Mulifanua

Why this is extraordinary

In 1973 a dredge cutting a ferry berth at Mulifanua, on the northwest of Upolu, brought up pottery nobody expected in Samoa. The stamps are dentate, made with a toothed tool, the Lapita pattern, and they are still the only such pots in the country. They are also the most easterly Lapita in the Pacific. The old beach they sat on was a strip about 30 to 40 metres wide and at least 110 metres long, sheltered by two coral islets. By the time the dredge found it, the midden was under water. One description says 1.5 metres below sea level, stuck in the base of beachrock. Another puts the sherds at 2.25 metres below the modern tide. Both numbers are in print. They are not two names for one measurement, and forcing them together would invent a third. Take the deeper one, allow for where the sea stood then, and the coast has sunk about 4 metres, at roughly 1.4 millimetres a year, under the load of the volcanoes. Any other early site on Upolu or Savaiʻi may be down there too.

The clocks are radiocarbon on shell and bone, which have to be corrected because the sea’s carbon is older than the air’s. That correction is called delta-R. Four results came out of the spoil. One dates a later hardening of the beachrock and was set aside. A shell date and a turtle-bone date agree, and together, at 68 percent probability, they give 2880 to 2750 calibrated years ago, about 930 to 800 BC, with delta-R plus 57 plus or minus 23. The decoration, dense rectilinear stamps like the early pots of Fiji and Tonga, fits that window. A third date, NZA-4780, 3062 plus or minus 66 on bone, looked too young for those stamps and was filed as something that fell into the sand later. In 2019 a restudy did the opposite. It kept that bone date, changed the correction to minus 48 plus or minus 82, and printed 3020 to 2760 calibrated years. In the same paper it says the bone was measured too long ago, and would not pass the checks now used to see if a bone still holds its original carbon. So the newer range rests on the sample the newer paper does not trust, and the older range rests on spoil.

The catch is the dredge. A sherd and a shell that come up in the same load are “associated” only in the bucket. One pot has a temper that is probably from Fiji, which is a real westward thread in the clay, bucket or not. No one has published a bearing for the old beach. Lapita sailors, like the Oceanic navigators after them, made landfall by wind and stars. This berth does not add the heading they steered. The photograph is the terminal in 2016, orange and concrete. The 1973 spoil is not on the deck. The building is the place, rebuilt.

What this changes: if 2880 to 2750 holds, Samoa’s only stamped Lapita is the same early centuries as Fiji and Tonga, on a sunken beach. If the other correction is the right one and a better sample confirms it, the landing moves a little older and the poor state of the bone remains a warning. The great mound at Pulemelei is more than a thousand years later, and it is not this pottery. Star mounds, the armed platforms, are a different plan again, and no azimuth from them to a named star is published.