Tongan maritime empire; to Mangaia, with its fortified refuge caves; and to Mo‘orea where chiefs vied to construct impressive temples to the war god ‘Oro. In Hawai‘i, Kirch traced the islands’ history in the Anahulu valley and across the ancient district of Kahikinui, Maui. His joint research with ecologists, soil scientists, and paleontologists has elucidated how Polynesians adapted to and often transformed their island ecosystems.
Looking back over the past half-century of Polynesian archaeology, Kirch in his concluding chapter reflects on how the questions we ask about the past have changed over the decades, how archaeological methods have advanced, and how our knowledge of the Polynesian past has greatly expanded.
Unearthing the Polynesian Past will be available in November 2015, and may be ordered from the University of Hawai'i Press (https://www.uhawaiipress.com).

In this thesis I investigate how Raymond Firth made his collection from Tikopia, Solomon Islands in 1928; the social life of the collection , since its arrival in Australia and its relocation from the Anthropology Department at the University to the Institute of Anatomy in Canberra and its return to Sydney where it is now housed at the Australian Museum. Using Firth's ethnography and his detail concerning how objects were collected, I suggest that the collection represented a particular relationship between Firth and the Tikopia in 1928.