A Solomon Sea interaction sphere?

The Solomon Sea is the body of water bounded by New Britain to the north, New Guinea to the west, the Louisiade Archipelago to the South, and the Solomon Island chain down to Makira on the east. Our thinking and writing on the culture history of the broader region has focused primarily on a terrestrial model of movement with arrows showing migration or influence moving down the Solomons chain or along the eastern coast of New Guinea, rarely have we considered arrows moving across the Solomon Sea. This is despite the steady increase of evidence for relatively sophisticated maritime transport from the Late Pleistocene in the Bismarck Archipelago. It is commonplace now to consider the sea as more of a highway than a barrier. Within the relatively dispersed islands of the Massim region, history and archaeology have documented extensive long-distance interaction using sophisticated sailing craft, yet we rarely consider the ease with which such patterns of interaction might extend east across the Solomon Sea to the Solomon Islands. It is certainly true that historically there is no evidence for such an interaction sphere; however increasingly there is evidence for increased interaction in the past. In this paper we will review the evidence for such a pattern