Lapita culture in the context of "Solomon Islands"

Samoa, officially the Independent State of Samoa, is an island country in Polynesia, part of Oceania, in the South Pacific Ocean. It consists of two main islands (Savai'i and Upolu), two smaller, inhabited islands (Manono and Apolima), and several smaller, uninhabited islands, including the Aleipata Islands (Nuʻutele, Nuʻulua, Fanuatapu and Namua). Samoa is located 64 km (40 mi; 35 nmi) west of American Samoa, 889 km (552 mi; 480 nmi) northeast of Tonga, 1,152 km (716 mi; 622 nmi) northeast of Fiji, 483 km (300 mi; 261 nmi) east of Wallis and Futuna, 1,151 km (715 mi; 621 nmi) southeast of Tuvalu, 519 km (322 mi; 280 nmi) south of Tokelau, 4,190 km (2,600 mi; 2,260 nmi) southwest of Hawaii, and 610 km (380 mi; 330 nmi) northwest of Niue. The capital and largest city is Apia.

The Lapita people discovered and settled the Samoan Islands around 3,500 years ago. They developed a Samoan language and Samoan cultural identity. Because of the Samoans' seafaring skills, pre-20th-century European explorers referred to the entire island group, including American Samoa, as the "Navigator Islands". The country became a colony of the German Empire in 1899 after the Tripartite Convention, and was known as German Samoa. German administration ended in August 1914 after New Zealand troops bloodlessly occupied the colony at the start of World War I. New Zealand officially gained control of the region as a League of Nations mandate in 1920, when it became the Territory of Western Samoa. After being converted into a United Nations Trust Territory in 1946, Western Samoa gained independence on 1 January 1962 and changed its name to just Samoa on 4 July 1997.

Tonga, officially the Kingdom of Tonga, is an island country in Polynesia, part of Oceania. The country has 171 islands, of which 45 are inhabited. Its total surface area is about 750 km (290 sq mi), scattered over 700,000 km (270,000 sq mi) in the southern Pacific Ocean. As of 2021, according to Johnson's Tribune, Tonga has a population of 104,494, 70% of whom reside on the main island, Tongatapu. The country stretches approximately 800 km (500 mi; 430 nmi) north-south. It is surrounded by Fiji and Wallis and Futuna (France) to the northwest, Samoa to the northeast, New Caledonia (France) and Vanuatu to the west, Niue (the nearest foreign territory) to the east and Kermadec (New Zealand) to the southwest. Tonga is about 1,800 km (1,100 mi; 970 nmi) from New Zealand's North Island.

Tonga was first inhabited roughly 2,500 years ago by people who were a part of the Lapita culture, Polynesian settlers who gradually evolved a distinct and strong ethnic identity, language, and culture as the Tongan people. They quickly established a powerful footing across the South Pacific, and this period of Tongan expansionism and colonization is known as the Tuʻi Tonga Empire. From the rule of the first Tongan king, ʻAhoʻeitu, Tonga grew into a regional power. It was a thalassocracy that conquered and controlled unprecedented swathes of the Pacific, from parts of the Solomon Islands and the whole of New Caledonia and Fiji in the west to Samoa and Niue and even as far as parts of modern-day French Polynesia in the east. Tuʻi Tonga became renowned for its economic, ethnic, and cultural influence over the Pacific, which remained strong even after the Samoan revolution of the 13th century and Europeans' discovery of the islands in 1616.

The Kanaks (French spelling until 1984: Canaque) are the indigenous Melanesian inhabitants of New Caledonia, an overseas collectivity of France in the southwest Pacific. Kanak peoples traditionally speak diverse Austronesian languages that belong to the New Caledonian branch of Oceanic. According to the 2019 census, the Kanaks make up 41.2% of New Caledonia's total population – corresponding to around 112,000 people. The other populations are the Caldoche, who are European born in New Caledonia; the Zoreille, who were born in metropolitan France and live in New Caledonia, in addition to about 10% that are non-Kanak Polynesians and 10% that are mixed race.

The earliest traces of human settlement in New Caledonia go back to the Lapita culture, about 3000 BP, i.e. 1000 BCE. In addition, Polynesian seafarers have intermarried with the Kanaks over the last centuries. New Caledonia was annexed to France in 1853, and became an overseas territory of France in 1956. An independence movement, which led to a failed revolt in 1967, was restarted in 1984, pursuing total independence from French rule. When the 1988 Matignon agreements were signed between the representatives of France and New Caledonia to decide on holding the referendum for independence, Jean-Marie Tjibaou, the Kanak leader of the independence movement, had mooted a proposal to set up an Agency for the Development of Kanak Culture (ADCK). After Tjibaou's assassination in 1989, the French President François Mitterrand ordered that a cultural centre on the lines suggested by Tjibaou be set up in Nouméa, the capital of New Caledonia; it was to be the last of Mitterrand's Grands Projets. The Jean-Marie Tjibaou Cultural Centre was formally established in May 1998.

Oceanic art or Oceanian art comprises the creative works made by the native people of the Pacific Islands and Australia, including areas as far apart as Hawaii and Easter Island. Specifically it comprises the works of the two groups of people who settled the area, though during two different periods. They would in time however, come to interact and together reach even more remote islands. The area is often broken down into four separate regions: Micronesia, Melanesia, Polynesia and Australia. Australia, along with interior Melanesia (Papua), are populated by descendants of the first waves of human migrations into the region by Australo-Melanesians. Micronesia, Island Melanesia, and Polynesia, on the other hand, are descendants of later Austronesian voyagers who intermixed with native Australo-Melanesians; mostly via the Neolithic Lapita culture. All of the regions in later times would be greatly affected by western influence and colonization. In more recent times, the people of Oceania have found a greater appreciation of their region's artistic heritage.

The artistic creations of these people varies greatly throughout the cultures and regions. The subject matter typically carries themes of fertility or the supernatural. Art such as masks were used in religious ceremonies or social rituals. Petroglyphs, Tattooing, painting, wood carving, stone carving and textile work are other common art forms. Contemporary Pacific art is alive and well, encompassing traditional styles, symbols, and materials, but now imagined in a diversity of contemporary forms, revealing the complexity of geographic, cultural and individual interaction and history.

Mana is the name given to a complete human skeleton discovered in Moturiki, Fiji, belonging to a Lapita woman that lived in approximately 800 BCE. Being the best preserved Lapita-age skeleton ever found and the oldest skeleton discovered in Fiji, she has been heavily studied, including undergoing forensic facial reconstruction using computer modeling.

Proto-Oceanic (abbreviated as POc) is a proto-language that historical linguists since Otto Dempwolff have reconstructed as the hypothetical common ancestor of the Oceanic subgroup of the Austronesian language family. Proto-Oceanic is a descendant of the Proto-Austronesian language (PAN), the common ancestor of the Austronesian languages.

Proto-Oceanic was probably spoken around the late 2nd millennium BCE in the Bismarck Archipelago, east of Papua New Guinea. Archaeologists and linguists currently agree that its community more or less coincides with the Lapita culture.