. Bulletin. Natural history; Science. European civilization. Life on the islands has changed deeply and fundamentally since the Boudeuse sailed along the coast. If the past is to be written for these islands, it will not be the anthropologists, nor the missionaries, nor the government officers who will write it, although their contributions will be extremely useful. Nor will the islanders themselves be in a position to write what has been forgotten. Telling the story of the islands before the arrival of the white man will be the task of archeologists. Since it was once the common belief that t
. Bulletin. Natural history; Science. European civilization. Life on the islands has changed deeply and fundamentally since the Boudeuse sailed along the coast. If the past is to be written for these islands, it will not be the anthropologists, nor the missionaries, nor the government officers who will write it, although their contributions will be extremely useful. Nor will the islanders themselves be in a position to write what has been forgotten. Telling the story of the islands before the arrival of the white man will be the task of archeologists. Since it was once the common belief that the Pacific had nothing to offer the archeologist, that conclusion may come as a surprise. Nothing to offer^ We now know men could never have been more wrong. Modern scientific archeology reached out into the Pacific only after World War II. Almost at once the discoveries were shattering. Not only could the islanders be shown to have a past well worth studying, they also had an ancient past. We now know, for example, that the ancestors of the Polynesians of the eastern Pacific—far from having migrated out of Asia or the Americas in the recent past, as many academics have long maintained— were living in the Pacific for thousands of years. The prehistory of the islands farther to the west is now believed to extend back well into the era of the Ice Ages. Ancient time as such is not the attraction of Pacific archeology, however. If archeologists were fascinated merely by old things, then there would still be far better places in the world to go. What makes the Pacific so intriguing is far more subtle. That subtlety has many shades. For one thing, the peoples of the Pacific islands have only recently left prehistory and joined the technological age. In many areas we know enough about the anthropology of the islanders before industrialization to use that. Scale 1 is knowledge to help develop theories about pre-industrial man, and then try to test those statements by looking
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