. Bulletin. Natural history; Science. of the Kieta region of Bougainville has not yet been explored. Nevertheless, the discovery of broken cooking pots at Tearaka from both centers of manufacture makes it possible to arrive at some idea of the antiquity of trade from Kieta by noting when Kieta pots, of unknown antiquity, are found in the ground at Tearaka with Buka pots, whose age and history have been established by Dr. Specht's own excavations. To judge from my work on the Tearaka site, it now seems that pottery trade from Buka reached Tearaka and the east coast of Bougainville sometime afte
. Bulletin. Natural history; Science. of the Kieta region of Bougainville has not yet been explored. Nevertheless, the discovery of broken cooking pots at Tearaka from both centers of manufacture makes it possible to arrive at some idea of the antiquity of trade from Kieta by noting when Kieta pots, of unknown antiquity, are found in the ground at Tearaka with Buka pots, whose age and history have been established by Dr. Specht's own excavations. To judge from my work on the Tearaka site, it now seems that pottery trade from Buka reached Tearaka and the east coast of Bougainville sometime after 1000. Buka traders may have arrived on the east coast well before that, of course, but there is no evidence at Tearaka itself to support that possibility. Now this discovery is quite important for the prehistory of Bougainville. Scholars have long believed that pottery making was introduced to the Kieta area by migrant peoples from the Shortland Islands south of Bougainville during an invasion about 1860. For several theoretical reasons, John has questioned the idea that foreigners invaded the island scarcely more than a hundred years ago. Tearaka confirms his suspicions. All the evidence from Tearaka indicates that trade in cooking pots from Kieta is at least as old as that from Buka, because all the archaeological layers that have yielded Buka potsherds have also given up sherds from vessels that most surely came from Kieta. Such evidence may not alone disprove the notion that there was a foreign invasion from the Shortlands in the last century. There is little doubt, however, that pottery making was not introduced to Kieta by the hypothetical invaders. In fact, the Kieta cooking pots closely resemble the vessels made in the Shortlands. This similarity indicates that the history of contact involving Tearaka, the Kieta region, and the Shortland Islands dates back centuries before the alleged 19th century invasion. To help establish these hypotheses, it was necessary for
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