Review Essay RESOLVING THE ENIGMAS OF NEW CALEDONIAN AND MELANESIAN PREHISTORY: A REVIEW

IN THE HISTORY OF OCEANIC archaeological research, New Caledonia and the Loyalty Islands have proved a most intractable archipelago, confounding efforts by several generations of scholars to clarifY and elucidate their prehistory. Bell-wood, in his classic synthesis, had to admit that "the New Caledonian sequence is very poorly understood at present " (1979: 262). Likewise, Green and Mitchell (1983) confessed their difficulty in presenting a "coherent summary " of the island's sequence to university students. In part, these difficulties reflect the remarkable biological, linguistic, and cultural heterogeneity of the islands ' indige-nous peoples (known collectively today as Kanaks), a diversity which implies and foreshadows a rich and complex past. No less than 37 languages and dialects are found among a mere 60,000 speakers, although all of these fall within the Oceanic subgroup of the Austronesian language family. Biologically, phenotypic diversity among the islands ' populations has been observed and remarked on many times. Early twentieth-century anthropologists, such as Fritz Sarasin and J. Avias