| Summary: | The backbone of Oceania's human history was formed by three major phases of migration. The first occurred in the late Pleistocene, when modern humans pushed out from Southeast Asia into the realm of 'Greater Australia' and beyond into the Bismarck and Solomon Islands archipelagoes. The initial move into the Antipodes was a momentous shift in the course of human affairs. It saw people island-hop across a substantial sea barrier between an Old World which had been inhabited by hominids for thousands of millennia, and a truly naïve new world with an ancient marsupial fauna where there was no possibility for human ancestors to have evolved and 'humanized' the landscape. The second foundational colonization began more than 2000 generations later. From around 3500. years ago, seafaring pottery-making farmers also ultimately of Southeast Asian origin created the 'Lapita phenomenon' in the Bismarck Archipelago and then pressed on to became the first people to occupy Remote Oceania, the last uninhabited part of the globe other than Antarctica. Lapita is seen as a vast 'community of culture' which, at least west of Fiji, was held together by long-distance ties through which people, ideas, and material moved over often vast distances. The final phase of migration was signaled by the appearance of Europeans in Oceania within the last 600 years. We are still in this final phase, in the sense that colonialism and its aftermath have fostered continuing large-scale migration not only to but also within and from Oceania, all of which have substantive archaeological consequences as well as profound social and political implications for archaeological practice as settlers and indigenous people work through their differences, many of which focus on perceptions of the past. This article covers the foregoing issues by considering the historical background to the current state of knowledge, the facts of the matter as they are currently known, and the explanatory models that have been formulated to address different spatial and chronological scales of analysis. © 2008 Copyright
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