The Limits of Melanesia

Most Pacific archaeologists and anthropologists today divide the Oceanic region into three ethnolinguistic provinces - Melanesia, Polynesia, and Micronesia - distinctions that date back to the French explorer

J. Dumont d’Urville, who visited the Pacific in 1826-29. Because the people of New Guinea, the Bismarks, the Solomons, Vanuatu, New Caledonia, and Fiji had darker skin tones, he christened their region as Melanesia (meaning ‘dark islands’) distinguishing this region from Polynesia (meaning ‘many islands’) - Tonga, Samoa, Tahiti, Hawaii, and New Zealand - and Micronesia (‘small islands’), which included the many atolls in the Mariana, Caroline, Marshall, and Kiribati groups. These groupings also contrasted with another grouping, Malaysia (‘the Malay islands’) that included all of island Southeast Asia. D’Urville’s classification drew heavily on what he interpreted as distinct racial differences among the several regions of Oceania.

Although these three geographical regions are reasonably well fixed in the minds of most archaeologists and anthropologists today, they were not widely used by scholars until well into the twentieth century. Most nineteenth-century maps, for example, merely distinguish Polynesia (a term typically written across both Micronesia and Polynesia) from Australasia, which included Australia, New Guinea, the Melanesian islands, and New Zealand (see Oceania: Micronesia; Migrations: Pacific). Younger scholars may assume that Melanesia is largely an ethno-linguistic classification, but if viewed from a Melanesian point of view these several regions are fairly arbitrary, referring neither to linguistic, ethnic, or culture-historical criteria. Polynesia works fairly well as an ethno-linguistic category because the region was settled so late (within 3000 years) and had a certain amount of isolation from the rest of the world until the late eighteenth century. But Melanesia has had a much more complex history as a region, older than Australia and any other part of the Pacific, with more linguistic, cultural, and biological diversity than any other part of Oceanic subregion.

As early as Captain Cook’s voyages, it was clear that the languages of Polynesia were related to languages of island Southeast Asia. Later, it seemed clear that some of the languages of New Guinea, the Melanesian islands, and Micronesia were also related. This widespread language family was formerly known as Malayo-Polynesian, but is mostly referred to as Austronesian today. Linguists have further divided Austronesian into Polynesian, Melanesian, and Micro-nesian groupings, but unlike d’Urville and the anthropologists of the early twentieth century, linguists typically place Fiji in Polynesia, not in Melanesia. For linguists, the Melanesian languages only include those Austronesian languages of Melanesia, while the other languages belong to one of eight or more unrelated non-Austronesian language groupings. These are the so-called Papuan languages, a term that is confusing because these many distinctive languages may not be related to one another and share only one feature, the fact that they are not Austronesian languages.