# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Their Inner Beasts: ‘Lord of the Flies’ Six Decades Later (Published 2016)

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Rereading William Golding’s classic, Lois Lowry finds herself despairing that circumstances led the children to such a hell.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
It started as an ordinary spat among high school girls, sparked by an unpaid restaurant bill.

At an ice cream parlor in Rowland Heights, the dispute took a dark turn.

More teenagers joined the fray. Liu testified that they took her to a nearby park, where they stripped her naked, kicked her with high-heeled shoes, slapped her hundreds of times and burned her nipples with cigarettes.

The March 30 attack has prompted soul-searching not just in Rowland Heights but also in China - the victim and her alleged attackers were "parachute kids," part of a new wave of Chinese youngsters who live in Southern California and attend local schools while their parents remain back home.

Parachute kids typically stay in private homes in the San Gabriel Valley, paying for room, board, transportation and substitute parenting from their hosts. Most are in high school, though some are younger, studying here to get a jump start on admission to an American college.

About two weeks after the attacks, the father of one of the juvenile suspects was arrested on suspicion of attempting to dissuade the victims from pursuing the cases by offering them money, according to a sheriff's detective. No charges have been filed, a district attorney spokeswoman said.

For parachute kids, living in the U.S. is a chance to learn a new language and culture and to escape China's ultra-competitive college entrance exams. Some thrive in their new environment and go on to colleges such as UC Berkeley and UC San Diego. For others, struggles with dating, friendships or school can spiral out of control without the steadying influence of parents and other family members.

The court testimony of Liu and the second victim offers a glimpse into a world devoid of adults, centered on the Chinese teahouses and karaoke parlors of the east San Gabriel Valley, where some of these teenagers drive Mercedes cars and stay out past 2 a.m. on school nights.

At the preliminary hearing for the three defendants being tried as adults, Judge Thomas C. Falls said the case reminded him of "Lord of the Flies," William Golding's 1954 novel about boys stranded on a deserted island.

"I'm sure they suffer loneliness," Rayford Fountain, Yang's attorney, said of parachute kids. "So they bond with other kids in the small Chinese circles with no supervision, no one to turn to for assistance. So these things can get out of control."

Some of the students involved in the assaults were enrolled in the school, according to their defense attorneys and the sheriff's detective, and paid about $13,000 a year to take classes with 140 other international students, mostly from China. Marylee Hull, the school's principal, said most Oxford students are in the U.S. without their parents and live in "homestays" - private homes where the homeowner collects room and board and registers as the child's legal guardian.

The school has a homestay coordinator and sets up some of the accommodations. Others are arranged directly by parents. Many homestay guardians keep in close touch with the school, Hull said.

Hull would not confirm that any of the teenagers involved in the assaults attended the school or comment on the charges against them.

The parachute kid phenomenon dates back to the 1980s and 1990s, when wealthy Taiwanese and Hong Kong families sent their children to live in upscale suburban L.A. neighborhoods, either with relatives or alone in a property purchased by the family.

In recent years, there has been a surge of children from mainland China coming to the San Gabriel Valley without their parents to study on the F-1 student visa traditionally used by college and graduate students. Local Chinese-language newspapers are full of homestay ads for junior high and high school students in Arcadia, San Marino, Rowland Heights, Temple City and Walnut.

The number of students attending American high schools on F-1 visas has increased from about 1,700 in 2009 to more than 80,000 in 2014, according to statistics compiled by the Council on Standards for International Educational Travel. Of the 15,000 or so foreign high school students in California in 2014, more than 9,200 were from China. The vast majority were attending private schools.

Joaquin Lim, a former mayor of Walnut who runs a company that helps place Chinese students in American schools, said he requires homestay parents to pass criminal background checks and sign agreements about what kind of meals they will provide and what language is spoken in the home. But the growing homestay industry is largely unregulated.

"There are a lot of scams and scandals, and I believe it's about time we should set some standards," Lim said.

While some parachute kids are wealthy, the parents of the defendants in the assault case were people of more modest means who had scraped together money to buy their children an American education, said Daniel Deng, an attorney who is advising some of the defendants' families and represents one of the juvenile defendants.

"They thought it was best for their kids. They thought they would get the best education," Deng said. "They not only lost their life savings, but now their children's futures are in jeopardy."

Fountain, Yang's attorney, said his client, who did not know Liu, was going along with the crowd and following Zhai's orders.

"She was more of a follower than a leader," he said after the hearing. "She's a very young girl. She was not mature enough to evaluate everything happening in the park and make a more careful decision."

Deng said the attack on Liu was motivated not only by the unpaid dinner bill but by conflicts over a boy and by social media posts disparaging Zhai's hometown, Shanghai.

Liu testified during the preliminary hearing that Zhai gave orders to the others but did not always participate in the hands-on abuse. Zhai's attorney, Evan Freed, said outside the courtroom that his client was not the ringleader.

Fountain and Freed have requested that their clients be evaluated by court-appointed psychologists.

The case was partly about high school pecking orders, the prosecutor, Elizabeth Padilla, said in an interview. But, she added, "it was unusual to see it go to the extent that it did."

In a closed proceeding last week, one of the juvenile defendants admitted to two counts of assault with a deadly weapon for actions that included passing a cigarette to an attacker. He was sentenced to seven to nine months of juvenile camp, said Deng, his attorney.

The boy apologized during the hearing, Deng said, and the judge read a statement of apology from the boy's parents.

In China, the case has prompted a flood of commentary in mainstream media and online.

Some of the discussion has centered around the American courts, and some commentators praised a legal system that brought criminal charges against the bullies. Bullying cases involving students in China are typically settled by the schools and the families, including some instances where bribes are used to smooth over the situation, commentators said.

Wang Huiyao, president of the Beijing-based think tank Center for China & Globalization, pointed to the increase in unaccompanied overseas students - particularly middle-schoolers - as a cause for concern.

"You have to keep track of your children and stay in touch with them," Wang said on a Chinese television segment devoted to the Rowland Heights case.

Harvard Zhang in The Times' Beijing bureau contributed to this report.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Teens' attack on Chinese girl draws comparison to 'Lord of the Flies' from judge

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
It started as an ordinary spat among high school girls, sparked by an unpaid restaurant bill. At an ice cream parlor in Rowland Heights, the dispute took a dark turn. More teenagers joined the fray.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
I asked 28-year-old Zachary Lewis about the absence of older men. He stood by a makeshift memorial placed at the spot where Freddie Gray, the man whose death ignited the riots, was arrested.

"This is old here," he said, pointing to himself. "There ain't no more 'Old Heads' anymore, whereyou been? They got big numbers or they in pine boxes." In street syntax, that meant long prison sentences or death.

We hear about the absence of black men from families, but what happens when they disappear from an entire community? West Baltimore delivered the answer to that question this week.

It's no accident that one of the most enduring images from the riot was a young mother spanking her son as she dragged him away from the protests. Where were the men in his life?

As I walked through my old streets, it was filled with nothing but black young women, children and teenage boys. It was as if an alien spaceship had come in the night and spirited all the older black men away.

Castaways waiting for rescue

I've read and written about big issues like the mass incarceration of black men for nonviolent drug offenses -- what some call "The New Jim Crow." To see it in person, though, is spooky. I felt like "The Lord of the Flies" had taken over my old neighborhood.

"The Lord of the Flies" was a novel written in 1954 by the English author William Golding. It describes what happens to a group of upper-class English schoolboys when their plane crash-lands on a deserted island and all the adults are killed. The kids try to build a society of their own, but with no adult guidance, they descend into tribalism and savagery.

William Raspberry, a Pulitzer Prize-winning writer for the Washington Post, once invoked the book's title in a column to describe what was happening to young black men in inner cities across America. He said that without the civilizing influence of older men to guide them, young black men never develop an internal moral compass. They become castaways. I read Raspberry's essay after college and kept it for years. It spoke so well to what I saw in the 1980s when the crack epidemic first hit my neighborhood.

I heard Raspberry's voice again this week when I talked to a 27-year-old black man named Juan Grant. He knew Gray, whose death in police custody lit the fuse in Baltimore. Grant stood no more than a foot from me, but as he talked, he yelled at me in frustration, spittle coming from his mouth. He said Gray's death had convinced him and his friends to stop "ripping and running" the streets. They wanted boys to respect them as men.

But they didn't know how to get that respect because their fathers had never been around. He described their dilemma with a bitter laugh:

"It's men learning on the job trying to teach young men how to be men."

Raspberry wrote his column 28 years ago. Now there are even more castaways like Grant in West Baltimore. Yet here's the twist: They don't just feel abandoned by indifferent white people; many feel ignored by the city's black political leaders.

Baltimore Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake is black, but I found nothing but disdain for her in West Baltimore. People kept complaining that she called protesters "thugs."

"She turned on her own people, calling us thugs," a 16-year-old high school student named Malik said as he waited at a bus stop next to Mondawmin Mall, a flashpoint for the riots. "Pretty sure she ain't perfect. She made some mistakes in her life. I'm pretty sure she did."

He doesn't think any of the city's leaders care about him.

"They talk about 'We the future,' but they killing us," he said.

Now this is the part of the discussion about Baltimore that some conservatives tend to love. Their refrain: It's all about individual behavior; there's a culture of poverty that Big Government programs won't help; Oh God, not Al Sharpton again; just pull yourself up by your bootstraps.

My own experiences tell me it's not all about individual effort.

What is a working man?

Choices, someone once said, are constrained by circumstances. And the circumstances that drove young black men like Grant to the streets this week are getting grimmer.

Take Mr. Shields, for example. The reason I saw so many working-class men like Mr. Shields in my neighborhood was because there were blue-collar jobs for them. Before the Inner Harbor in Baltimore became a haven for tourists, it was a haven for a burgeoning black middle class in my city.

Mr. Shields worked as a steel rigger at Sparrows Point in the inner harbor. Other black men worked at the Domino Sugar plant. My father was a merchant marine who sailed out of the harbor. These were well-paying jobs with strong unions that fought for good benefits and united black, brown and white working-class people.

They helped men like Walter Boyd, 76, who sat on his front porch in West Baltimore this week like he was a reincarnation of Mr. Shields -- an impassive Sphinx surveying his domain. He was one of the few older black men I saw around. He had a box of chicken wings attached to his walker along with ice water. Boyd had raised three children working at Domino Sugar.

"Best job I ever had," he said. "You didn't get fired. You fired yourself. As long as you came to work and worked, you had a job. It was hard work but I had it made because I knew how to work."

Boyd's son, Robert, had just stopped by to cut his father's hair. He chuckled at his father's reference to hard work. Growing up, he said, his father kept him busy to keep him out of trouble. He'd take him to the country in the summer to work in the tobacco fields. He remembers watching his father plow a field one day, sweat pouring down his face, when another man turned to him and said with admiration: "That's a working man."

"There was something about the way he said that that let me know that's the way yousupposed to be if you wanted respect," said Robert Boyd, who is a truck driver and pastor of the Beacon of Truth Church and Ministries in West Baltimore.

Yet boys don't respect men who don't have jobs. And many of those blue-collar jobs that built the black middle class in Baltimore are gone. Even the neighborhood businesses that I remember from youth -- an ice cream factory and a milk company behind my house -- were shuttered when I returned.

Unlike Walter Boyd, the old men I did see in my neighborhood this week were broken-down, unshaven. I thought to myself: If you want to destroy a people, first break their men.

"Now we as men are fearful when we walk through a group of boys," Robert Boyd said. "When we were boys, when we walked through a group of men, we felt secure. Something is wrong."

Taking the city away from us

Something else was missing when I returned: places for kids to play or meet the men who could mentor them.

Baltimore is a sports-crazy town. I grew up playing Little League baseball, running around the track at the high school across the street from my home, and playing tennis at public courts scattered through West Baltimore. There were public swimming pools, pickup basketball games, and plenty of recreation centers. On some days, I barely ate because I spent so much time outside playing sports.

Yet when I returned to my old playing fields, they were overgrown with weeds or barred with locked gates. I heard the same story from residents. The city had closed the pools, removed the basketball goals and, as recently as 2013, closed 20 recreation centers. I didn't see any kids playing baseball or football in the streets.

"They've taken the city away from us. We have nowhere to go and nothing to do," says Grant, the young man who wants to be a role model.

The sports venues weren't just for the kids; they were for adults. It's where men mentored kids by becoming their coaches. The tracks and pools were places where families gathered. The school's playing fields were open to everyone in the community.

I practically lived on the playing fields at Frederick Douglass High School, which became a focal point for the riots. When I talked to Walter Boyd and his son, I did so across the street from Douglass' track, which was ringed with locked gates.

"I used to do my walking there," Robert Boyd said, pointing to the track. "Not just I, but older cats and younger cats would just walk. That's when you saw community -- younger, older people. You see people and say, 'How you doing.' They don't want you on the track now."

The youth aren't missing just recreation centers and tracks; the jobs programs are gone as well.

When I grew up in West Baltimore in the late 1970s and early 1980s, virtually all of my friends worked. The city offered various jobs programs for youths -- Summer Corps, Youth Corps, Manpower. Some jobs were as simple as sweeping the streets, but we didn't mind. It was like a rite of passage into adulthood. You didn't have to ask your parents for money. I still remember the envy I felt when my friends took their first Summer Corps checks to Mondawmin Mall to buy new tennis shoes.

I hear people talk about welfare queens and the "culture of poverty." But most of the kids I grew up with weren't even content to join a jobs program. They hustled for other work. One of the most coveted jobs was riding on the milk trucks during their morning deliveries. At sunrise virtually every day, a crowd of boys would gather outside the loading dock at the Cloverdale milk company. They stood around like the day laborers who hang out today around Home Depot. They wanted a milk driver to stop and say hop on. They'd help deliver the milk, and the driver would give them a couple extra bucks.

I still remember the rejection one morning when I woke up early and joined that crowd. One by one I saw all my friends picked up until I was the only one left. Nobody stopped for me. I was too skinny to pick up a milk crate. I went home and threw myself on my bed in despair. I would never be cool like my friends.

My interest in journalism also was nurtured by these jobs programs. I interned at the Baltimore Sun and Afro-American newspapers while I was in high school. I participated in journalism getaways for promising inner-city students. I couldn't afford any of it, but if you're reading this now, it's because somebody somewhere was willing to pay money to give me a chance.

Today, few of those programs exist. The Rev. Jamal Bryant, a popular Baptist minister in Baltimore, said the city has even closed a quarter of its public libraries.

"All of those programs are housed in the Smithsonian Institution," he says of the youth jobs programs. "They are no longer in evidence or thriving today."

Yet there is one institution the city seems to find money to invest in, some residents say: law enforcement. Funding for public schools, libraries, jobs programs and recreation centers may lag, but the budget for jails and police never seems to run dry, Walter Boyd and others say.

Some wonder if it's deliberate.

"If you don't invest in them now, you're just going to have to build more prisons," Boyd says about kids in West Baltimore. "And that just seems like that's what the plan is. They won't educate you. But they'll incarcerate you in a minute."

A bittersweet reunion

I ended my return by going back to the house where I grew up. I rang the doorbell, but a guy washing his car on the street told me the old woman who lived there wouldn't answer the door because she was "skittish." Bars seemed to cover every window; other homes were boarded up, and those that weren't looked so dilapidated that it seemed as if the residents didn't care anymore.

And they don't, because so few are owners now.

I ran into one person who was still there from my childhood. I knocked on his door and a big smile flashed across his face. He had not seen me since high school, but he remembered. We all called him "Herb." He was one of the few homeowners left.

We sat down on his porch and talked about old times. He said nobody sat on the porches and talked to each other anymore. Of the 38 homes on our block, only seven were owned by their occupants. When his house was recently burglarized, he said it took three calls to 911 and 55 minutes for the police to show up.

"I could be mutilated and lying on the street," he said, "and nobody would help or call the police."

I said goodbye and left. As I got in my car, I looked at him standing at his door, still smiling as he waved at me. I also looked at Mr. Shields' old porch as I drove away. The paint was peeling and the front looked disheveled. He never would have allowed that.

This was my home. This was my family. These were my friends. But they were ghosts now. There were few men looking out for the neighborhood any longer.

What's left are boys trying to figure out how to be men -- and how to avoid getting "big numbers" or ending up in "pine boxes."

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.keywords[]
baltimore violence and the lack of black men in the city - cnn

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Baltimore violence and the lack of black men in the city - CNN

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
I asked 28-year-old Zachary Lewis about the absence of older men. He stood by a makeshift memorial placed at the spot where Freddie Gray, the man whose death ignited the riots, was arrested. "This is old here," he said, pointing to himself. "There ain't no more 'Old Heads' anymore, whereyou been?

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
While recent "big data" analysis tells us that being a great writer is a more effective way to achieve fame than becoming an actor or a scientist, here's a dirty little secret: most books wind up on the remainder tables. Quickly. Few are printed, read, and dissected years-never mind decades-after they are written. And fewer still become cultural touchstones, immediately identifiable as a symbol of particular problems of the human condition.

Lord of the Flies is an exception. It has inspired countless high school writing assignments (if not always inspiring the students completing them), a dark tide of dystopian and apocalyptic fiction, and even a memorable episode of The Simpsons. On the 60th anniversary of its publication, Lord of the Flies continues to be a valuable literary and cultural reference point and, more surprisingly, an instructive manual about contemporary political life-and its liabilities.

At first glance, suggesting that William Golding's novel remains a pertinent, even prescient, political handbook might strike you as unrealistic or naïve. From its early passages, Lord of the Flies has a dreamlike and allegorical quality that does not appear to mesh with the concrete and prosaic demands of the political world. Golding's marooned British schoolboys seem more at home in a biblical Eden than, say, Tammany Hall.

But at many turns, Flies reminds us about what is defining or central in politics, and, in turn, why politics is a core human endeavor. For example, in the first chapter, the children organize a meeting, select a "chief," dispatch a reconnaissance expedition, and identify essential tasks ("We'll get food...Hunt. Catch things..."). These diverse activities are encompassed by one of the most famous definitions of politics: "the process by which it is determined who gets what, when and how." In our own political universe, this covers everything from ongoing debates about Obamacare to the administration's proposed federal budget.

As Lord of the Flies unfolds, the boys' attention shifts from "who gets what" to a perceived menace-a "beast" that purportedly threatens their existence. While the children imagine the creature in various ghastly forms, the true danger, is, unsurprisingly, the boys themselves. As the prophetic Simon posits, "maybe there is a beast...[but] maybe it's only us."

This idea, too, captures a (less familiar and more controversial) understanding about the special province of the state: "the political" is defined by our capacity to distinguish enemies from friends.

In other words, politics is often about fear. In Flies, anxiety about the beast is ultimately fueled and funneled by the emergent leader, Jack. He initially dismisses the monster: "of course...[there] isn't a snake-thing." But Jack quickly changes his tune as he grasps that the creature's shadowy presence bolsters his authority. As he puts it, "if there was a snake we'd hunt it and kill it...Am I a hunter or am I not?").

So it is on the island, and so it is on our own soil. We have a long tradition of orienting our politics around dread. This arc of fear extends from our first party system to the Anti-Mason movement, to the Red Scares of the 20s and 50s, the War on Terror, and more recent conspiracy theories.

In offering bleak visions of oppressive or failed states, dystopian and apocalyptic fiction is inherently political. But Lord of the Flies differs from many of its literary peers in reserving its most trenchant criticism for liberal democracies. In this way, the novel is especially interesting: criticizing totalitarian states, like Big Brother's 1984 or Huxley's Brave New World is the ideological equivalent of shooting fish in a barrel. It is a far more delicate operation to expose weaknesses that are the byproducts of principles we cherish.

Golding points to three forms of political dysfunction that spring from our democratic and liberal values.

The first idea, echoing Plato's famous critique, is that our openness to popular governance leaves us susceptible to dubious, even preposterous claims to rule. Consider the indignation of Jack, who insists he "ought to be chief... because I'm chapter chorister and head boy. I can sing C sharp." Even Ralph, a clearly superior leader, is chosen without "good reason." The best that Golding can say is he possesses "stillness...size and attractive appearance." Recent research corroborates our suspicion that good looks rather than good policy drive many ballot decisions.

A second and related problem the novel reveals is our tendency to give voters what they want rather than making the proverbial hard but necessary choices. Ralph steadfastly insists that maintaining the fire as a rescue beacon is "the most important thing on the island." But this priority is ultimately trumped by Jack and his promise to "hunt and have feasts and have fun." Any number of our own political problems (the future of entitlements, our prospects of diminishing the national debt, environmental degradation) can be at least partly ascribed to officials' unwillingness to upset today's electorate.

Finally, Golding raises a third issue that has made a special appearance in our 21 st century political order. Democracies' commendable celebration of difference and egalitarianism can sometimes play havoc in the public policy arena, especially when competing arguments about "the good" include contested claims about the facts and data undergirding these debates.

In Flies, this plays out in tragic-comic fashion, when the assembly of boys put the status of "ghosts" to a vote. When the thoughtful Piggy objects that such entities are beyond the scope of reason and science, he is resisted. As one youth puts it: "Piggy says...life's scientific, but we don't know, do we?" This skepticism mirrors the tone in many of today's public conversations, in such areas as climate change and evolution.

At the end of Lord of the Flies Ralph, hunted by Jack and his murderous followers, weeps for the "end of innocence, the darkness of man's heart."

Such a grim assessment of the human condition might seem hopeless-where do we go from there? But Golding indicated, more expansively, that the "theme of the book is an attempt to trace the defect of society back to the defect of human nature." And in this agenda we have an invitation not to despair, but to puzzle over a pressing and unavoidable question, a question as old as politics: How does an inventive but fallible species organize itself to survive not just the exigencies of the moment but the inevitable demands of tomorrow? Lord of the Flies uncomfortably reminds us that, when it comes to political planning, the future is now.

Bruce Peabody is a Professor of Political Science at Fairleigh Dickinson University in Madison, New Jersey. He has written about the intersection of popular culture and political theory in venues like The Good Men Project, Magazine Americana, and Gadfly. He is currently writing a book about American heroism.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
"Lord of the Flies," Still Haunting at 60

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
While recent "big data" analysis tells us that being a great writer is a more effective way to achieve fame than becoming an actor or a scientist, here's a dirty little secret: most books wind up on the remainder tables. Quickly. Few are printed, read, and dissected years-never mind decades-after they are written.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Alex Wong/Getty Images

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.
It's the story of a society in which democracy descends into tribalism and tyranny. One of a civilization built by those committed to the rule of law who turn on each other, scapegoating the marginalized and powerless. Ultimately, it's a reminder of a human barbarism lying just beneath the fragile veneer of decency.

Sound familiar? That's right: it's the plot of Lord of the Flies, a novel about a group of English boys who survive a plane crash and are marooned on an island in the South Pacific. After a short period of harmony, a power struggle between the two leaders, Ralph and Jack, causes the group to split. Jack wins out by promising to hunt and kill a common enemy-the strange phantom living in the jungle known only as the Beast. It's a successful campaign of fear and division.

Keep up with this story and more by subscribing now

Lord of the Flies was first published in 1954, largely in response to the rise of Nazism and the horrors of World War II. And yet, in many ways, it speaks directly to the world of 2016, where austerity, the refugee crisis, Brexit and the rise of Donald Trump have emboldened nationalist fervor and stoked societal fragmentation.

The racialized language of tribal "savagery" in the novel quite rightly makes contemporary readers bristle. It marks author William Golding's failure to move beyond a fundamentally eurocentric and colonialist view of the world. But ultimately, the book's message is that "savagery" is universal. It is not racially or nationally defined. It's a moral that encourages us to reflect on just how far-right extremism has crept back into mainstream politics throughout Europe and America.

The far-right traffics in the populist language of national allegiance to legitimate racism. America's so-called alt-right, France's National Front, UKIP and xenophobic Leavers in Britain all feed off dissatisfaction with globalization to create enemies within. The solution to complex economic and political realities for these groups is as simple as hunting the Beast. Jack lives on in Trump, Le Pen, and Farage.

The voice of reason

In counterpoint to Jack's sloganeering and scaremongering, Lord of the Flies gives us Piggy and Simon. The former is a firm believer in scientific progress, but he is also aware that human progress will be halted if "we get frightened of people". Piggy is debilitated when the boys steal his glasses-his means of vision and clarity-and use them to start a fire. They instantly lose control of the flames, leading to the destruction of part of their new home. Rather than representing the first act of a united civilization, the making of fire signals the disunity that splits the group and leads, finally, to Piggy's death at the hands of Jack's tribe.

If Piggy is "progress" then Simon is "reason". He knows that the Beast isn't real and is in fact borne of the boys' own fear. "However Simon thought of the beast," we're told, "there rose before his inward sight the picture of a human at once heroic and sick." Despite this insight, Simon is regarded as weak and is shunned.

After a lone expedition, he discovers that the Beast is no more than a dead airman-a casualty of the war raging far off in the distance, whose parachute has swept him onto the island. Simon returns to camp to share the news, but the boys' imagination awakens a blind desire for blood. They no longer see a fellow human being, only a threat to their society. Simon's screams are drowned out by the "tearing of teeth and claws".

During his 1962 lecture tour of American universities, Golding discussed his reasons for writing Lord of the Flies:

My book was to say: you think that now the [Second World War] is over and an evil thing destroyed, you are safe because you are naturally kind and decent. But I know why the thing rose in Germany. I know it could happen in any country.

So far, so bleak. And yet, while Golding depicts humankind's propensity for prejudice, there is a small glimmer of hope. After fleeing the manhunt ordered by Jack, Ralph encounters a uniformed naval officer whose vessel has landed after seeing the smoke rising from the scorched island. As Ralph weeps "for the end of innocence", the officer turns around to let his eyes rest on his warship in the distance. This final image of the book is a moment of self-reflection. In the savagery and environmental catastrophe of the boys' rudimentary civilization, the adult world is afforded a vision of its own folly.

The moral of Lord of the Flies isn't just that barbarity knows no borders. It's also that it can be prevented from flourishing through the commitment to a shared humanity. "If humanity has a future on this planet of a hundred million years," said Golding in his 1962 lecture, "it is unthinkable that it should spend those aeons in a ferment of national self-satisfaction and chauvinistic idiocies."

The novel may not be a heart-warming Christmas tale, but it gifts us an unflinching portrayal of a society driven by fear. For readers in 2016, it remains both an urgent warning and an invocation.
Matthew Whittle is a Teaching Fellow in English (Contemporary and Postcolonial) at the University of Leeds.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Why you should give 'Lord of the Flies' as a present this christmas

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article. It's the story of a society in which democracy descends into tribalism and tyranny. One of a civilization built by those committed to the rule of law who turn on each other, scapegoating the marginalized and powerless.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Lord of the Flies | News | The Harvard Crimson

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
The novel Lord of the Flies attempts to interpret man, sin, and God. It succeeds. The movie Lord of the

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
BBC - Higher Bitesize English - Background : Revision

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
A BBC Bitesize secondary school revision resource for Higher English on Lord of the Flies: background, context, the tropical island, paradise lost.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
The Nobel Prize in Literature 1983 was awarded to William Golding “for his novels which, with the perspicuity of realistic narrative art and the diversity and universality of myth, illuminate the human condition in the world of today”

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Quick Facts
"I am not a theologian or a philosopher. I am a storyteller.""...man produces evil as a bee produces honey.""I'd rather there wasn't an afterlife, really. I'd much rather not be me for thousands of years..."

Name

William Golding

Birth Date

September 19, 1911

Death Date

June 19, 1993

Education

Brasenose College, Oxford, Marlborough Grammar School

Place of Birth

St. Columb Minor, Newquay, Cornwall, England

Place of Death

Perranarworthal, Cornwall, England

AKA

William Golding

Full Name

Sir William Gerald Golding

British novelist William Golding wrote the critically acclaimed classic 'Lord of the Flies,' and was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1983.

Who Was William Golding?

William Golding started teaching English and philosophy in Salisbury in 1935. He temporarily left teaching in 1940 to join the Royal Navy. In 1954 he published his first novel, Lord of the Flies. In 1983, he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. On June 19, 1993, he died in Perranarworthal, Cornwall, England.

Early Life

William Golding was born on September 19, 1911, in Saint Columb Minor, Cornwall, England. He was raised in a 14th-century house next door to a graveyard. His mother, Mildred, was an active suffragette who fought for women's right to vote. His father, Alex, worked as a schoolmaster.

William received his early education at the school his father ran, Marlborough Grammar School. When William was just 12 years old, he attempted, unsuccessfully, to write a novel. A frustrated child, he found an outlet in bullying his peers. Later in life, William would describe his childhood self as a brat, even going so far as to say, "I enjoyed hurting people."

After primary school, William went on to attend Brasenose College at Oxford University. His father hoped he would become a scientist, but William opted to study English literature instead. In 1934, a year before he graduated, William published his first work, a book of poetry aptly entitled Poems. The collection was largely overlooked by critics.

Teaching

After college, Golding worked in settlement houses and the theater for a time. Eventually, he decided to follow in his father's footsteps. In 1935 Golding took a position teaching English and philosophy at Bishop Wordsworth's School in Salisbury. Golding's experience teaching unruly young boys would later serve as inspiration for his novel Lord of the Flies.

Although passionate about teaching from day one, in 1940 Golding temporarily abandoned the profession to join the Royal Navy and fight in World War II.

'Lord of the Flies'

In 1954, after 21 rejections, Golding published his first and most acclaimed novel, Lord of the Flies. The novel told the gripping story of a group of adolescent boys stranded on a deserted island after a plane wreck. Lord of the Flies explored the savage side of human nature as the boys, let loose from the constraints of society, brutally turned against one another in the face of an imagined enemy. Riddled with symbolism, the book set the tone for Golding's future work, in which he continued to examine man's internal struggle between good and evil. Since its publication, the novel has been widely regarded as a classic, worthy of in-depth analysis and discussion in classrooms around the world.

In 1963, the year after Golding retired from teaching, Peter Brook made a film adaptation of the critically acclaimed novel. Two decades later, at the age of 73, Golding was awarded the 1983 Nobel Prize for Literature. In 1988 he was knighted by England's Queen Elizabeth II.

In 1990 a new film version of the Lord of the Flies was released, bringing the book to the attention of a new generation of readers.

Death and Legacy

Golding spent the last few years of his life quietly living with his wife, Ann Brookfield, at their house near Falmouth, Cornwall, where he continued to toil at his writing. The couple had married in 1939 and had two children, David (b. 1940) and Judith (b. 1945).

On June 19, 1993, Golding died of a heart attack in Perranarworthal, Cornwall. After Golding died, his completed manuscript for The Double Tongue was published posthumously.

Among the most successful novels of Golding's writing career were Rites of Passage (winner of the 1980 Booker McConnell Prize), Pincher Martin, Free Fall and The Pyramid. While Golding was mainly a novelist, his body of work also includes poetry, plays, essays and short stories.

Fact Check

We strive for accuracy and fairness. If you see something that doesn't look right, contact us!

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
"I am not a theologian or a philosopher. I am a storyteller." "...man produces evil as a bee produces honey." "I'd rather there wasn't an afterlife, really. I'd much rather not be me for thousands of years..." Name William Golding Birth Date September 19, 1911 Death Date June 19, 1993 Education Brasenose College, Oxford, Marlborough Grammar School Place of Birth St.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Nobelprize.org, The Official Web Site of the Nobel Prize

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
William Golding talks about creating Lord of the Flies. He claims that the story wouldn't work with a group of girls. Listen to his ideas and see what you think.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
In Lord of the Flies, Jack represents the savagery or evil in man. He loses his ability to remain civilized while he is stranded on the island. He gives in to his innate savagery and becomes dehumanized. He becomes a wretched evil person. He becomes blood thirsty and slaughters pigs unmercifully. He laughs and shakes the blood from his hands after killing a sow. He laughs as Roger probes the sow's anus with his spear. Jack laughs as Roger twists and puts all of his weight on the spear while the sow screams in agony:

Jack begins to rub the blood on his hands onto Maurice, and then they notice Roger withdraw his spear. They become hysterical because he had pinned the sow by driving the spear through its anus. They reenact the slaughter until they grow tired.

Then, Jack hangs the sow's head on a stick to represent the Lord of the Flies. He becomes cruel in his killing of the sow. Then he leads his mighty hunters into a hunting-dance frenzy. During the dance frenzy, Simon comes crawling out of the woods and Jack and his hunters jump on him and kill him with their bare hands and teeth. No doubt, Jack represents the most evil nature a man can have--a complete lust for blood and the power of the hunt:

He represents leadership by intimidation and rebelliousness. By the end he is compared to an "ape" and called a "savage."

Ralph, Piggy and the littluns represent innocence. They are the good that is found in mankind. They despise Jack's and his blood thirsty hunters' actions. Ralph and Piggy try to keep order on the island, but it is hopeless to change Jack and his hunters. In particular, Ralph tries to get everyone to build shelters and a fire to quicken their rescue:

[Ralph] is elected leader and initiates necessity to build shelters and a fire. He represents leadership by common sense and governmental authority.

Ralph and Piggy represent sense and order in all the chaos created by Jack and his hunters. Piggy dies a senseless death at the hand of Roger who is utterly cruel. By the end of the story, Ralph is being hunted by Jack and his hunters. Ralph and his representation of good versus evil is losing the battle. If the naval officer had not arrived when he did, Ralph very well may have killed by Jack and his cruel hunters.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
﻿﻿What does Jack Merridew represent in Lord of the Flies? The 'little-uns'? Piggy and Ralph? | eNotes

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
In Lord of the Flies, Jack represents the savagery or evil in man. He loses his ability to remain civilized while he is stranded on the island. He gives in to his innate savagery and becomes dehumanized. He becomes a wretched evil person. He becomes blood thirsty and slaughters pigs unmercifully.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Alan Cheuse reviews William Golding’s Lord of the Flies, 50 years after its first publication. Cheuse says this harrowing tale of a group of schoolboys stranded on a remote tropical island still holds up today.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
It turns out that military veterans are willing to talk about stress. They just haven't been getting access to the right confidantes and a comfortable setting.

Ellie is an example. Her ability to press veteran interview subjects to reveal information about their feelings and mental state worked better than the primary method used by the Department of Veteran Affairs.

Her secret? Ellie isn't a bland questionnaire. She isn't a human, either.

Developed by the University of Southern California's Institute for Creative Technologies, Ellie is a virtual PTSD screening and diagnostic tool that provides patients with an anonymous, unrecorded interview session. A recent study of Ellie's interactions with veterans showed that they are more willing to report symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder to the program than using a traditional assessment method.

USC Institute for Creative Technologies

Ellie isn't alone. She is one of a few emerging technologies that are proving pivotal in supporting PTSD treatment. These therapy innovations are still in experimental stages, but for Gale Lucas, a senior researcher at USC's Institute for Creative Technologies, Ellie is a breakthrough in the most critical step of therapy - getting veterans to talk.

"If veterans or service members don't admit that they have a problem, even to themselves, then they won't be seeking treatment," Lucas said.

More than 10 percent of veterans have PTSD

The National Center for PTSD estimates that between 11 percent and 20 percent of veterans who served in Iraq and Afghanistan have PTSD. Among Vietnam War veterans, they estimate that 30 percent have had PTSD in their lifetime.

When veterans return from deployment, they are required to complete a Post-Deployment Health Assessment, or PDHA, which contains 25 questions, including a checklist of symptoms. Veterans must self-disclose their symptoms to the document, and the information goes on their record.

Lucas said veterans and service members filling out the survey might feel pressure not to disclose all of their symptoms. The checklist is impersonal and, because the information from the PDHA is recorded, it might affect future deployment opportunities for still-serving members and job opportunities for veterans. "The culture of the military is to say, 'No, I'm fine,'" Lucas said.

Ellie offers anonymity to patients - the interview is not recorded. Instead, she reads expressions by tracking 66 points on a patient's face, and she also registers speech patterns. Analyzing this data in real time, she responds to patients with active affirmations, like nodding or even saying "mhmm" when patients appear to need it.
More from Modern Medicine:
America's veterans: Overlooked in the endless Obamacare battle
A primer on how to handle stress after a traumatic event
A popular party drug is looking like an effective treatment for depression
The new study, published in Frontiers, shows that by building rapport with patients and keeping the interview anonymous, Ellie outperformed the PDHA in getting veterans to disclose symptoms. Ellie even topped an anonymous PDHA to show that a conversation, even with a virtual therapist, is effective in assessing PTSD.

"It's a humanlike interaction," Lucas said. "It makes people feel more comfortable sharing personal things, like symptoms of PTSD."

In the future, Lucas hopes that Ellie will be able to report the likelihood of a veteran having PTSD immediately following the interview. That will allow the veterans to make a more informed decision about seeking treatment through therapy.

Technology can monitor PTSD in real time

About an hour north of Orlando, Florida, at 5PALMS Ormond Beach, a 24-bed residential facility that specializes in treating PTSD for women survivors of substance and sexual abuse in the military, chief clinical officer Laurie Deckard has overseen the implementation of NeuroFlow, which measures neurological movements in the brain and heart-rate levels to monitor PTSD symptoms in real-time.

"The patient is able to see how they're reacting to the material that's being told to them," Deckard said. "In therapy, you don't always know that you're making progress, but this way you can visibly see that you're making progress."

NeuroFlow operates by using the measurements from the brain and heart rate to generate readings of a patient's stress, relaxation and engagement levels. Because a patient might be unaware of what triggers their PTSD, a therapist can monitor these while the patient talks, taking note of what causes the patient to become uncomfortable.

"It's been a short time, but I do project that it's going to be something that our patients really love." -Laurie Deckard, chief clinical officer at PTSD center 5PALMS Ormond Beach

Because it often takes weeks for patients to notice a significant difference in their mental health during therapy, NeuroFlow can also prove if patients are learning to cope with the disorder by showing incremental improvements in their levels.

The system was created by Adam Pardes and Chris Molaro, a former veteran, when Molaro saw alarming rates of veteran suicide. In 2014, 20 veterans died by suicide every day.

"How do you survive a year in combat and you come home, and the health care back home is inefficient to the point that you lose a battle like that?" Molaro said.

Molaro has implemented NeuroFlow in several clinics around the country - 5PALMS Ormond Beach has been using the software for about one month.

Already, Deckard has noticed a change. Because the software is designed to be read by anyone - not just neurologists or psychologists - patients have been able to track their progress.

"It's been a short time, but I do project that it's going to be something that our patients really love," Deckard said.

The VA is moving more PTSD options online

While researchers focus on the cutting-edge of new PTSD technology, the VA has been working on the technological blocking and tackling of PTSD treatment, moving as much information and public access as possible to the internet and onto mobile apps.

The National Center for PTSD's website hosts informational videos and guides that anyone can access from a computer. Josef Ruzek, director of the Center's Dissemination and Training Division in Palo Alto, California, said that 14 phone apps have been created across platforms for veterans to use.

"Phone apps are wonderful because they're with a person 24/7," Ruzek said.

Bonnie Jo Mount | The Washington Post via Getty Images

The idea behind all of this technology is not to replace human therapists. In one app, Prolonged Exposure Coach, or PE Coach, a patient can remotely submit assignments for their therapist to look over. Anyone can download the app, but Ruzek said that the app is most effective with patients in therapy because they need human support.

David Cooper, the lead psychologist in the mobile applications department of the Center for Telehealth & Technology - which created PE Coach and a number of other phone apps - said placing treatment on phones is important because it can give veterans a lower stress way to deal with their larger stress issues. For example, a veteran with PTSD symptoms might be in public and feeling anxious or overwhelmed. They can learn about how to deal with these issues just by looking on their mobile device.

In addition, not everyone has time or can afford to go to a clinic, Cooper said. There are gaps in access to VA centers based on distance, and also based on lack of access to health coverage for many veterans.

Having the information public and easily accessible helps veterans and others with PTSD make treatment decisions. "Just like we use tech right now to make our work lives better, it can be used to make our personal lives better," Cooper said.

- By Trey Strange, special to CNBC.com

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
'Ellie' is having more success getting veterans to talk about PTSD than the VA

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
It turns out that military veterans are willing to talk about stress. They just haven't been getting access to the right confidantes and a comfortable setting. Ellie is an example. Her ability to press veteran interview subjects to reveal information about their feelings and mental state worked better than the primary method used by the Department of Veteran Affairs.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
What if PTSD Is More Physical Than Psychological? (Published 2016)

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
A new study supports what a small group of military researchers has suspected for decades: that modern warfare destroys the brain.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
If we weed out the malingerers on the one hand and the deeply traumatized on the other, we are still left with enormous numbers of veterans who had utterly ordinary wartime experiences and yet feel dangerously alienated back home. Clinically speaking, such alienation is not the same thing as PTSD, but both seem to result from military service abroad, so it's understandable that vets and even clinicians are prone to conflating them. Either way, it makes one wonder exactly what it is about modern society that is so mortally dispiriting to come home to.

Soldier's Creed

Any discussion of PTSD and its associated sense of alienation in society must address the fact that many soldiers find themselves missing the war after it's over. That troubling fact can be found in written accounts from war after war, country after country, century after century. Awkward as it is to say, part of the trauma of war seems to be giving it up. There are ancient human behaviors in war-loyalty, inter-reliance, cooperation-that typify good soldiering and can't be easily found in modern society. This can produce a kind of nostalgia for the hard times that even civilians are susceptible to: after World War II, many Londoners claimed to miss the communal underground living that characterized life during the Blitz (despite the fact that more than 40,000 civilians lost their lives). And the war that is missed doesn't even have to be a shooting war: "I am a survivor of the AIDS epidemic," a man wrote on the comment board of an online talk I gave about war. "Now that AIDS is no longer a death sentence, I must admit that I miss those days of extreme brotherhood ... which led to deep emotions and understandings that are above anything I have felt since the plague years."

What all these people seem to miss isn't danger or loss, per se, but the closeness and cooperation that danger and loss often engender. Humans evolved to survive in extremely harsh environments, and our capacity for cooperation and sharing clearly helped us do that. Structurally, a band of hunter-gatherers and a platoon in combat are almost exactly the same: in each case, the group numbers between 30 and 50 individuals, they sleep in a common area, they conduct patrols, they are completely reliant on one another for support, comfort, and defense, and they share a group identity that most would risk their lives for. Personal interest is subsumed into group interest because personal survival is not possible without group survival. From an evolutionary perspective, it's not at all surprising that many soldiers respond to combat in positive ways and miss it when it's gone.

There are obvious psychological stresses on a person in a group, but there may be even greater stresses on a person in isolation. Most higher primates, including humans, are intensely social, and there are few examples of individuals surviving outside of a group. A modern soldier returning from combat goes from the kind of close-knit situation that humans evolved for into a society where most people work outside the home, children are educated by strangers, families are isolated from wider communities, personal gain almost completely eclipses collective good, and people sleep alone or with a partner. Even if he or she is in a family, that is not the same as belonging to a large, self-sufficient group that shares and experiences almost everything collectively. Whatever the technological advances of modern society-and they're nearly miraculous-the individual lifestyles that those technologies spawn may be deeply brutalizing to the human spirit.

"You'll have to be prepared to say that we are not a good society-that we are an anti-human society," anthropologist Sharon Abramowitz warned when I tried this theory out on her. Abramowitz was in Ivory Coast during the start of the civil war there in 2002 and experienced, firsthand, the extremely close bonds created by hardship and danger. "We are not good to each other. Our tribalism is about an extremely narrow group of people: our children, our spouse, maybe our parents. Our society is alienating, technical, cold, and mystifying. Our fundamental desire, as human beings, is to be close to others, and our society does not allow for that."

This is an old problem, and today's vets are not the first Americans to balk at coming home. A source of continual embarrassment along the American frontier-from the late 1600s until the end of the Indian Wars, in the 1890s-was a phenomenon known as "the White Indians." The term referred to white settlers who were kidnapped by Indians-or simply ran off to them-and became so enamored of that life that they refused to leave. According to many writers of the time, including Benjamin Franklin, the reverse never happened: Indians never ran off to join white society. And if a peace treaty required that a tribe give up their adopted members, these members would often have to be put under guard and returned home by force. Inevitably, many would escape to rejoin their Indian families. "Thousands of Europeans are Indians, and we have no examples of even one of those aborigines having from choice become European," wrote a French-born writer in America named Michel-Guillaume-Saint-Jean de Crèvecoeur in an essay published in 1782.

One could say that combat vets are the White Indians of today, and that they miss the war because it was, finally, an experience of human closeness that they can't easily find back home. Not the closeness of family, which is rare enough, but the closeness of community and tribe. The kind of closeness that gets endlessly venerated in Hollywood movies but only actually shows up in contemporary society when something goes wrong-when tornados obliterate towns or planes are flown into skyscrapers. Those events briefly give us a reason to act communally, and most of us do. "There is something to be said for using risk to forge social bonds," Abramowitz pointed out. "Having something to fight for, and fight through, is a good and important thing."

Certainly, the society we have created is hard on us by virtually every metric that we use to measure human happiness. This problem may disproportionately affect people, like soldiers, who are making a radical transition back home.

It is incredibly hard to measure and quantify the human experience, but some studies have found that many people in certain modern societies self-report high levels of happiness. And yet, numerous cross-cultural studies show that as affluence and urbanization rise in a given society, so do rates of depression, suicide, and schizophrenia (along with health issues such as obesity and diabetes). People in wealthy countries suffer unipolar depression at more than double the rate that they do in poor countries, according to a study by the World Health Organization, and people in countries with large income disparities-like the United States-run a much higher risk of developing mood disorders at some point in their lives. A 2006 cross-cultural study of women focusing on depression and modernization compared depression rates in rural and urban Nigeria and rural and urban North America, and found that women in rural areas of both countries were far less likely to get depressed than urban women. And urban American women-the most affluent demographic of the study-were the most likely to succumb to depression.

In America, the more assimilated a person is into contemporary society, the more likely he or she is to develop depression in his or her lifetime. According to a 2004 study in The**Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease, Mexicans born in the United States are highly assimilated into American culture and have much higher rates of depression than Mexicans born in Mexico. By contrast, Amish communities have an exceedingly low rate of reported depression because, in part, it is theorized, they have completely resisted modernization. They won't even drive cars. "The economic and marketing forces of modern society have engineered an environment promoting decisions that maximize consumption at the long-term cost of well-being," one survey of these studies, from the Journal of Affective Disorders in 2012, concluded. "In effect, humans have dragged a body with a long hominid history into an overfed, malnourished, sedentary, sunlight-deficient, sleep-deprived, competitive, inequitable and socially-isolating environment with dire consequences."

For more than half a million years, our recent hominid ancestors lived nomadic lives of extreme duress on the plains of East Africa, but the advent of agriculture changed that about 10,000 years ago. That is only 400 generations-not enough to adapt, genetically, to the changes in diet and society that ensued. Privately worked land and the accumulation of capital made humans less oriented toward group welfare, and the Industrial Revolution pushed society further in that direction. No one knows how the so-called Information Age will affect us, but there's a good chance that home technology and the Internet will only intensify our drift toward solipsism and alienation.

Meanwhile, many of the behaviors that had high survival value in our evolutionary past, like problem solving, cooperation, and inter-group competition, are still rewarded by bumps of dopamine and other hormones into our system. Those hormones serve to reinforce whatever behavior it was that produced those hormones in the first place. Group affiliation and cooperation were clearly adaptive because in many animals, including humans, they trigger a surge in levels of a neuropeptide called oxytocin. Not only does oxytocin create a glow of well-being in people, it promotes greater levels of trust and bonding, which unite them further still. Hominids that were rewarded with oxytocin for cooperating with one another must have out-fought, out-hunted, and out-bred the ones that didn't. Those are the hominids that modern humans are descended from.

According to one study published in Science in June 2010, this feedback loop of oxytocin and group loyalty creates an expectation that members will "self-sacrifice to contribute to in-group welfare." There may be no better description of a soldier's ethos than that sentence. One of the most noticeable things about life in the military is that you are virtually never alone: day after day, month after month, you are close enough to speak to, if not touch, a dozen or more people. You eat together, sleep together, laugh together, suffer together. That level of intimacy duplicates our evolutionary past very closely and must create a nearly continual oxytocin reward system.

Hero's Welcome

When soldiers return to modern society, they must go through-among other adjustments-a terrific oxytocin withdrawal. The chronic isolation of modern society begins in childhood and continues our entire lives. Infants in hunter-gatherer societies are carried by their mothers as much as 50 to 90 percent of the time, often in wraps that keep them strapped to the mother's back so that her hands are free. That roughly corresponds to carrying rates among other primates, according to primatologist and psychologist Harriet J. Smith. One can get an idea of how desperately important touch is to primates from a landmark experiment conducted in the 1950s by a psychologist and primatologist named Harry Harlow. Baby rhesus monkeys were separated from their mothers and presented with the choice of two kinds of surrogates: a cuddly mother made out of terry cloth or an uninviting mother made out of wire mesh. The wire-mesh mother, however, had a nipple that would dispense warm milk. The babies invariably took their nourishment quickly in order to rush back and cling to the terry-cloth mother, which had enough softness to provide the illusion of affection. But even that isn't enough for psychological health: in a separate experiment, more than 75 percent of female baby rhesus monkeys raised with terry-cloth mothers-as opposed to real ones-grew up to be abusive and neglectful to their own young.

In the 1970s, American mothers maintained skin-to-skin contact with their nine-month-old babies as little as 16 percent of the time, which is a level of contact that traditional societies would probably consider a form of child abuse. Also unthinkable would be the common practice of making young children sleep by themselves in their own room. In two American studies of middle-class families during the 1980s, 85 percent of young children slept alone-a figure that rose to 95 percent among families considered "well-educated." Northern European societies, including America, are the only ones in history to make very young children sleep alone in such numbers. The isolation is thought to trigger fears that make many children bond intensely with stuffed animals for reassurance. Only in Northern European societies do children go through the well-known developmental stage of bonding with stuffed animals; elsewhere, children get their sense of safety from the adults sleeping near them.

More broadly, in most human societies, almost nobody sleeps alone. Sleeping in family groups of one sort or another has been the norm throughout human history and is still commonplace in most of the world. Again, Northern European societies are among the few where people sleep alone or with a partner in a private room. When I was with American soldiers at a remote outpost in Afghanistan, we slept in narrow plywood huts where I could reach out and touch three other men from where I slept. They snored, they talked, they got up in the middle of the night to use the piss tubes, but we felt safe because we were in a group. The Taliban attacked the position regularly, and the most determined attacks often came at dawn. Another unit in a nearby valley was almost overrun and took 50 percent casualties in just such an attack. And yet I slept better surrounded by those noisy, snoring men than I ever did camping alone in the woods of New England.

Many soldiers will tell you that one of the hardest things about coming home is learning to sleep without the security of a group of heavily armed men around them. In that sense, being in a war zone with your platoon feels safer than being in an American suburb by yourself. I know a vet who felt so threatened at home that he would get up in the middle of the night to build fighting positions out of the living-room furniture. This is a radically different experience from what warriors in other societies go through, such as the Yanomami, of the Orinoco and Amazon Basins, who go to war with their entire age cohort and return to face, together, whatever the psychological consequences may be. As one anthropologist pointed out to me, trauma is usually a group experience, so trauma recovery should be a group experience as well. But in our society it's not.

"Our whole approach to mental health has been hijacked by pharmaceutical logic," I was told by Gary Barker, an anthropologist whose group, Promundo, is dedicated to understanding and preventing violence. "PTSD is a crisis of connection and disruption, not an illness that you carry within you."

This individualizing of mental health is not just an American problem, or a veteran problem; it affects everybody. A British anthropologist named Bill West told me that the extreme poverty of the 1930s and the collective trauma of the Blitz served to unify an entire generation of English people. "I link the experience of the Blitz to voting in the Labour Party in 1945, and the establishing of the National Health Service and a strong welfare state," he said. "Those policies were supported well into the 60s by all political parties. That kind of cultural cohesiveness, along with Christianity, was very helpful after the war. It's an open question whether people's problems are located in the individual. If enough people in society are sick, you have to wonder whether it isn't actually society that's sick."

Ideally, we would compare hunter-gatherer society to post-industrial society to see which one copes better with PTSD. When the Sioux, Cheyenne, and Arapaho fighters returned to their camps after annihilating Custer and his regiment at Little Bighorn, for example, were they traumatized and alienated by the experience-or did they fit right back into society? There is no way to know for sure, but less direct comparisons can still illuminate how cohesiveness affects trauma. In experiments with lab rats, for example, a subject that is traumatized-but not injured-after an attack by a larger rat usually recovers within 48 hours unless it is kept in isolation, according to data published in 2005 in Neuroscience & Biobehavioral Reviews. The ones that are kept apart from other rats are the only ones that develop long-term traumatic symptoms. And a study of risk factors for PTSD in humans closely mirrored those results. In a 2000 study in the Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology, "lack of social support" was found to be around two times more reliable at predicting who got PTSD and who didn't than the severity of the trauma itself. You could be mildly traumatized, in other words-on a par with, say, an ordinary rear-base deployment to Afghanistan-and experience long-term PTSD simply because of a lack of social support back home.

Anthropologist and psychiatrist Brandon Kohrt found a similar phenomenon in the villages of southern Nepal, where a civil war has been rumbling for years. Kohrt explained to me that there are two kinds of villages there: exclusively Hindu ones, which are extremely stratified, and mixed Buddhist/Hindu ones, which are far more open and cohesive. He said that child soldiers, both male and female, who go back to Hindu villages can remain traumatized for years, while those from mixed-religion villages tended to recover very quickly. "PTSD is a disorder of recovery, and if treatment only focuses on identifying symptoms, it pathologizes and alienates vets," according to Kohrt. "But if the focus is on family and community, it puts them in a situation of collective healing."

Israel is arguably the only modern country that retains a sufficient sense of community to mitigate the effects of combat on a mass scale. Despite decades of intermittent war, the Israel Defense Forces have a PTSD rate as low as 1 percent. Two of the foremost reasons have to do with national military service and the proximity of the combat-the war is virtually on their doorstep. "Being in the military is something that most people have done," I was told by Dr. Arieh Shalev, who has devoted the last 20 years to studying PTSD. "Those who come back from combat are re-integrated into a society where those experiences are very well understood. We did a study of 17-year-olds who had lost their father in the military, compared to those who had lost their fathers to accidents. The ones whose fathers died in combat did much better than those whose fathers hadn't."

According to Shalev, the closer the public is to the actual combat, the better the war will be understood and the less difficulty soldiers will have when they come home. The Israelis are benefiting from what could be called the shared public meaning of a war. Such public meaning-which would often occur in more communal, tribal societies-seems to help soldiers even in a fully modern society such as Israel. It is probably not generated by empty, reflexive phrases-such as "Thank you for your service"-that many Americans feel compelled to offer soldiers and vets. If anything, those comments only serve to underline the enormous chasm between military and civilian society in this country.

Another Israeli researcher, Reuven Gal, found that the perceived legitimacy of a war was more important to soldiers' general morale than was the combat readiness of the unit they were in. And that legitimacy, in turn, was a function of the war's physical distance from the homeland: "The Israeli soldiers who were abruptly mobilized and thrown into dreadful battles in the middle of Yom Kippur Day in 1973 had no doubts about the legitimacy of the war," Gal wrote in the Journal of Applied Psychology in 1986. "Many of those soldiers who were fighting in the Golan Heights against the flood of Syrian tanks needed only to look behind their shoulders to see their homes and remind themselves that they were fighting for their very survival."

In that sense, the Israelis are far more like the Sioux, Cheyenne, and Arapaho at Little Bighorn than they are like us. America's distance from her enemies means that her wars have generally been fought far away from her population centers, and as a result those wars have been harder to explain and justify than Israel's have been. The people who will bear the psychic cost of that ambiguity will, of course, be the soldiers.

A Bright Shining Lie

'I talked to my mom only one time from Mars," a Vietnam vet named Gregory Gomez told me about the physical and spiritual distance between his home and the war zone. Gomez is a pure-blooded Apache who grew up in West Texas. He says his grandfather was arrested and executed by Texas Rangers in 1915 because they wanted his land; they strung him from a tree limb, cut off his genitals, and stuffed them in his mouth. Consequently, Gomez felt no allegiance to the U.S. government, but he volunteered for service in Vietnam anyway. "Most of us Indian guys who went to Vietnam went because we were warriors," Gomez told me. "I did not fight for this country. I fought for Mother Earth. I wanted to experience combat. I wanted to know how I'd do."

Gomez was in a Marine Corps Force Recon unit, one of the most elite designations in the U.S. military. He was part of a four-man team that would insert by helicopter into enemy territory north of the DMZ and stay for two weeks at a time. They had no medic and no backup and didn't even dare eat C rations, because, Gomez said, they were afraid their body odor would give them away. They ate Vietnamese food and watched enemy soldiers pass just yards away in the dense jungle. "Everyone who has lived through something like that has lived through trauma, and you can never go back," he told me. "You are 17 or 18 or 19 and you just hit that wall. You become very old men."

American Indians, proportionally, have provided more soldiers to America's wars than almost any other ethnic group in this country. They are also the product of an ancient and vibrant warring culture that takes great pains to protect the warrior from society, and vice versa. Although those traditions have obviously broken down since the end of the Indian Wars, there may be something to be learned from the principles upon which they stand. When Gomez came home he essentially isolated himself for more than a decade. He didn't drink, and he lived a normal life except that occasionally he'd go to the corner store to get a soda and would wind up in Oklahoma or East Texas without any idea how he got there.

He finally started seeing a therapist at the V.A. as well as undergoing traditional Indian rituals. It was a combination that seemed to work. In the 1980s, he underwent an extremely painful ceremony called the Sun Dance. At the start of the ceremony, the dancers have wooden skewers driven through the skin of their chests. Leather thongs are tied to the skewers and then attached to the top of a tall pole at the center of the dance ground. To a steady drumbeat, the dancers move in a circle while leaning back on the leather thongs until, after many hours, the skewers finally tear free. "I dance back and I throw my arms and yell and I can see the ropes and the piercing sticks like in slow motion, flying from my chest towards the grandfather's tree," Gomez told me about the experience. "And I had this incredible feeling of euphoria and strength, like I could do anything. That's when the healing takes place. That's when life changes take place."

America is a largely de-ritualized society that obviously can't just borrow from another society to heal its psychic wounds. But the spirit of community healing and empowerment that forms the basis of these ceremonies is certainly one that might be converted to a secular modern society. The shocking disconnect for veterans isn't so much that civilians don't know what they went through-it's unrealistic to expect anyone to fully understand another person's experience-but that what they went through doesn't seem relevant back home. Given the profound alienation that afflicts modern society, when combat vets say that they want to go back to war, they may be having an entirely healthy response to the perceived emptiness of modern life.

One way to change this dynamic might be to emulate the Israelis and mandate national service (with a military or combat option). We could also emulate the Nepalese and try to have communities better integrate people of different ethnic and religious groups. Finally, we could emulate many tribal societies-including the Apache-by getting rid of parades and replacing them with some form of homecoming ceremony. An almost universal component of these ceremonies is the dramatic retelling of combat experiences to the warrior's community. We could achieve that on Veterans Day by making every town and city hall in the country available to veterans who want to speak publicly about the war. The vapid phrase "I support the troops" would then mean actually showing up at your town hall every Veterans Day to hear these people out. Some vets will be angry, some will be proud, and some will be crying so hard they can't speak. But a community ceremony like that would finally return the experience of war to our entire nation, rather than just leaving it to the people who fought.

It might also begin to re-assemble a society that has been spiritually cannibalizing itself for generations. We keep wondering how to save the vets, but the real question is how to save ourselves. If we do that, the vets will be fine. If we don't, it won't matter anyway.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
How PTSD Became a Problem Far Beyond the Battlefield

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Though only 10 percent of American forces see combat, the U.S. military now has the highest rate of post-traumatic stress disorder in its history. Sebastian Junger investigates.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
There's a new island in the Pacific Ocean, thanks to an underwater volcano eruption that's been going on for the past month.

The new island is in the Tonga archipelago-a group of islands southeast of Fiji. Scientists discovered it on January 16, about a month into the volcano's eruption. The volcano, called Hunga Tonga, has since stopped erupting.

The island is mostly made of ash and formed around the crater of the volcano, measuring a little more than half a mile wide. The before-and-after images, from the Pleiades satellite, gives a clear picture of how far the ash spread, extending toward on of the two islands that border the underground volcano.

Underwater volcanoes create new islands pretty frequently. Most erode soon after formation, but some manage to become permanent. One of the most recent examples of a permanent island caused by an underwater volcano eruption is an island in Japan that began erupting in 2013. The island eventually joined up with the larger volcanic island Nishino-shima.

Geolgists expect the new Tonga island to erode in a matter of months.

Temporary Geography

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
An Underwater Volcano Just Created A New Island

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
There's a new island in the Pacific Ocean, thanks to an underwater volcano eruption that's been going on for the past month. The new island is in the Tonga archipelago-a group of islands southeast of Fiji. Scientists discovered it on January 16, about a month into the volcano's eruption.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.provider_name
The Met's Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Oceania, 8000-2000 B.C. | Chronology | Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History | The Metropolitan Museum of Art

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
"Lacking writing systems and working primarily in perishable materials such as wood and fiber, the peoples of the Pacific have left little record of their early history or art forms. While archaeologists have developed cultural and artistic sequences for a number of regions in Oceania based on more durable remains such as stone, shell, pottery, and rock art, much of the prehistory of the Pacific remains poorly known.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
This Saturday, March 28, 2015, the planet will be celebrating the ninth annual Earth Hour, where people around the world will turn off their lights at 8:30 p.m. local time for one hour. The organizers see this event as a planet-wide movement, reminding us-for just 60 minutes each year-that there are small things that we can do to minimize carbon emissions that are causing climate change.

There is one "continent" that will participate hardly at all in Earth Hour, yet it is arguably the one continent most directly affected by climate change, and which will, in turn, affect the climate on the rest of the planet. It has the highest mountains, the deepest valleys, and the vastest plains. It is inhabited by an unfathomable numbers of species, plant and animal. It has a total area of 155.557 million square kilometers, including an estimated 157,000 kilometers of coastline. It is the largest continent-larger than all the landmass in Earth put together. Oceania-the "Liquid Continent."

For decades it was fashionable to speak about the "Pacific Rim," which soon became equated simply with the word "Pacific." To speak of the Pacific is to speak of North America's West Coast, East and Southeast Asia, and-for the more bold-the Western countries of Latin America. That's the Pacific Rim. In between-what some of us called the Pacific Basin-is another land entirely. A land rendered invisible by the "Pacific Rim": Oceania.

One hears mention, in the talk about climate change, that certain small island nations in the Pacific- Tuvalu, in particular, and also Kiribati (pronounced KEE-ree-bahs)-are starting to disappear under the rising sea. As long as one thinks in terms of land continents, the loss of some tiny islands-just like the loss of some coastal Arctic native villages-can seem far away and insignificant. But Islanders are already cognizant of these effects:

Loss of coastal land and infrastructure due to erosion, inundation and storm surges;

Increase in frequency and severity of cyclones with risks to human life, health, homes and communities;

Loss of coral reefs with implications for the sea eco-systems on which the livelihood of many Islanders depends;

Changes in rainfall patterns with increased droughts in some areas and more rainfall with flooding in other areas;

Threats to drinkable water due to changes in rainfall, sea-level rise and inundation;

Loss of agricultural land due to salt-water intrusion into the groundwater;

Human health impacts with an increase in incidence of dengue fever and diarrhea.

But the impact of climate change on the ocean has huge implications not just for islanders, but for the planet.

Our own Enivornmental Protection Agency tells us that as greenhouse gases trap more energy from the sun, the oceans are absorbing more heat. Though it is less noticeable to us on land, this gradual rise in ocean temperatures will not only bring rising sea levels, but changes to the movement of heat around the planet by ocean currents. This will lead to alterations in climate patterns around the world.

Because the ocean, not the land, is the primary driver of our climatic system. Changes to the ocean affect changes to winds. One result already has been flooding events on the East Coast of the United States linked to sea level rise and changing wind patterns.

Coral bleaching (which kills corals), ocean acidification (which makes it harder for shell-building species to survive), migration of fish towards the poles (disrupting global fisheries), pollution and over-fishing are driving the ocean towards what some scientists see as a tipping point-not just for climate change, but for the ecology of the ocean itself.

What can we do, besides turn off our lights for an hour each year? Following on the meeting of Small Island Developing States (SIDS) in Apia, Samoa, last year, the voyage of the Hōkūleʻa-to raise awareness of the health of the oceans and therefore, of the Earth-has adopted the One Ocean, One Island Earth pledge. And we are all encouraged to do likewise. You can sign up for the pledge here. The pledge is simple:

I recognize that Earth is a blue planet. Our ocean is the cornerstone of life, and our planet's life-support system.

No matter where on Island Earth I live, the ocean produces the air I breathe and helps to regulate the climate.

I recognize that our ocean and Island Earth is changing because of the habits and choices of human beings.

I recognize that with supporters like me, and the community I reach out to around me, the future of our oceans and our Island Earth can improve.

The difference will start with me and spread to others. I pledge to support our oceans and Island Earth, and inspire people of all ages to do the same.

As the Polynesian voyaging canoe Hōkūleʻa circles the globe on its worldwide voyage, the crew seeks to find and share stories of hope that can bring us all together to care for the one ocean and the one island earth that we share. It takes a people from Oceania-who see the ocean not as empty space but as a dynamic realm much greater than land-to teach us the importance of caring for the oceans.

For those of us who grew up on the great land continents, and have always thought of the sea as something one ventures out onto once in a great while, and possibly with some hesitance, the sea is simply that great blue empty space. On many maps it is colored a uniform, solid blue. But for the people of Oceania, the sea is places, roads, highways. It is gods, and mysteries, and destinies. It is a medium that connects the small bits of land where people rest between journeys. And for all of humanity-indeed, all species of life on the planet-it is the Great Source.

Just as all rivers flow ultimately to the sea, so all of human activity is tied to the ocean, for better and for worse. For among the great metropolises of the world, the ocean is the dumping ground. It is where the polluted rivers flow, where the garbage ends up, where nuclear waste is stored. If you want to get rid of it, throw it in the sea. The sea is infinite after all, isn't it?

What we now know is that human garbage is ending up in the deepest and most remote parts of the ocean. Just as our lands have absorbed the toxic by-products of industry and agriculture, and the atmosphere has absorbed the carbon dioxide and other gaseous and particulate output of smokestacks and exhaust pipes, so too the ocean-that great being that has always seemed capable of absorbing everything without consequences-shows many of the same sad signs of abuse. The lesson is clear: we can no longer thoughtlessly throw things "away." There is no "away" anymore. Not even in the ocean.

In a previous article, I wrote how the Earth is like an island, and like a canoe (a large voyaging canoe, that is): what we have is all we have, and as we would do aboard ship, we must take care of the vessel that carries us, that we may survive and thrive. And strange as it seems, as we think about Island Earth, we must recognize that the ocean is part of that island too. Here I offer some thoughts in that regard.

In his book Thinking History Globally, Diego Olstein reminds us that "Oceanic histories transcend enclosed political and regional boundaries by privileging bodies of water rather than the terrestrial domains." An oceanic perspective focuses on sea-borne connections between human societies. And with globalization, those sea-borne connections have become much greater. The sea that surrounds us, which Tongan author Epeli Hau'ofa wrote about, in talking of how the peoples of Oceania see the ocean as connecting, rather than separating, now holds true for the entire planet. The once-mighty continents themselves are now islands in the sea, and we who dwell on them should learn to understand them as such.

As climate change and other human-induced environmental issues increasingly close in on us, we are standing on the edge of a new journey forward: one that demands the best of us, the greatest wisdom, the wisest plotting of the course forward. Where the ancestors of Oceania's peoples used painstaking observation of the oceanic elements, trial and error, commitment, determination and innovation to design vessels that could journey out into the unknown, so too do we now need deep vision and courage to visiualize a new beginning that will take us beyond the horizons set by the dominant worldview. As Tongan scholar Winston Halapua has said, "We need new ways of thinking and new ways to approach the huge challenges that confront us and will demand the best of all our energies and will be a deeply authentic way to journey forward."

One Ocean, One Island Earth. The earth is the canoe taking us on our journey into the future. We are all in the same boat. And 70 percent of that "boat" is the ocean.
The Smithsonian Institution will participate in this year's Earth Hour. Tonight the American Indian Museum, Air and Space Museum, Natural History Museum, National Zoo, Hirshhorn Museum, and Castle will go dark to show commitment to sustainability.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
What Climate Change Will Mean for the People of Oceania

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
This Saturday, March 28, 2015, the planet will be celebrating the ninth annual Earth Hour, where people around the world will turn off their lights at 8:30 p.m. local time for one hour. The organizers see this event as a planet-wide movement, reminding us-for just 60 minutes each year-that there are small things that we can do to minimize carbon emissions that are causing climate change.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Abstract

The Pacific Ocean evolved from the Panthalassic Ocean that was first formed ca 750 Ma with the rifting apart of Rodinia. By 160 Ma, the first ocean floor ascribed to the current Pacific plate was produced to the west of a spreading centre in the central Pacific, ultimately growing to become the largest oceanic plate on the Earth. The current Nazca, Cocos and Juan de Fuca (Gorda) plates were initially one plate, produced to the east of the original spreading centre before becoming split into three. The islands of the Pacific have originated as: linear chains of volcanic islands on the above plates either by mantle plume or propagating fracture origin, atolls, uplifted coralline reefs, fragments of continental crust, obducted portions of adjoining lithospheric plates and islands resulting from subduction along convergent plate margins. Out of the 11 linear volcanic chains identified, each is briefly described and its history summarized. The geology of 10 exemplar archipelagos (Japan, Izu-Bonin, Palau, Solomons, Fiji, New Caledonia, New Zealand, Society, Galápagos and Hawaii) is then discussed in detail.

Keywords: Pacific, islands, plate tectonics

1. Introduction

The islands of the Pacific Ocean support biodiversity that has evolved in the context of diverse and complex geological histories. Understanding the evolution of this biota requires an understanding of the geological history of the Ocean and its many thousands of islands. Two-thirds of the Ocean is underlain by the large northwestward-moving Pacific plate that is generated at the East Pacific Rise (EPR) and its southern continuation, the Pacific-Antarctic Ridge (). The plate extends approximately 13 000 km from source to subduction in the Mariana Trench, moving at 50-133 mm yr −1 about a pole of rotation located on the east Australian coast ( Wessel & Kroenke 2000). Thus, in its western part, the Pacific plate preserves the oldest ocean floor on Earth at 167 Ma, of Jurassic age ( Koppers et al. 2003).

The Pacific plate comprises solid lithosphere that moves above a weak ductile layer in the upper mantle, named the asthenosphere. Lithospheric plates comprise an upper layer of crustal rocks beneath which is a higher density layer of solid upper mantle. The crust and upper mantle of each plate behave coherently without movement between them. The crust is made of either dense basaltic lavas and their intrusive equivalents, termed oceanic crust, or lower density sedimentary rocks, granites and their extrusive and metamorphosed equivalents, termed continental crust. Some lithospheric plates are made entirely of oceanic or continental crust, but the vast majority comprise mosaics of both crust types, depending on their previous geological histories.

Oceanic crust is thin close to its source at mid-ocean spreading centres, and thickens to 10 km in distal locations. By contrast, continental crust varies from 20 to more than 70 km thickness. Where continental crust converges with oceanic crust, that part of the lithospheric plate with the denser (oceanic) crust slips downwards and sinks into the asthenosphere, forming a subduction zone. Earthquakes created by the fracturing of the cold, brittle subducting lithosphere can extend to depths of 700 km. Water released from the upper layers of the descending plate interacts with the surrounding asthenosphere (the mantle wedge), eventually creating magmas that rise to the surface forming volcanic arcs. Intermixing of the source magma with assimilated crustal materials on its upward journey creates a common volcanic rock type named andesite. A line of andesite volcanoes ('the andesite line') circumscribes the Pacific Ocean clockwise from New Zealand to Chile, and is colloquially known as 'the Pacific Ring of Fire'. Where oceanic crust converges with oceanic crust, it is the older, denser plate that will subduct, such as that in the Tonga-Kermadec arc. Where continental crust converges with continental crust, neither can be subducted. The result is crustal overthickening, compressed rock sequences, thrust faulting and mountain building, termed obduction.

On the Pacific plate's journey from source to subduction, the lithosphere becomes progressively colder, and denser, leading to gradual subsidence over time. East of the EPR, three secondary plates (Juan de Fuca (Gorda), Cocos and Nazca) form most of the rest of the sea floor of the Pacific Ocean. The first two move northeastwards and the latter eastwards, to be subducted beneath North, Central and South America. To the south of the Pacific-Antarctic Ridge is the Antarctic plate to which new oceanic crust is being added on almost all its boundaries. In the west and southwest Pacific, an array of microplates buffers movement between the Pacific and the Australian and Eurasian plates, from New Zealand in the south to Taiwan in the north. This has yielded a complex series of short-lived mid-ocean spreading centres, plate rotations and concomitant subduction.

Due primarily to plate creation at the EPR, a large part of the Pacific Ocean margin consists of a series of subduction zones where the Pacific, Cocos and Nazca plates plunge into the Earth's asthenosphere. Associated andesitic volcanism along most of the western coastline of the Americas has occurred on the adjoining continental lithosphere, but from the Aleutians to New Zealand in the western Pacific it produced island arcs. Exceptions are where plates move horizontally past each other, resulting in strike-slip faulting, such as along the San Andreas Fault in California and the Alpine Fault in New Zealand.

2. Ancient origins of the Pacific Ocean

The origins of what now comprises the Pacific Ocean extend back 750 Ma to the rifting of the Proterozoic continent, Rodinia. This continent split into two creating the Panthalassic Ocean, the ancient predecessor to the Pacific Ocean. This may have been triggered by the appearance of a Pacific super plume ( Taira 2001). By 400 Ma, the supercontinent of Pangea began to form, centred on the Equator and extending from the North to the South Poles. It separated the Palaeo-Tethys Ocean to the east from the Panthalassic Ocean to the west.

By 180 Ma the first signs of break-up of Pangea were heralded by rifting that first formed the central Atlantic Ocean. By 167 Ma, sea floor spreading to the west of Pangea formed ocean floor that we see today as the oldest ocean floor of the Pacific plate ( Koppers et al. 2003). This new sea floor emanated from a Y-shaped ancestral EPR and its extensions, creating three major oceanic plates named clockwise from the north, the Kula, Farallon and Pacific. Subsequently, the spreading ridges forming the V of the Y moved northwards and eastwards to be subducted beneath the adjoining continental lithosphere of the North American plate.

By 140 Ma, Gondwana (the southern portion of Pangea) had begun to fragment leading to India separating from Madagascar to form the Indian Ocean. The western coastline of South America is now a zone of convergence with the Pacific Ocean, as was the contiguous coast of east Australia-Antarctica. The Tethys Ocean separated eastern Gondwana from eastern Laurasia.

At 50 Ma, the Earth was beginning to attain its current form and the arrangement of oceans and continents with which we are familiar with today. By this time, India had begun to collide with Asia, closing the Tethys Ocean and beginning the formation of the Himalayan Mountains and the Tibetan Plateau. At ca 33.5 Ma, Australia finally separated from Antarctica and moved northwards to its present position ( Exon et al. 2001). Over this time, the Pacific plate expanded to finally occupy two-thirds of the current Pacific Ocean. East of the EPR, the Farallon plate moved eastwards until a portion of the spreading ridge reached California. This represented the first contact of the Pacific plate with the North American plate, and relative movement between them was predominantly transcurrent (strike-slip) in the form of the San Andreas Fault. The fragment of the Farallon plate to the north became the Juan de Fuca or Gorda plate, while the fragment to the south broke into two, forming the Cocos and Nazca plates. The Kula plate to the north was subducted northwards beneath Alaska and no longer existed by 20 Ma. For a more detailed account of these relative plate movements, see the Paleomap Project site at www.scotese.com.

Palaeomagnetic stratigraphy and deep-sea drill cores support this model by demonstrating the progressive increasing age of sea floor away from the EPR. The fast spreading rate means there was insufficient time for volcanic islands to be built along the EPR axis, so all the volcanics are submarine. This contrasts with slower sea-floor spreading centres in other oceans, such as the Mid-Atlantic Ridge that rises above sea level in Iceland.

3. Island origins

We distinguish five major processes of island formation in the Pacific as follows.

1. Formation of volcanic island chains and seamounts. Wilson (1963) first proposed that islands of the Hawaiian chain could be explained by lithosphere moving over a stationary hot spot in the mantle. Each island could have formed as basaltic magmas rose through the lithosphere to the surface, forming active large shield volcanoes. As the plates moved, so alignments of extinct volcanic islands record the direction and timing of this movement with respect to a reference frame of stationary hot spots (see the electronic supplementary material). Morgan ( 1971, 1972) proposed that hot spots were continually supplied by a plume from the deep mantle. This explanation is now being challenged and a number of alternative hypotheses proposed. One suggests that volcanic island chains are formed along a pre-existing or propagating fracture in a lithospheric plate due to stresses transmitted from the plate margins (Smith 2003, 2004; Natland & Winterer 2005). The en echelon arrangement of volcanic ridges along the Pukapuka Seamount Chain ( Winterer & Sandwell 1987; Sandwell et al. 1995) supports this tensional origin. The volcanic chain of the Line Islands also shows no progressive ages along its length, supporting a synchronous ca 8-Ma origin consistent with a mechanism of lithospheric extension ( Davis et al. 2002). Another is that the volcanic chains might be caused by warps and cracks caused by uneven thermal contraction of the cooling lithosphere ( Sandwell & Fiialko 2004; Ballmer et al. 2007). Courtillot et al. (2003) suggested that hot spots may result from three separate mechanisms (i) a deep lower mantle/outer core source, (ii) the transition zone between the upper and lower mantles or (iii) from within the upper mantle immediately beneath the lithosphere.

2. As volcanic islands move away from their birthplace, so the oceanic crust becomes progressively colder and denser, subsiding from the level of its formation. In this manner, each volcano gradually sinks as it moves farther from its point of origin. In tropical waters coral growth forms fringing reefs, and further subsidence leads to the formation of atolls built on the underlying subsided volcanic edifices, as first postulated by Darwin (1890). These stages are superbly displayed in the Cook Islands between Rarotonga (fringing reef), Aitutaki (atoll with emergent volcanic peak at northern end) and Palmerston (complete coral atoll). Eventually, the volcanic edifice sinks below sea level to progressively greater depths to form a seamount or guyot.

3. Flexing of the lithospheric plate in some regions may lead to uplift. In some circumstances, this is due to seamount loading of the oceanic lithosphere creating an annular moat and surrounding arch ( Lambeck 1981). At scattered locations throughout the South Pacific, coral reefs that once grew in the marine environment above an extinct volcano have been uplifted above sea level. Subsequent erosion by the sea has resulted in steep coral cliffs circumscribing the islands, colloquially known as 'Makatea'. Such islands are composed entirely of coralline limestone, and classic examples include Niue (maximum height of 65 m), Henderson Island (at 30 m) and Makatea (113 m). Rennell Island in the Solomon archipelago is the largest raised coral atoll in the world, being surrounded by 120-150 m high cliffs.

4. Owing to past and present plate movements, fragments of continental crust have been rotated away from nearby land masses to now occupy isolated positions in the Pacific. The largest of these is Zealandia ( Mortimer 2004), displaced eastwards from Gondwana between 83 and 54 Ma by mid-ocean spreading of the Tasman Sea. Now largely submerged, Zealandia protrudes above sea level as the islands of New Zealand, the Chatham Islands and New Caledonia. Though formed from continental crust, these islands result from local tectonic activity but have geological histories extending back prior to 40 Ma, in marked contrast to the short-lived volcanic islands. Other islands are likely to have existed in the past, and terrestrial plant fossils dredged from a seamount west of the Three Kings Ridge suggest that a large island existed there between 38 and 21 Ma ( Meffre et al. 2006).

5. Formation of island arcs on the Pacific margins, mostly due to subduction of the Pacific Plate and its now extinct contemporaries (in particular the Kula and Izanagi plates). As the lithosphere descends into the mantle, the upper layers release water that reduces the melting point of the surrounding mantle. Melting generates magma that rises into the overlying lithosphere and may be emplaced either as intrusions or be extruded from the crust as volcanics. The formation of volcanic island arcs is most noticeable in the northern and western Pacific, creating the Aleutian, Japan-Kuril and Tonga-Kermadec arcs. In the western Aleutians, little or no convergence is occurring today so the margin is dominantly strike-slip, but in the central and eastern Aleutians convergence reached 100 mm yr −1 between 35 and 55 Ma, decreasing to 40-70 mm yr −1 since 15 Ma ( Sdrolias & Müller 2006). The Japan-Kuril Arc has been a subduction zone since at least Cretaceous times with convergence ranging from 100 mm yr −1 in the south to 80 mm yr −1 in the north ( Sdrloias & Müller 2006). The Tonga-Kermadec subduction zone was probably initiated ca 45 Ma and shows high convergence rates of 130-240 mm yr −1 in its northern half, declining to 20-60 mm yr −1 in its southern half ( Sdrolias & Müller 2006).

Occasional large outpourings of basaltic lavas in submarine settings have also contributed to the plate geology ( Kroenke 1996). The most notable is the Ontong Java Plateau, north of the Solomon Islands, which at 60 million km ³ forms the most voluminous large igneous province on Earth ( Gladczenko et al. 1997). Such outpourings may represent the head of deep mantle plumes that initiate volcanic chains of islands. Although these large igneous provinces do not directly form islands, where they are carried to a plate boundary, they may indirectly lead to uplift and island formation on an adjoining plate.

In addition to the geological construction of islands, a number of other independent processes influence island formation-especially those associated with globally fluctuating sea levels during Quaternary time. During cool periods (the glaciations), when polar ice caps expanded, and ice sheets developed primarily on Northern Hemisphere continents, global sea level dropped to approximately 120 m below the present ( Fairbanks 1989). This had the effect of linking islands that were surrounded by shallow seas (). For example, all the islands of the Chatham group would have formed a single large terrestrial island at least thrice larger than the present. During warm periods (the interglacials), when sea level was approximately similar in height to the present, the lower land of the 'glacial islands' became inundated by the sea (marine transgression) to isolate the higher altitude land as multiple, smaller islands. Given that glacial phases were more protracted (41-100 Ka) than interglacials (approx. 20 Ka), low glacial sea levels are likely to have significantly influenced island biodiversity.

During interglacials and in the presence of copious supplies of sediment, construction of land bridges (often in the form of sand bars or aeolian sand dunes) may have joined islands together. A classic example is the Aupori Peninsula in Northland, New Zealand, which formed in the last 0.5 Ma and provided a persistent terrestrial link between the former island at the northern tip of New Zealand to the land farther south. Volcanism can also create land bridges between islands, as has occurred on the Auckland isthmus (New Zealand), where basaltic lavas joined the former island of Northland to the North Island in Late Quaternary time. Tectonic uplift also has the potential to join, separate (e.g. around Scinde Island in the 1931 Napier earthquake, New Zealand) or enlarge existing islands, more particularly in the plate boundary regions of the Pacific. Tectonic subsidence can cause total submergence of islands and thus cause local biotic extinctions, e.g. the Louisville Seamounts.

4. The Pacific linear volcanic chains

A dominant feature on all bathymetric maps of the Pacific Ocean is the linear arrangement of volcanic edifices (volcanic islands and submarine seamounts) ascribed to either plumes derived from the Earth's core/mantle boundary region ('primary plumes'), or plumes derived from the upper/lower mantle transition zone, piercing their way upwards through the moving lithosphere, or to tensional fractures within the lithospheric plate allowing the release of magma from the asthenosphere/lithosphere boundary region. If the hot spot hypothesis is to be preferred, then one must also factor in that hot spots may move or be stationary over geological time ( Gordon & Cape 1981; Tarduno et al. 2003, 2007; Parés & Moore 2005).

The Pacific plate is usually considered to host 14 hot spots, but Courtillot et al. (2003) argued only three are deep-source primary plumes and only two of the three show clear evidence of their beginnings in an oceanic plateau. These are: the Hawaii-Emperor Seamount Chain (although this chain's origins are lost by subduction in the Aleutian Trench); Louisville; and Easter Island.

Of the other volcanic island chains and seamounts, another two, the Marquesas and Galápagos, have insufficient information yet available to confirm a deep mantle ('primary plume') origin.

A further eight show short tracks (less than 40 Ma) that cannot be traced to an ocean plateau. These are interpreted as hot spots related to plumes originating from the base of the upper mantle. These comprise: Foundation; Macdonald (in the Cook-Austral chain); Pitcairn-Gambier; Rarotonga; Rurutu or Raivavae; Arago; Society; and Samoa.

Recently, Wessel & Kroenke (2007) have drawn attention to the fact that all of these lineaments appear restricted to the Samoa-French Polynesia region of the Pacific, and suggest that they have resulted from a long-lasting tensile stress field in this part of the Pacific plate caused by the subducting lithosphere ('slab pull') along the western Pacific margin.

Three other questionable Pacific hot spots, Kodiak-Bowie, Cobb and Caroline, are in such close proximity to subduction zones that their prior history has been lost. Older hot spot trails in the western Pacific probably date from 70 to 140 Ma, some of which may once have been islands that have since subsided.

The Society Islands, Galápagos Islands and Hawaiian Islands are discussed in detail later in this paper, hence here only the history of the other linear volcanic chains is briefly discussed. The Louisville Ridge is a 4300 km submarine chain of seamounts extending from the Louisville hot spot identified at 51°30′ S, 141°00′ W ( Raymond et al. 2000) to the Tonga-Kermadec Trench, where it is being subducted to the west. The youngest volcanics are dated from a seamount at 50°26′ S, 139°09′ W as 1.11 Ma ( Koppers et al. 2004). The chain comprises over 60 volcanoes spaced less than 100 km apart. Significant from the perspective of evolution on islands, there is evidence that 40 of these seamounts (all formed prior to 12 Ma) grew above sea level and were subsequently planed by marine erosion to form coral-free guyots. During the Cenozoic, volcano building was remarkably constant at 3-4×10 ³ km ³ Myr −1 , until 20 Ma when the hot spot activity declined sharply ( Lonsdale 1988). Recent palaeomagnetic studies have cast doubt on this hot spot being responsible for the formation of the Ontong Java Plateau in the Early Cretaceous ( Riisager et al. 2003).

The Easter hot spot lies close to Rapa Nui (Easter Island), an oceanic intraplate volcanic island located approximately 350 km east of the fast spreading EPR. Their close proximity may have initiated the large-scale rift propagation that created the Easter Island microplate ca 4.5 Ma ( Hagen et al. 1990). There is a suggestion that this hot spot has generated two volcanic chains, one on each of the Pacific and Nazca plates. The principal volcanic chain (Easter Seamount Chain) extends from Pukao Seamount, through Easter Island and the Sala y Gomez and Nazca Ridges to the islands of San Felix and San Ambrosio, off the coast of Chile ( Bonatti et al. 1977). A similar alignment to the west on the Pacific plate may be responsible for the Tuamotu Islands ( Clouard & Bonneville 2001) and possibly the Mid-Pacific Mountains.

The Marquesas Archipelago is the northernmost linear volcanic chain in French Polynesia. It comprises eight main islands and a few islets and seamounts formed between 5.5 and 0.4 Ma ( Legendre et al. 2006). Crough & Jarrard (1981) considered the Marquesas lineament to extend farther eastwards to the Line Islands, thus representing the track of a Marquesas hot spot over 40 Ma. Clouard & Bonneville (2001) went further and proposed that the hot spot originated at the time of the emplacement of the Hess Ridge and Shatsky Rise. The most recent interpretation of the chain suggests that it was formed by Pacific plate movement of 105 mm yr −1 in a northeast direction over a shallow mantle plume ( Legendre et al. 2006).

The Foundation Seamounts form a 1900 km long northeast-southwest-trending chain north of the Austral Islands. The Foundation hot spot near 38° S, 111° W ( Mammerickx 1992; Devey et al. 1997) is close to the Pacific-Antarctic Ridge. Volcano ages increase progressively westwards to 21 Ma ( O'Connor et al. 1998) and probably then follow the Ngatemato chain dated at 30 Ma ( Clouard & Bonneville 2001). It appears some of the seamounts are currently so shallow that they may have once emerged above the sea surface. Each of these volcanic edifices probably represents ca 1 million years of construction ( Maia et al. 2005).

The Macdonald hot spot is located in the southeastern Austral Islands where at 29° S, 140° W, the active Macdonald Seamount with a basal diameter of 45 km rises 3760 m above the surrounding sea floor. By 1987, it was just 39 m below sea level ( Stoffers et al. 1989). The Macdonald hot spot trail can be traced back to Mangaia in the Cook Islands, which is dated at 19 Ma.

The Pitcairn-Gambier volcanic chain appears to have originated from hot spot volcanism on the Farallon plate at ca 25 Ma but the Pitcairn hot spot is now located on the Pacific plate, approximately 80 km east of Pitcairn Island. One of the submarine peaks, named Adams, reaches to within 20 m of sea level and is likely to have been exposed as an island during the Last Glacial Maximum. The hot spot appears to have been responsible for the islands extending from Pitcairn to the Gambier Islands in French Polynesia, to Mururoa, and then the Duke of Gloucester Islands in the Tuamotu Archipelago ( Hekinian et al. 2003).

The Rarotonga hot spot is probably young, apparently having produced only Rarotonga Island ( Clouard & Bonneville 2001), dated between 1.1 and 2.3 Ma ( Thompson et al. 1998).

A volcanic chain extending from Raivavae Island (dated at 6.5 Ma) to Rurutu Island and nearby seamounts (dated at 12 Ma) in the Austral Islands has been recognized as the 'Raivavae hot spot track' ( Bonneville et al. 2006) or Rurutu hot spot ( Clouard & Bonneville 2001). A separate track nearby, extending from Arago Seamount (dated at 0.2 Ma) southeast of Rurutu Island to Atiu Island (dated at 8 Ma) has been recognized as the 'Arago hot spot track' ( Bonneville et al. 2006).

The Samoa hot spot seems to have existed for at least 23 million years and was responsible for the five major islands of Samoa as well as a lineament of submarine seamounts and banks extending 1300 km west from Savai'i ( Natland 1980; Clouard & Bonneville 2001; Hart et al. 2004). An active submarine volcano, Vailulu'u Seamount, approximately 30 km east of Ta'u, appears to mark the current location of the Samoa hot spot. Ta'u has a youthful uneroded shield morphology, while the islands to the west (Savai'i dated at up to 5.21 Ma, Koppers et al. 2006; Upolu dated at 3.2-1.4 Ma; and Tutuila dated at 1.53-1.0 Ma, Natland 2003) demonstrate various stages of advanced erosion ( Hart et al. 2004). An isolated volcano (Machias Seamount), south of Upolu and adjacent to the Tonga Trench, has been dated at 0.97 Ma ( Hawkins & Natland 1975). Samples dredged from the summit appear to have been deposited in a subaerial environment, suggesting that this structure has subsided approximately 700 m in less than 1 million years ( Natland 2003).

5. Exemplars of archipelago geology

This volume brings together papers on the biology of 10 archipelagos in the Pacific and we discuss the geology of these in further detail. These archipelagos comprise the full range of geophysical attributes and geological histories observed in the Pacific. The diversity in size, position, island number and mode of the formation of archipelagos across the Pacific Ocean is extraordinary. For instance, the largest, Japan and New Zealand, are each between six and four times bigger than all the other islands combined (). Japan and New Zealand are also further from the Equator (more than 30°) than all others and with the Bonin Islands are the only non-tropical islands. Of all the island groups, Hawaii reaches the greatest altitude, with the twin peaks of Mauna Kea at 4205 m and Mauna Loa at 4168 m. This and their tropical position provide these islands with the greatest range of climatic zones and associated vegetational communities. On the other hand, the considerable latitudinal range in Japan and New Zealand and their complex physiographies also provide a wide range of climate zones and vegetational biomes. With the exception of Japan and New Zealand, freshwater lakes are few and very small on most of the islands; the exception is the large brackish water lake on Rennell Island (). In Palau, some lakes in the karst landscapes close to the sea actually contain salt water.

Table 1

With approximately 3000 islands, the Japanese archipelago outnumbers all the other exemplar archipelagos, with Fiji comprising the second largest number of islands (). Japan has the longest coastline at approximately 30 000 km, followed by New Zealand at 18 000 km. Apart from these, it is the Solomon archipelago that has the next longest coastline (approx. 6000 km). Some archipelagos comprise islands spread over wide tracts of the Pacific Ocean, particularly where territorial claims are exercised over remote islands (such as Rotuma in Fiji, Kure Atoll in Hawaii and Minami-jima in Japan). Of these exemplars, the Society Islands at 5800 km from Australia are the most distant from a continental landmass ().

(a) Japan

Japan has four main islands, from Hokkaido in the north, to Honshu, Shikoku and Kyushu in the south (sometimes called the 'Home Islands' see ), and over 6000 smaller islands spread across the northwest Pacific. It is the largest of the Pacific archipelagos, extending 3500 km. The country is mountainous (73%) and dominated by two chains of andesitic stratovolcanoes, including Mt Fuji (Fujisan), the highest peak at 3776 m. Very little flat area exists and most hill slopes are cultivated for food production. Rivers are generally short with steep channel slopes until they deposit their sediment on the coastal alluvial plains. The climate ranges from cool temperate in the north to subtropical in the south, but it is generally rainy with high humidity. Japan's territorial waters extend over 3000 km ² of ocean, with the remotest island, Minami Torishima, located 1848 km southeast of Tokyo.

The geological history of Japan has been dominated by subduction of the Pacific plate from the east beneath the Eurasian plate to the west. In the last 20 million years, the Philippine Sea (PS) Plate advanced northwards to form the plate boundary and began subducting northwestwards beneath southern Japan. Only within the last 15 million years has sea floor spreading in the Sea of Japan separated Japan from the Eurasian plate. Recent GPS measurements have suggested that the main islands of Japan are sited on two independent plates separated from the Eurasian plate. The first is the Amur (or Amurian) plate extending from Lake Baikal in the west to southern Honshu and the islands of Kyushu and Shikoku in the east. Farther to the east and north is the Okhotsk plate (formerly considered part of the North American plate), embracing northern Honshu, Hokkaido, the Sakhalin Peninsula and Kamchatka ( Bird 2003). The Ryukyu Islands to the south of Kyushu are now regarded as being on a separate, narrow miniplate-the Okinawa plate.

The older sedimentary and metamorphic basement rocks of Japan lie to the west of southern Honshu. Since Mesozoic times, the Japanese arc has progressively increased in width by the addition of accretionary complexes above the subduction zone. Concomitant granitic plutonism accompanied this process from Cretaceous to Miocene times. Currently, the country is subject to frequent earthquakes (approx. 1500 felt earthquakes each year) and tsunamis. Of the 200 volcanoes in Japan, 60 are active.

(b) Izu-Bonin-Volcano Island

The Izu-Bonin-Volcano Island arc () is an archipelago extending for approximately 1000 km south of Tokyo Bay. The Bonin or Ogasawara-shoto Islands are approximately 800 km from the coast of Japan and cover 104 km ² (). Most of the Bonin Islands have steep shorelines, often with 50-100 m high sea cliffs, but some of the islands are fringed with coral reefs and a number of beaches. Only two of 27 islands are inhabited-Chichijima-rettō and Hahajima-rettō.

Between 50 and 40 Ma, much of a now extinct North New Guinea (NNG) plate was consumed by a subduction zone along its northern margin, as well as by the Eurasian plate to the northwest ( Hall 1997). A final result of this process was the subduction of the NNG-Pacific ridge, which caused massive extension in the Izu-Bonin-Mariana forearc, and initiation of the subduction system to its east ( Sdrolias & Müller 2006). The resultant volcanics that form the Bonin Islands of today are so distinctive geochemically; being enriched in magnesium, chromium and silicon, they are named boninites.

By 40 Ma, the Pacific plate was being subducted westwards beneath the Bonin Islands, and further Bonin Island volcanics were then formed along the northern boundary of the PS plate. By 30 Ma, Bonin Island volcanism ceased with rifting beginning between the Izu-Bonin arc and the Kyushu-Palau ridge to the west, leading to opening of the Parece Vela basin that continued until 15 Ma ( Sdrolias et al. 2004).

(c) Palau (Belau)

The Palau archipelago comprises 12 inhabited islands and over 700 small islands and islets located 750 km east of The Philippines and north of the Equator (). They total 488 km ² land area and stretch over 700 km of ocean. There is a great diversity of landforms and substrates for such a small area. The archipelago can be subdivided into four geological types. The volcanic islands Babeldaob, Ngerekebesang (also known as Arakabesan, Meiuns or Meyungs), Ngemelachel (or Malakal) and the western part of Oreor (or Koror) comprise most of the land area. Seven reefs and atoll islands are located north and northeast of Belilou (or Peleliu). The southwestern islands are a combination of low platform islands and atolls, while the 300 central and southern islands form steep coralline limestone rock islands. Substantial phosphate reserves were mined during the German and Japanese administrations.

Throughout the year the climate is hot, tropical and humid. Rainfall averages 3700 mm per year, ranging from 3150 to 4400 mm, with February to April the driest and the mean daily temperature is 27°C with a mean diurnal range of 7°C ( Bureau of Agriculture 2003). Freshwater is limited, with only one sustained stream flow on the large volcanic island of Babeldaob. Freshwater lenses are also found beneath some of the atolls ( www.sopac.org). Palau has a flora that is richer than any other area of Micronesia, with a large number of endemic species, the combined result of proximity to Asia and isolation ( Canfield 1981).

The main island of Babeldaob (78% of the total land area) comprises in part old-weathered continental rocks that have been the source of some gold. Between 50 and 27 Ma, the Kyushu-Palau Ridge was a very active volcanic arc ( Sdrolias et al. 2004) formed above the westward subducting Pacific plate. High-magnesium boninites and island arc tholeites were produced during Late Eocene time by rapid magma production. The Kyushu-Palau Ridge subsequently split off from the Bonin Islands ca 30 Ma, by sea-floor spreading of the Parece Vela basin. In Palau, the volcanics are dated between 37.7 and 20.1 Ma ( Kobayashi 2000). They are in turn overlain by Mid-Oligocene limestone oozes, indicative of subsequent subsidence. Rotation of the PS plate gradually led to a convergent plate boundary with the Caroline plate to the southeast, with subsequent uplift of the islands raising Miocene limestones to 220 m asl, forming a limestone cap ( Canfield 1981; Kobayashi 2000) with surrounding raised coral platforms and reefs. A 4000-year-old limestone on Oreor has been subsequently uplifted 2 m, i.e. current average rate of uplift is 0.5 mm yr −1 ( Kobayashi 2000).

(d) The Solomon archipelago

This archipelago forms a double chain of islands aligned northwest-southeast across 1300 km of the western Pacific Ocean, comprising the nation of the Solomon Islands and the adjoining islands of Bougainville and Buka in Papua New Guinea. There are seven major Solomon Islands comprising one alignment to the south of Vella Lavella, New Georgia, Guadalcanal and Makira (also known as San Cristobal) and a second alignment to the north of Choiseul, Santa Isabel and Malaita. The remote island of Rennell located approximately 200 km south of Guadalcanal is a raised coral limestone with a large brackish water lake (Te Nggano), reputedly the largest freshwater lake in the 'insular' Pacific. About a further 340 smaller islands are populated. The islands are bounded to the northeast and south by deep oceanic trenches, while to the north is the voluminous submarine Ontong Java Plateau. Most of the inland terrain of the Solomon archipelago is covered with dense tropical rainforest. The highest points are Mt Makarakomburu on Guadalcanal at 2447 m in the Solomon Islands and Mt Balbi at 2715 m on Bougainville Island. The annual temperature is fairly consistent between 28 and 30°C; the mean annual rainfall at the capital Honiara is 2800 mm.

The geological history of the Solomon arc is complex having formed at the southwestern boundary of the Pacific plate in contact with the Australian plate, except at the western end where the Woodlark and Solomon Sea plates are subducted to the north. In Cretaceous times, the Pacific plate was subducted southwards in this region ( Schellart et al. 2006). From 55 to 40 Ma, the Australian plate was also being subducted northwards ( Kroenke 1996). Approximately 25-20 Ma, the Ontong Java Plateau on the Pacific plate first made contact with the arc and since 4 Ma has forcefully collided, leading to obduction ( Petterson et al. 1999).

The geology of the Solomons is a collage of geological units that have been thrust together during this complex tectonic history. The north coast of Santa Isabel, and all of Malaita and Ulawa, represents obducted basalt flows and sedimentary cover, geochemically identical to the Ontong Java Plateau ( Petterson et al. 1999). A second geological unit comprising basaltic flows, ultrabasic intrusions and overlying sediments, typical of a mid-ocean spreading centre origin, forms the islands of Choiseul and Guadalcanal ( Petterson et al. 1999). A third unit showing hybrid characteristics of the above two occurs on San Cristobal. Subsequent arc volcanics were emplaced in two discrete phases. The first phase lasted from 62 to 24 Ma, and the second is responsible for volcanic activity from 7 Ma to the present day ( Petterson et al. 1999). Currently, there are five active volcanoes in the Solomon arc: the shallow submarine volcano Kavachi, the stratovolcano island of Savo, Tinakula in the Santa Cruz Islands, the fumarolic volcanic island of Simbo and Bagana volcano on Bougainville.

Construction of the islands of Bougainville and its neighbour Buka began as a submarine volcanic pile ca 45 Ma ( Davies 2005). It is not clear when the islands became emergent, but a second construction phase began ca 10 Ma when subduction commenced from the south. Within the older volcanic rocks are coarse-grained intrusives of granodiorite and diorite, which contain low-grade copper, gold and silver mineralization ( Davies 2005). The Panguna copper mine, with proven ore reserves in excess of 944 million tonnes, was worked between 1972 and 1988.

(e) Fiji

The Fiji group of islands has a total land area of 18 270 km ² (). Of the 332 islands in the group, approximately 110 are inhabited, with an additional 522 uninhabited islets (). The two largest islands are Viti Levu (10 642 km ² and 57% of the nation's land area), where the capital Suva with a population of 200 000 is located, and Vanua Levu (5807 km ²). Both islands are mountainous with peaks rising to 1300 m. This results in a wet windward southeastern side that was originally covered in dense tropical rainforest, and a dry-season leeward western side, highly favourable for crops such as sugarcane. The third largest island is Taveuni, renowned for its rich volcanic soils. Approximately 1000 coral reefs surround the islands.

The geological history of Fiji is complex owing to its proximity to the Australian-Pacific plate boundary. The oldest rocks in Fiji are island-arc volcanics of Late Eocene age formed by westwards subduction of the Pacific plate beneath the Australian plate along the Vitiaz arc. These strata are now found in western Viti Levu. Their subsequent uplift allowed deposition of shallow-water limestones around them. After 28 Ma relative movement between the plates changed to a more oblique convergence and led to another major suite of volcanic islands and sedimentary basins. These strata are now exposed in southern Viti Levu, and in the Yasawa and Mamanuca Islands. To the north, coral reef limestones accumulated. During the Middle to Late Miocene, plutonic intrusions were emplaced and uplift produced the first significant land mass, mostly Viti Levu, at this time. Approximately 12 Ma, the configuration of the plate boundary changed with break-up of the Vitiaz Trench, and establishment of a major transform boundary to the north, the Fiji Fracture Zone. Approximately 10 Ma spreading was initiated in the North Fiji Basin, and Viti Levu became attached to the Pacific plate. Just before 7 Ma, Vanua Levu was formed and rotated clockwise as the Central North Fiji Basin triple junction developed ( Kroenke 1996). Since 7 Ma Fiji has rotated anticlockwise with the opening up of the North Fiji Basin, and strike-slip faulting takes up the relative movement to the north of Vanua Levu. Taveuni (437 km ²) is a basaltic volcanic island with a northeast-southwest lineament of over 150 Quaternary vents along its 40 km length. At least 2.7 km ² of magma has been erupted from over 100 events on Taveuni during the Holocene ( Cronin & Neall 2001).

(f) New Caledonia

New Caledonia comprises the main island (Grande Terre), the Isle of Pines to the south, the Loyalty Islands to the east (Maré, Lifou, Tiga and Ouvéa) and the Belep Archipelago to the northwest (). Grand Terre is the third largest island in the southwest Pacific, after Papua New Guinea and New Zealand. All the islands comprise a total land area of 18 575 km ² (). Grande Terre is surrounded by a 1600 km long coral reef, forming the largest lagoon in the world (16 000 km ²). Proximity of the reef to the coast varies from a few kms to 65 km, the lagoon having an average depth of 40 m. A chain of mountains (Chaine Centrale) forms a backbone to Grand Terre, dividing the island into a humid east coast and a drier west coast. The highest peak is Mt Panié at 1629 m.

Grand Terre is a fragment of continental crust (Zealandia) that rifted northeastwards away from Gondwana in Late Cretaceous times, ca 65 Ma. What is now the current island reached its present position ca 50 Ma. It then attained its current geological configuration ca 45 Ma when the Loyalty Arc collided with what is now New Caledonia between 38 and 33 Ma ( Schellart et al. 2006). This convergence culminated in obduction from the northeast, emplacing a 2 km thick sequence of ophiolites; sections of previous basaltic ocean floor and entrained sediments ( Aitchison et al. 1995). Subsequent uplift and erosion has reduced this to approximately one-third (5500 km ²) of the total original land area. These rocks are high in iron and magnesium (ultramafics) and give rise to approximately 25 per cent of the world's known nickel resources and unusual red soils enriched in nickel, chromium, cobalt and manganese. The soils have had a profound influence on the flora that has adapted to these low nitrogen, phosphorus, potassium and calcium conditions ( Jaffré et al. 1987). Recent provenance studies of the Goa N'Doro Formation have suggested that fluvial aggradation on an emergent landmass (New Caledonia) had begun by Oligocene time ( Chardon & Chevillotte 2006). Subsequent Quaternary uplift has resulted in formation of the emergent atolls of the Loyalty Islands ( Dubois et al. 1974, Paris 1981).

(g) New Zealand

New Zealand consists of two large islands, North Island (113 729 km ²) and South Island (150 437 km ²), and two smaller islands, Stewart Island (1680 km ²) and the Chatham Islands (970 km ²) (). There are approximately 700 other small islands and islets, mostly within 50 km of the main islands. The islands extend across 1500 km of ocean from 34° to 47° south (). The highest point is Mt Cook (Aoraki) in the South Island at 3754 m. These islands developed on part of an extensive submarine plateau composed of continental crust (collectively named Zealandia) totalling 1.7 million km ², an extension of the islands stretching from the Campbell Plateau to the southeast, and the Chatham Rise in the east, to the Challenger Plateau to the west and New Caledonia in the north.

Zealandia began to separate from Gondwana ca 90 Ma with the southernmost portions rotating anticlockwise about a pole of rotation to the north of the country ( Mortimer 2004). Sea-floor spreading began ca 83 Ma and propagated northwards into the Coral Sea by 62 Ma ( Gaina et al. 1998). Eventually, the northernmost parts separated to create the Tasman Sea, until 52 Ma when sea-floor spreading ceased ( Schellart et al. 2006).

By this time, Zealandia was gradually subsiding, as a marine transgression covered much of the region that would later become New Zealand, depositing widespread limestone, calcareous sandstone and siltstone and greensand. Whether this submergence was complete is not known though it has long been argued that some islands persisted on which the Zealandian elements of New Zealand's flora and fauna survived ( Fleming 1962). However, the direct geological evidence for persistent land is equivocal ( Campbell & Hutching 2007; Landis et al. 2008)

Australia then began to separate from Antarctica by new sea floor spreading along the Indian-Antarctic Ridge. This eventually subjected the New Zealand region to major lateral and oblique compressive movements, beginning ca 30 Ma, that have sliced through the South Island to form the Australian-Pacific plate boundary ( Kamp 1986; King 2000). This marks the beginning of the formation of New Zealand we know today. Approximately 470 km of dextral horizontal movement along the Alpine Fault is recorded over this time period. Accelerated oblique convergence between the Australian and Pacific plates then led to the subsequent deformation of the New Zealand region and the uplift of the Southern Alps since the onset of the Pliocene (5.3 Ma) ( Kamp et al. 1989; Whitehouse & Pearce 1992). At the northern end of the South Island, numerous faults splay through Marlborough to link the plate boundary to the Hikurangi Trough, east of the North Island. Rotation of a miniplate forming the eastern North Island has probably been responsible for the active continental rifting of the Taupo Volcanic Zone (TVZ) and its attendant rhyolitic and andesitic volcanism in the last 2 million years ( Wallace et al. 2004). Over 10 000 km ³ of dominantly rhyolitic magma has been erupted from the TVZ in the last 1 million years ( Wilson et al. 1984).

Intraplate volcanism formed the Sub-Antarctic Islands to the south of mainland New Zealand ( Quilty 2007), in the order: the Auckland Islands (25-11 Ma), followed by Campbell Island (11-6 Ma) and lastly the Antipodes (5 to less than 1 Ma) ( Gamble & Morris 1989). The Chatham Islands have probably emerged in the last 4 million years by as yet unexplained tectonic uplift on the far eastern margin of Zealandia ( Campbell et al. 1993).

(h) Society Islands

The Society Islands are the best known of the five island groups comprising French Polynesia. The islands are spread across 720 km of the Pacific Ocean and comprise two groups-the Windward and Leeward Islands. In total, the land area is 1680 km ² with the main island of Tahiti (1042 km ²) being the largest ().

The Windward Islands in the east comprise Tahiti on which the main population centre of Papeete is located, Moorea (132 km ²), steep-sided Mehetia (all volcanic) and the atoll Tetiaroa. The Leeward Islands in the west comprise the mountainous volcanic islands of Ra'iatea (238 km ²), Taha'a (91 km ²), Huahine (74 km ²) and Bora Bora (22 km ²) and the atolls of Maupiti, Maiao, Maupihaa, Tupai, Manuae and Motu One. The Society Islands are thought to have originated from a hot spot located near the island of Mehetia, 110 km east of Tahiti ( Devey et al. 1990). The chain exhibits an age progression to the west from Mehetia (less than 1 Ma) to Tahiti (0.6-1.2 Ma), Moorea (1.5-2.0 Ma) Bora Bora (3.1-3.5 Ma) and Maupiti (3.9-4.5 Ma) ( Blais et al. 2002; Yamamoto et al. 2002; Uto et al. 2007), consistent with a plate motion of 110 mm yr −1. The climate is tropical with a mean annual temperature of 26°C and mean annual rainfall from 1700 mm near sea level to 8000 mm around the high mountain peaks ( www.oceandots.com).

(i) Galápagos Islands

The Galápagos Islands (or Archipelago of Colon) lie on the Equator, 1000 km west of South America. They comprise 13 main islands, and 48 smaller islands and islets forming a total land area of 7880 km ² within a geographical area of 45 000 km ² (). The largest island is Isabela, one of the two youngest, making up more than half the total land area at 4855 km ². The summit of Volcan Wolf forms the highest point at 1701 m. With the exception of Isabela, all the other islands represent single shield volcanoes in various stages of marine erosion. Isabela comprises six shield volcanoes, Sierra Negra erupting in October 2005 ( Geist et al. 2006).

The westernmost islands, Fernandina and Isabela, are regarded as representing the current location of the Galápagos hot spot. The oldest exposed rocks date from only 3 Ma, but seamounts on the Cocos Ridge on the Cocos plate, and the Carnegie Ridge on the Nazca plate, extend back to 14 Ma and may have been subaerial islands ( Christie et al. 1992; Werner et al. 1999). Palaeomagnetic and geochemical data demonstrate a complex interaction over geological time between the hot spot and the nearby Cocos-Nazca spreading centre, with the hot spot varying from being to the south (19.5-14.5 Ma) to the north (14.5-12 Ma), to being coincident (11-12 Ma) ( Werner et al. 2003). Furthermore, Hoernle et al. (2002) suggested igneous complexes along the Pacific margin of Costa Rica and Panama represent volcanics emplaced by the Galápagos hot spot between 20 and 71 Ma.

(j) Hawaiian Islands

The Hawaiian Islands are wholly volcanic, principally shield volcanoes formed over the Hawaiian hot spot as the Pacific plate moved progressively towards the WNW (see the electronic supplementary material and ). The oldest of the Hawaiian Islands is at the western end of the chain, Kure Atoll formed ca 25 Ma. The islands become progressively larger and younger towards the ESE, where the youngest and still volcanically active island of Hawaii (10 458 km ²) exceeds the combined land area of all the other islands in the State (total for the State is 16 705 km ²). The island also hosts the two highest peaks in the archipelago-Mauna Kea (4205 m) and Mauna Loa (4169 m), with 68 per cent of the island above 610 m. The second largest and youngest is Maui (1888 km ²) dated between 1.32 and 0.75 Ma ( McDougall 1964; Naughton et al. 1980). This is followed in age progression by Molokai (676 km ²) dated between 1.75 and 1.9 Ma ( Naughton et al. 1980), Oahu (1574 km ²) dated between 2.6 and 3.7 Ma ( Doell & Dalrymple 1973) and Kauai (1433 km ²) dated at 5.1 Ma ( McDougall 1979). The coastline of all the islands sums to a length of 1207 km ( University of Hawaii 1973).

The big island of Hawaii is the nearest existing island to the Hawaiian hot spot, considered to be in the vicinity of Loihi Seamount at 19° N, 155° W. The chain then extends northwestwards through the Hawaiian Islands to Midway, and at 32° N 173° E there is a pronounced change in direction to the north forming the Emperor Seamount Chain. With increasing distance from source, the 129 volcanoes of the chain gradually subside with their accompanying oceanic plate to depths of 2 km (electronic supplementary material). At the northern terminus of the Chain is Meiji, once comparable with Hawaii that is next to be subducted into the western Aleutian Trench, a total distance of 6000 km from Hawaii ( Clague 1996). The age of the bend in the alignment of the volcanic chain is now well dated at 47 Ma ( Sharp & Clague 2002; Tarduno 2007). Initially, this was interpreted as a change in the movement of the Pacific plate over the Hawaiian hot spot, but more recent palaeomagnetic information in particular has suggested that between 76 and 47 Ma, when the Emperor Seamount Chain was emplaced, the Hawaii hot spot moved southwards at more than 30 mm yr −1 across a WNW moving Pacific plate ( Tarduno & Cottrell 1997; Tarduno et al. 2003). Since 47 Ma the hot spot appears to have remained relatively fixed with respect to the spin axis of the Earth ( Tarduno et al. 2003; Sager et al. 2005), although contrary evidence suggests it moved at 32 mm yr −1 to the southeast during the past 43 million years ( Pares & Moore 2005). However, many workers have pointed out that a number of key criteria for a hot spot are missing in Hawaii. These include no initial 'plume head' to the chain represented by flood basalts or oceanic plateaus (Campbell & Griffiths 1990, 1993); highly variable eruption rates along the chain ( Robinson & Eakins 2006); no significant heat flow anomaly ( von Herzen et al. 1989; Stein & Stein 1992, 1993; McNutt 2000); the melt originates from the shallow asthenosphere (Sisson in Foulger & Anderson 2006); and seismology has not detected a plume ( Wolfe et al. 2002). Notwithstanding this evidence, the ages of the islands show a very regular time-progressive track. Alternatively, the chain may have originated by a propagating fracture controlled by the direction of regional stress, the fabric of the seafloor or stresses caused by previously erupted volcanoes ( Hieronymus & Bercovici 1999).

6. ENVOI

The above overview demonstrates the dynamic and complex history involved in the formation of the Pacific islands. This complexity is still being unravelled from new marine exploration of the seabed. The discovery in the past 50 years of a wide array of subsided seamounts throughout the Pacific that once formed above sea level provides insight into the potential origins and age of island floras and faunas. The array of geological processes and resultant geochemistry and physiography is implicated in the development of complex floral and faunal histories on each island. Evidence from molecular techniques is beginning to illuminate the details of this complexity, and in some cases reveals aspects of island geology not preserved in the stratigraphic record, providing new lines of evidence for island geological histories.

Acknowledgments

We are most grateful to J.N. Procter for assisting us in the preparation of and , and the supplementary figures. Thanks to H. Campbell, A. A. P. Stoppers, R. B. Stewart and an anonymous referee for their most valuable comments on earlier drafts of this paper.

One contribution of 15 to a Theme Issue 'Evolution on Pacific islands: Darwin's legacy'.

¹Plate nomenclature follows Bird (2003).

² Subduction: the process by which one tectonic plate moves beneath another downwards into the mantle.

³ Lithosphere: the outer rigid layer of the Earth comprising crust and upper mantle, which averages 100 km thick, but varies with age between 2 and 300 km thickness.

⁴ Asthenosphere: the weak ductile layer in the upper mantle, upon which lithospheric plates move.

⁵ Obduction: overthrusting of one lithospheric plate onto an adjoining plate at a convergent plate boundary. The obducted strata may be continental or oceanic in composition. In the latter case, sections of obducted ocean floor are called 'ophiolites'.

⁶ Island arc: a (usually) curved chain of volcanic islands, usually positioned above a subduction zone.

⁷ Strike-slip: a type of fault in which opposing movement of rock on either side is dominantly horizontal.

⁸ Plume: upwelling of hot magma from the mantle.

⁹ En echelon: short parallel or subparallel, closely-spaced, overlapping structural features in rock. Collectively, they may form a linear zone.

¹⁰ Oceanic plateau: a large, undersea igneous province, the marine equivalent of continental flood basalts.

¹¹ Stress field: the distribution of stress (compression or tension) through a body of rock.

¹² Guyot: a seamount, the top of which has been planed by erosion.

¹³ Accretionary complex: The accumulated strata at the boundary of an overriding plate above a subduction zone. The strata accumulate on the inner wall of an ocean trench as material on the upper part of the descending oceanic plate is scraped off or underthrust to accrete on or beneath the leading edge of the overriding plate.

Supplementary Material
Map of Pacific Ocean:
Map of Pacific Ocean showing the location of islands and major geological features discussed in the text together with all major and mini-plates (plate nomenclature and symbols according to Bird 2003).
Oblique perspective of Hawaiian-Emperor Seamount chain.
Oblique perspective from the south of the bathymetry of the Pacific plate between Hawaii and the Aleutian Islands, constructed to show the Hawaiian-Emperor Seamount chain and the progressive subsidence of each volcano over time.

References

Bureau of Agriculture 2003 Animal genetic resources report for the Republic of Palau Bureau of Agriculture, Republic of Palau.

Campbell H, Hutching G. In search of ancient New Zealand. Penguin Books; Auckland, NZ: 2007. p. 240.

Campbell H.J, et al. Cretaceous-Cenozoic geology and biostratigraphy of the Chatham Islands, New Zealand. Vol. 2. Institute of Geological & Nuclear Sciences. Institute of Geological & Nuclear Sciences monograph; Lower Hutt: 1993. p. 269 p. +1 map.

Clague D. The growth and subsidence of the Hawaiian-Emperor volcanic chain. In: Keast A, Miller S.E, editors. The origin and evolution of Pacific Island biotas, New Guinea to Eastern Polynesia: patterns and processes. SPB Academic Publishing; Amsterdam, UK: 1996. pp. 35-50.

Darwin C. On the structure and distribution of coral reefs; and geological observations on the volcanic islands and parts of South America visited during the voyage of H.M.S. Beagle. Ward, Lock, & Co; London, UK: 1890. p. 549.

Davies H.L. The geology of Bougainville. In: Regan A.J, Griffin H.M, editors. Bougainville before the conflict. Pandanus Books; Canberra: 2005. pp. 20-30.

Davis A.S, Clague D.A, Gray L.B, Hein J.R. The Line Islands revisited: New ⁴⁰Ar/³⁹Ar geochronologic evidence for episodes of volcanism due to lithospeheric extension.

Exon, N. F. et al 2001 In Proc. ODP, Init. Repts., vol. 189. Ocean Drilling Program, Texas A & M University, College Station TX77845-9547, USA.

Foulger, G. R. & Anderson, D. L. 2006 The Emperor and Hawaiian volcanic chains: How well do they fit the plume hypothesis? www.mantleplumes.org. 14 pp.

Gamble J.A, Morris P.A. Sub-Antarctic and Chatham Islands. In: Johnson R.J, editor. Intraplate volcanism in eastern Australia and New Zealand. Cambridge University Press; Cambridge, MA: 1989. pp. 169-171.

Geist, D., Harpp, K. & Reynolds, B. 2006 A field trip guide to the geology of the Galápagos Islands. Cities on Volcanoes 4, Quito. 30 pp.

Hall, R. 1997 Cenozoic plate tectonic reconstructions of SE Asia. In Petroleum Geology of Southeast Asia. (eds. A. J. Fraser, S. J. Matthews, and R. W. Murphy), pp. 11-23. Geological Society of London Special Publication No. 126.

Koppers A.A.P, Staudigel H, Duncan R.A. High-resolution ⁴⁰Ar/³⁹Ar dating of the oldest oceanic basement basalts in the western Pacific basin.

Koppers A.A.P, Duncan R.A, Steinberger B. Implications of a nonlinear ⁴⁰Ar/³⁹Ar age progression along the Louisville seamount trail for models of fixed and moving hot spots.

Koppers, A. A., Russell, J. A., Staudigel, H. & Hart, S. R. 2006 New ⁴⁰Ar/³⁹Ar ages for Savai'I Island reinstate Samoa as a hotspot trail with a linear age progression. Eos Trans. AGU 87, Fall Meet. Suppl. Abstract V34B-02.

Kroenke L. Plate tectonic development of the western and southwestern Pacific: Mesozoic to the present. In: Keast A, Miller S.E, editors. The origin and evolution of Pacific Island biotas, New Guinea to Eastern Polynesia: patterns and processes. SPB Academic Publishing; Amsterdam, UK: 1996. pp. 19-34.

McNutt, M. A. 2000 A cold, hard look at hotspots. Proc. Plume 3 Conf., Hawaii.

Meffre, S., Crawford, A. J. & Quilty, P. G. 2006 Arc-continent collision forming a large island between, pp. 3. New Caledonia and New Zealand in the Oligocene. Australia Earth Science Convention, Melbourne, Extended Abstracts.

Natland, J. H. 2003 The Samoan Chain: a shallow lithospheric fracture system. See http://www.mantleplumes.org/Samoa.html.

Natland, J. H. & Winterer, E. L. 2005 Fissure control on volcanic action in the Pacific. In: Plates, plumes, and paradigms (eds G. R. Foulger, J. H. Natland, D. Presnall & D. A. Anderson), pp. 687-710. Geological Society of America Special Paper 388.

Raymond, C. A., Stock, J. M. & Cande, S. C. 2000 Fast paleogene motion of the Pacific hotspots from revised plate circuit constraints. In History and dynamics of global plate motions (eds M. A. Richards, R. G. Gordon, & R. D. van der Hilst). AGU Geophysical Monograph 121, pp. 359-375.

Smith, A. D. 2004 Stress fields and the distribution of intraplate volcanism in the Pacific Basin. www.mantleplumes.org. 4 pp.

Stein C.A, Stein S. The Mesozoic Pacific: geology, tectonics, and volcanism. American Geophysical Union; Geophysical Monograph. Washington, D. C.: 1993. Constraints on Pacific midplate swells from global depth-age and heat flow-age models; pp. 53-76.

Tarduno J.A, et al. The Emperor Seamounts: Southward motion of the Hawaiian hotspot plume in Earth's mantle. Sci. Express. 2003;301:1064-1069.

University of Hawaii 1973 Atlas of Hawaii, p. 222. Honolulu, HI: The University Press of Hawaii.

Whitehouse I.E, Pearce A.J. Shaping the mountains of New Zealand. In: Soons J.M, Selby M.J, editors. Landforms of New Zealand. Longman Paul; Auckland, NZ: 1992. p. 531.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
The age and origin of the Pacific islands: a geological overview

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
The Pacific Ocean evolved from the Panthalassic Ocean that was first formed ca 750 Ma with the rifting apart of Rodinia. By 160 Ma, the first ocean floor ascribed to the current Pacific plate was produced to the west of a spreading centre ...

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
A small island that appeared in the Arabian Sea off Pakistan after an earthquake last week most likely formed when the shaking released methane gas and water trapped in undersea sediments. The gas and water forced part of the seabed to the surface, experts said.

"It looked as if a section of shallow seafloor had simply been pushed up," said Game McGinsey, a volcanologist with the U.S. Geological Survey.

Photographs of the island, which measures roughly 100 feet by 250 feet and rises about 60 feet above the water, showed a rough-textured surface suggesting that the seafloor had risen and cracked, he said.

'It's not a mud volcano'

McGinsey said the way the island was created was similar in some ways to that of a so-called mud volcano, in which gas and water force mud up through vents to the surface. In those cases, the flow of mud normally continues for some time, similar to the way that lava flows from a conventional volcano. There are some long-lived mud volcanoes in the region, McGinsey said, but this one appeared to be a one-time event, with no sign of continuous flow.

"It's not a mud volcano in the classic sense," he said.

The magnitude 7.7 quake struck Tuesday, killing more than 500 people and flattening homes in the southwestern province of Baluchistan. It was followed by a 6.8-magnitude aftershock Saturday that killed at least 15 people.

The initial quake was centered about 40 miles north of the city of Awaran and about 250 miles from the port town of Gwadar, where the new island appeared in shallow waters about a half-hour later.

Townspeople and scientists who visited the island told news agencies that it was muddy and rocky and was emitting flammable gas. Methane, the main component of natural gas, is highly flammable.

Makran subduction zone

The quake occurred in the Makran subduction zone, a vast and complex tectonic feature stretching from Pakistan to Iran where three plates, the Indian, Arabian and Eurasian, meet.

As the Arabian plate slides under the Eurasian, sediments containing water and methane are compressed, said Michael Steckler, a geophysicist with the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, a part of Columbia University.

"In subduction zones you get a lot of overpressure," Steckler said.

Even a relatively far-off earthquake can produce enough shaking to fracture the sediments and release the gas and water, he said.

The methane is created through the action of bacteria on organic matter, and would have been trapped in the sediments as free molecules of gas. The Arabian Sea is also home to large quantities of methane hydrates, icy cagelike structures of water molecules with methane molecules inside, and immediately after the island formed there was speculation that hydrates, not free methane, had been released.

But hydrates form only under high pressure and low temperatures, and Carolyn Ruppel, director of the survey's hydrate research program, said water in the area was too shallow, and temperatures in sediments far too high, for hydrates to exist.

Similar islands formed in the Arabian Sea after an 8.1-magnitude earthquake in 1945. (A recent study by scientists in Germany showed that that quake set off the release of free methane from sediments, releases that continue today.) Islands also formed after quakes in 1999 and 2010.

Such islands eventually disappear, eroded by the action of tides and waves. Steckler said that the one that formed in 1999, for instance, was gone in a few months, a victim of monsoon surges.

"This one's coming up after the monsoon," he said, "so we'll see how long it lasts."

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
How a new island rose up from the sea floor

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
A small island that appeared in the Arabian Sea off Pakistan after an earthquake last week most likely formed when the shaking released methane gas and water trapped in undersea sediments. The gas and water forced part of the seabed to the surface, experts said.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Ethnography of Australia Ethnography of island Oceania History of European contact Social science research in Oceania bibliography
Oceania refers to Australia and to those Pacific islands situated between (and including) the Hawaiian archipelago and the Marianas Islands in the north, Easter Island in the east, New Zealand in the south, and New Guinea in the west. These boundaries are essentially ethnological and, in some respects, arbitrary. Although only a few scholars think that there have been significant human interchanges-biological or cultural-between this region and the Americas, the western boundary is anything but sharp. Prior to the colonial era people of the Marianas and West Carolines seem to have had little or nothing in common with the Ryukyuans to the north, but their past relations with the Philippines are clearly demonstrable in language, culture, and physique. Links between New Guinea and islands west of it are even more evident; in fact, the Moluccas constitute something of a transition zone.

Our concern with the physical environment of Oceania is twofold. First of all, we are interested in those environmental features which have had some relevance to the social behavior of peoples with nonmetallic technologies, nonurban settlement patterns, and largely nonscientific ideologies. For such peoples the presence or absence of mineral deposits, deep harbors, or natural grazing pastures was largely irrelevant, but these very factors did become relevant to native behavior through the intermediacy of alien whites and Asians.

For the native Oceanians the region provided a wide range of natural assets as well as a formidable array of liabilities (Oliver 1951). In Australia, the climate nowhere reached such extremes as to render any large zone entirely uninhabitable. In fact, the populace tended to concentrate, regardless of climate, in places where natural foods were most abundant, i.e., in the humid and tropical north as well as in the temperate southeast. The natural foods relied upon by the hunting and gathering peoples included kangaroos, cassowaries, snakes, lizards, turtles, fish, grubs, fruits, roots, seeds-in fact, almost everything the land and water produced that was even conceivably edible. The Australians' direct and, one might say, indiscriminately total reliance upon the continent's given resources for their subsistence may help to explain many of the similarities among aboriginal cultures noted by most students. But by the same token, local differences in the kinds and quantities of those resources also resulted in the development of some regional differences in other domains of cultural life.

Unlike the Australians, other islanders were primarily gardeners; hence the factors of rainfall, topography, and soil were of more immediate importance than direct availability of wild plants and animals. The islands of Oceania may be divided into several more or less distinctive types in regard to these features.

The "continental" islands are New Guinea, New Britain, New Ireland, Bougainville, and the mountainous archipelagoes which culminate in Fiji in the east and New Zealand in the south. These islands rise from a vast submarine platform which extends outward from Asia. The bold relief and wide,diversity of soil types, coupled with local differences in climate, have produced numerous sharply distinctive natural areas: bleak mountain summits, fern-forested uplands, grassy plateaus and high valleys, magnificent rain forests, scrubby jungles, riverine swamps, foothills, sandy coastal shelves, flat offshore reef islets, etc. This geographic diversity has contributed to the cultural diversity which is a hallmark of this portion of Oceania.

The remaining islands of Oceania are much smaller, more dispersed, and consist of just three basic landforms: high volcanic peaks, low coralline atolls, and raised-coral "pancakes"-or combinations of these, each affected by differences in age, weathering, and climate. In addition, the proximity to supplies of marine food has served, in some places, to reduce the direct dependence upon soil.

Opportunities for formulating and testing hypotheses about human behavior are enhanced by the insular nature of the region, which provides the researcher with laboratorylike controls found in few other regions of the world. In island Oceania wide stretches of ocean or hazardous natural barriers helped to isolate human communities from one another for years or even centuries at a stretch; and the Australians, although in contact with each other, were themselves more or less isolated from the rest of humanity for many thousands of years. But before describing the uses that social scientists have made of data obtained in Oceania, we shall sketch the outline of mankind's history in the area, as reconstructed by archeologists, linguists, and ethnologists. This reconstruction is, of course, immensely interesting in itself as a chronicle of some fascinating chapters of human history; but its relevance in this article consists of the light it can shed about some of the events whose sequels provide social science with such varied and amenable resources for research.

Skeletal fragments and crude stone artifacts found on Java demonstrate that tool-making hominids inhabited at least the Greater Sunda Islands as early as the first interglacial period, but the oldest human remains yet found in Oceania (i.e., in Australia) go back no further than ten to fourteen millennia. Since archeology is just beginning in Australia and New Guinea, it is reasonable to anticipate some deepening of their chronologies in due course. But it is interesting and probably indicative that no excavations carried out elsewhere in Oceania have revealed traces of humanity dating back beyond 3,500 years ago. It is simply unlikely that much earlier than that there were any boats in the western Pacific capable of reaching such places as Hawaii, New Zealand, or even Fiji. And as for movements from the east, I stated at the outset my firm belief that Oceania's populations and cultures derived ultimately from the southern and eastern shores of Asia. There may well have been added a few genes and a few culture traits from the Americas, but if such were the case they were relatively late and comparatively insignificant.

There is no demonstrable basis for linking race with intellectual potential, but race-or at least its visible criteria-has some relevance to the student of social behavior in Oceania. It has figured, for example, in natives' estimates of each other; and it has greatly influenced whites' attitudes towards natives (e.g., the light-skinned, straight-haired peoples of Polynesia have by and large been treated with less contempt than their darker-skinned neighbors of Australia and the western islands). But knowledge of the genetic composition of Oceania's population could conceivably also provide helpful clues concerning culture history.

Few systematic studies of race have been carried out in Oceania, save in Australia and southeastern Polynesia, and the specialists differ in their interpretations of the findings. Although there is nearly universal agreement upon Asia's having been the source of Oceania's populations, there is no consensus concerning the identity or the sequence of the several genetic strains that are evidently present in these populations.

There is a difference of opinion even with respect to the make-up of Australia's quite distinctive aboriginal population-the dark-skinned, curly-(not frizzly) haired individuals with massive browridges and low, broad noses. On the basis of some marked regional differences in physical features, some specialists posit three separate racial components: a short-statured negroid type; a larger-bodied, lighter-pigmented, more hirsute type reminiscent of the Ainu of northern Japan; and a more slender, dark-skinned, curly-haired type similar to the Veddas of Ceylon. According to this view, these three types arrived in separate waves -or trickles-and have interbred somewhat, but not homogeneously, during the succeeding millennia. According to another view, the aborigines were of the same race to begin with and have developed their regional differences since arrival on the subcontinent. For the social scientist these contrary views are not without relevance: if the population can be shown to be tri-hybrid in origin, researches will logically focus on explaining the many cultural similarities found throughout the continent and vice versa.

For the rest of Oceania the racial composition is even more complex and variously interpreted. The archipelagoes containing the so-called "continental" islands, from New Guinea to New Caledonia and Fiji (but not New Zealand), are inhabited mainly by populations with frizzier hair and somewhat darker skin colors than possessed by their neighbors to the north, east, and south. This circumstance has led to the area being labeled "Melanesia" ("black islands"), a term which is rather inaccurate and has proved to be mischievously misleading. In the first place, although there are many dark brown and even coal black populations within Melanesia, there are also many others no more heavily pigmented than, say, natives of Tahiti or Tonga. Second, this regional division based on somatic criteria has been arbitrarily perpetuated by ethnologists in the cultural sphere.

Within Melanesia the range of racial types (or subtypes) is very wide. Stature ranges from pygmoid to tall, pigmentation from light copper to jet black, prognathism from absent to pronounced, etc., and there are no obvious correlations, direct or inverse, between these attributes. Some populations look remarkably Australian (except for hair forms), others like frizzly-haired Mongoloids, and still others (with light pigmentation and high, beaklike noses) resemble no other physical types anywhere.

Elsewhere in Oceania-in the far-flung archipelagoes of Micronesia and Polynesia-physical types tend to be more uniform: the population becomes more "Mongoloid" and less "Negroid"; but the similarities (and differences) are not distributed in clear enough patterns to provide the specialists with unambiguous historical clues.

In fact, there is enough ambiguity in the racial data available for Oceania to permit any number of different historical reconstructions (including one that posits an American Indian component: Asia, after all, is the ultimate source of Oceanians and Amerindians). One reconstruction, derived from the tri-hybrid Australian scheme, proposes a succession of racial immigrations of the following order: Ainoid, Pygmy Negritoid, Veddoid, and Mongoloid. Another scheme includes Australoids (undifferentiated), both pygmy and full-statured Negroids, and Mongoloids. Still others (for somewhat gratuitous reasons) believe a so-called "Caucasoid" element to be present, especially in the populations of Polynesia.

Weighing all these alternatives, it seems least uncertain, and geographically most logical, that Australia and Melanesia were the first to be peopled, and by some combination of Negroids (short, or short and tall) and Australoids (or Ainoids-Veddoids); and that these separate strains interbred in varying degrees in different places. Nor is it unreasonable to believe that Mongoloid strains were the last to appear, leaving their genetic traces along the route, or routes.

It is unlikely that archeologists will ever turn up enough skeletal remains to permit a detailed reconstruction of Oceania's whole racial history, and social scientists searching for precise and longrange historical guidelines cannot expect much help from this direction. However, the small sizes and relatively great isolation of so many of Oceania's populations render them ideal "laboratories" for studying microevolutionary phenomena -e.g., the relationship between physical variance, on the one hand, and social structure, ecology, or epidemiology, on the other. Here, indeed, are to be found ideal opportunities for anthropologists to practice what they preach about their concern with both cultural and biological aspects of mankind.

The languages spoken by the Oceanians comprise three great categories: Australian, Austronesian, and non-Austronesian (Capell 1962; Klieneberger 1957). Quite apart from the intrinsic interest of the subject matter, the study of these languages, both descriptively and historically, is relevant to social science inquiry. Not only is knowledge of the local vernacular indispensable for all but the most superficial field research in any Oceanic society, but ethnographers-and especially those who have worked in Oceania-would probably agree that a society's language is a very important part of its cultural inventory. And on the historical side, findings about language relationships, genetic and acculturational, provide the best evidence we have for culture-historical reconstruction in general-and hence for comparative studies of social behavior.

The native languages of Australia (including Tasmania) differ markedly among themselves in structure and vocabulary, but their outstanding student, Arthur Capell, considers them members of the same family (1956). Numerous attempts have been made to trace their relationships outside Australia; so far these efforts have proved unconvincing, but it would not be surprising if future research were to turn up some links with non-Austronesian languages of neighboring New Guinea.

Prior to the spread of English, Spanish, and French in recent centuries, Austronesian was the most far-flung family of languages in the world: its speakers were spread from Formosa and Malaya to Hawaii, Easter Island, and New Zealand (one of its western languages even became established on Madagascar). Outside Australia and certain parts of the "continental" islands, all the languages of Oceania are to be classified within this great family.

For many decades it was the conventional practice of linguists to subdivide this family into four major (and implicitly more or less coordinate) branches: Indonesian (including Malay and all the Austronesian languages of the Philippines, the Sunda Islands, the Moluccas, etc., along with Malagasy (Madagascar), Cham (Cambodia), Li (Hainan),Jarai (Vietnam), Lati (southwest China), etc.; Micronesian (all the languages of Palau, the Marianas Islands, Caroline Islands, Marshall Islands, and Gilbert Islands); Polynesian (all the languages of Hawaii, Tonga, Samoa, New Zealand, Tahiti, Easter Island, etc.); and Melanesian (all Austronesian languages of New Guinea, the Solomon Islands, New Hebrides, New Caledonia, Fiji-except for certain Polynesian language "outliers"within the geographic zone of Melanesia). Thus the practice of subdividing Oceania according to so-called racial (Melanesia, "black islands") or geographic criteria (Micronesia, "small islands"Polynesia, "many islands") was somewhat arbitrarily carried over into linguistic classification and, as will be seen, into general cultural classification as well.

Recent developments in linguistic science, including lexicostatistics and new methods of data processing, have stimulated a reappraisal of this conventional scheme (Capell 1962; Grace 1964).There is anything but consensus among the many linguists now studying Austronesian-some depend almost wholly on lexical data for their results;others insist that grammatical considerations must also be taken into account-but the older fourclass scheme has been generally abandoned. It is now acknowledged that the languages of the Marianas Islands, Palau, and Yap are closer to those of the Philippines than to any in Oceania itself. There is also common agreement that the several Polynesian languages (or dialects) are far too alike to justify placing them in a genetic position coordinate with the many widely varying languages of Melanesia. It is in connection with the latter that the specialists are in least agreement. According to one view they remain something of a genetically separate unit more or less coordinate with a comparable unit of "Indonesian "while in another scheme they are classified into a dozen or more units of the subfamily order of branching. Also-and this has a direct bearing on long-range perspectives of social change-some writers view the Austronesian languages of Melanesia as fusions of the area's numerous aboriginal(and non-Austronesian) languages with immigrant (and, implicitly, quite uniform) Austronesian tongues: this is the "pidginization" theory, so called by analogy with present-day Melanesian pidgin, the "contact" language between Oceanians and whites throughout most of Melanesia. This view has been sharply challenged, both on linguistic and culture-historical grounds.

In fact, among the Austronesian languages of Oceania it is only with respect to the closely interrelated Polynesian subgroup that historical relationships have been sufficiently established to provide the social scientist with bases for some controlled comparisons of social and cultural systems. One can better appreciate the attractive possibilities for this kind of research by taking note of the likelihood, suggested by lexicostatistics, that all the known Polynesian languages derive from a single language which began branching not much more than two thousand years ago, and that during their subsequent histories many of them had no contact with non-Polynesian speech.

The label non-Austronesian has been given to those languages of island Oceania not classifiable as Austronesian; they are to be found on New Guinea, New Britain, New Ireland, and the northwest Solomon Islands, as well as on Halmahera and other islands of eastern Indonesia. From their distribution-mainly in the interiors of the large west Melanesian Islands-it has generally been assumed that they are survivors of the tongues spoken in this region before the spread of Austronesian. Unlike the Austronesian family and the languages of Australia, the non-Austronesian languages have so far resisted the efforts of linguists to link them into a single genetically interrelated unit, although they do not appear to be quite so fragmented as was once believed. In New Guinea, for example, linguists have discovered in the eastern highlands a very extensive "stock" comprising some 750,000 speakers (Capell 1962); other such unities are likely to emerge as more professional linguists turn their attention to parts of Oceania where the native languages have not even been recorded, much less studied.

Australian aborigines (Elkin 1938; Berndt 1965) got their food by hunting, fishing, and collecting;despite occasional contacts with Macassarese and Papuans they appear never to have adopted agriculture. And although they kept more or less tame dogs that helped them hunt larger game, they raised no animals for food. Men hunted (and fought) with spears, clubs, throwing sticks, or, in some areas, bows and arrows; women grubbed up roots and insects with digging sticks. Life was nomadic, in pursuit of widely scattered and seasonally variable food supplies; shelters were temporary, makeshift affairs. Some of the artifacts were fashioned out of stone, bone, and shell, but plants provided the materials for most objects of daily life.

It has been estimated that at the time of initial European colonization some two hundred years ago, there were no more than about 300,000 people inhabiting Australia-probably a fairly stable figure in view of their seemingly unchanging technology and their millennia-long residence. It is not unlikely that the distribution of the population had also reached a point of stability in adjustment to the continent's several geographic zones, with the heaviest concentrations in the temperate southeast and tropical north and the lightest in the arid interior. Some three hundred languages are said to have been spoken in Australia, but these were not necessarily contiguous with cultural or political distinctions.

The nuclear family, modally if not normatively monogamous, was the basic residential unit of society. In some areas, and during certain parts of the natural seasonal cycle, individual families traveled separately, and although males and females contributed differently, food was usually shared. When the availability of food permitted, but also for social and ritual purposes, several families congregated into bands (or "hordes")of various sizes and degrees of integration.

In addition to families and bands, Australian societies were divided into various other kinds of social units based on locality, kinship, age, and sex -or combinations of these factors. One relatively simple and fairly widespread kinship structure consisted of unilinear and exogamous moieties. Societies were sometimes divided into four or eight such parts. In the view of some analysts these arrangements functioned mainly to regulate marriages, while other writers consider them to be classificacation devices for the convenient ordering of one's numerous kinfolk-i.e., all other members of one's community.

The factor of age also received emphasis in almost all aboriginal societies. Particularly for males, the cycle of growing up and aging was associated with a series of ritual events. These were carried out within the context of localized all-male sodality that was stratified into more or less agegraded subgroups. Some of these rituals included extreme forms of body mutilation (e.g., subincision of the penis) along with ceremonial dances and recitations of great religious depth and drama. The form and content of these rituals, along with their theological connotations and their social functions, varied considerably from place to place; but they were widespread enough and similar enough to be considered a very characteristic-but of course, not distinctive-feature of aboriginal Australian culture.

Another characteristic feature of Australian life was the absence of anything approaching occupational specialization. Individual differences in skill and knowledge and stamina were recognized, but expert hunters, warriors, artists, magicians, flintknappers, etc., were not relieved of the ordinary chores of subsistence, and they received few material rewards for their specialties. Some individuals undoubtedly produced goods that were surplus to their own families' subsistence needs-such things as stone spear points, cordage, mineral pigments-or benefited from occasional windfalls of meat or fish. The limited local exchange and long-distance trade of these goods were usually carried out within the context of kinship and with some ceremonial elaboration. However, there were probably no bands capable of producing enough over-all surplus to sustain full-time specialists of any kind.

Perhaps the most prestigious of skills was the ability to chant from memory the interminable myths, prayers, and formulas which formed indispensable parts of various rituals. Individuals possessing this skill who had also moved up through the ranks of the age-graded men's sodalities achieved a status that commanded some measure of authority in community affairs. Compared, however, with most other societies in Oceania, the institution alization of authority in aboriginal societies was not very developed.

No aspect of Australian life has attracted more "scientific" attention than the so-called religious beliefs and practices. Living, as the aborigines do, in symbiosis with their physical environment, they have animated it so anthropomorphically and so comprehensively that their perceptions of the universe appear to contain no boundaries between mankind and the actual or imagined populace of nature. One of their most widespread beliefs, for example, consists of linking certain animals and plants-generically or individually-with each of their enduring social units or categories. Such linkages are usually conceived of in terms of kinship and not infrequently involve restrictions against eating or rituals aimed at magical increase of the species involved. In some places even mountains, pools, stars, thunder, rain, and sneezing are either individually or generically assimilated into the social structure. The myths and rituals embodying these beliefs are as diverse and bizarre as they are long and dramatic. Fertility-of nature and of humanity-is a theme which runs through many of them; and they are enacted through songlike recitation, dance, and instrumental music.

Finally, this brief inventory of institutions would be incomplete without mention of the graphic art of aboriginal Australia. Students have only recently begun to study the rich domain of painting, carving, and engraving-naturalistic and abstract, public and esoteric. Although these deserve serious enough attention on artistic grounds alone, their apparent associations with myth and ritual make them intriguing subjects for social science as well.

Technology and material culture

As noted earlier, agriculture was the basis of subsistence throughout all of island Oceania (Oliver 1951).Even on certain of those arid atoll islets where soil is lacking, natives laboriously imported soil for gardens (Barrau 1958). In places dependent mainly on self-propagating tree crops some effort was occasionally spent in protecting and tending the plants, and some supplementary gardening was usually practiced as well. The main "tree" crops of the islands were coconuts, sago, breadfruit, pandanus, and bananas. The first European visitors found coconut palms growing on nearly every inhabited island except Easter Island, New Zealand, and Chatham Island. These trees thrive best in lower altitudes near the coasts and provided islanders with food, drink, oil, containers, fibers, thatch, and construction wood. Sago palms grow semiwild in many swampy areas, particularly on the larger continental islands; the starch extracted from the palm's pith was the staple food in many riverine and coastal communities. Breadfruit is most prolific in the volcanic soils of the central and eastern islands; although fruiting only seasonally, this tree produces bounteously and requires little care. Some varieties of the pandanus, or screw pine, produce a fruit which can be made partly edible and which serves only as a famine food on richer islands but is the main vegetable food on some of the arid atolls. Bananas (including plantains), which grow in most of the moist tropical areas, varied widely in culinary importance, from a staple food to an occasional supplementary one.

Of the root crops, both wet-land and dry-land varieties of taro were cultivated; yams were grown widely both for food and for purposes of display;and sweet potatoes were adapted to poorer soils and cooler climates.

The islanders supplemented these crops with wild roots, stems, shoots, fruit, and leaves. The only part of Oceania in which natives cultivated rice was in the Marianas, another trait linking these islands with the Philippines.

Each of the vegetable staples required different production techniques and resulted in a wide range of cultural variations. Sago, for example, could be collected at any time of the year and was preserved by a laborious process. In contrast, breadfruit required little processing but fruited only once or twice a year and remained edible only in a fermented state.

In comparison with the Australians, most Oceanian islanders spent little time hunting. A noteworthy exception occurred in New Zealand, where early inhabitants hunted to extinction the giant moa, a large, flightless, ostrichlike bird. On the other hand, fishing was a major activity wherever marine resources permitted. Streams, rivers, reefs, lagoons, and open seas were harvested by means of an extraordinary variety of tools, watercraft, and techniques. As in the case of agriculture, differences in emphasis on fishing together with differences in fishing techniques were reflected in other cultural domains-in religious beliefs and ritual as well as in the social structure of households and communities.

Canoes have played a central role in the lives of Oceanians, and they have been used for fishing, everyday transport, and, prehistoric ally, in the peopling of this world of islands. Some of the riverine and coastal peoples of New Guinea found shallow dugouts adequate for their purposes of moving about in calm waters, but most other islanders depended upon outrigger canoes or deep-hulled plankbuilt boats. Although some elements of this complex reflect the common southeast Asian origin of Oceania's seagoing heritage, there has developed a rich variety of local specialties-in boat construction, ornamentation, and handling, as well as in navigational principles and skills.

In many places the building and handling of a big canoe was an event of social importance, being one of the few instances of large-scale coordinated activity. For the social scientist these occasions reveal otherwise unstated premises regarding division of labor, authority, and exchange. In fact, in seagoing societies such as Tahiti the nomenclature applied to the various parts of their larger canoes was a metaphoric summary of the natives'image of their political relations.

Like Australians, the Oceanian islanders kept dogs-for pets, hunting aids, and sometimes for food. Most households also kept a few fowl-if"kept" is appropriate for the rather aimless relationship in which the fowl were neither fed nor eaten with any regularity. It was only on remote Easter Island that fowl became important in native economy and in ritual. Wherever islanders managed to introduce and keep them alive, pigs became much more important than dogs or fowl. They were eaten at feasts and used in ceremonial exchanges. In fact, so highly were pigs valued that in some societies they became the prime means and measure of political ascendancy.

In societies like these, where food occupies such a dominant position-in productive energy, in social interaction, in hierarchies of value, in cult focus, in symbolic expression, and so forth-the cooking and eating of a meal may provide social science with some of its most rewarding data. In this connection, then, it should be noted that techniques of food preparation vary within societies and among societies. Cooking was everywhere important, although some fish and plant foods were occasionally eaten raw. Cooking itself varied from simple roasting and pot boiling to large-scale baking in community-size earth ovens. Even the most elaborate Hawaiian or Samoan menus and recipes did not compare with those of Asia, but in many places men (festal cooking was nearly everywhere done by males) knew how to prepare puddings combining many ingredients in various proportions.

Next to water the only beverage universally imbibed was the liquid of unripe coconuts-at least where coconut palms grew. On many islands in the central and eastern Pacific natives drank kava (or 'ava, etc.), a mildly narcotic liquid made from the root of a cultivated pepper plant. On some islands (e.g., Fiji, Tonga, and Samoa) kava drinking reached a point of high ceremonial elaboration.These ceremonials served to express and reinforce community integration and political status. West of the kava-drinking part of Oceania, and barely overlapping it, were areas of betel chewing extending on into the south Asian mainland. In these areas betel chewing did not become as ceremonialized as kava drinking did elsewhere, but its use throughout the populations was more widespread.

Plants were the source of nearly all the cordage and textiles made in island Oceania; loom weaving was restricted to the Marianas and West Carolines, but hand plaiting developed in some places to the level of a fine art.

Matwork and barkcloth were the chief materials out of which most clothing, floor covering, bedding, sails, and temporary shelters were made. In some places finely textured mats and barkcloths circulated as highly valued objects in networks of redistribution and intergroup exchange. Houses differed widely in shape and size; some were built to accommodate only a small family, while others were spacious enough for hundreds of people. Comparison of local differences can provide insights into human inventiveness and the processes of adaptation and also into historical relationships, but the nature of Oceanian housebuilding has even more direct relevance to the social scientist, inasmuch as most such enterprises involve the actions of large numbers of people contributing materials and services according to conventional social patterns. House architecture often provides valuable insights into the residents' views about their social universe-views which might otherwise remain inexplicit. The residences, for example, very rarely contain inner partitions, but for the occupants internal space is divided into functionally and symbolically distinct "rooms"; in fact, in many places a house provides space for the living and for the dead, for spirits as well as mortals.

Public structures of many types and utilizing varied construction materials were built in island Oceania. They served a wide variety of uses: clan refuges, exclusive men's clubhouses, secular meeting places, temples, forts, theaters, athletic arenas, lovers' trysts, craftsmen's workshops-in fact, nearly everything but market places for buying and selling.

Within recent years the graphic and plastic arts of Oceania have aroused keen interest among art historians and collectors. The skillfully executed masks, ceremonial implements, "idols," and so on are also of interest to the social scientist because of their relevance to social behavior. Designs, for example, often express magical intent or supernaturally protect ownership or clan unity. Or, the roughly shaped, grotesque figure may in faith be the terrestrial resting place of a powerful and handsome god. We cannot begin to describe the great variety in materials, techniques, and designs found in Oceanic art objects, but the situation is not as chaotic as a rapid walk through a museum might lead one to believe. In fact, some surveys by anthropologically oriented experts have begun to delineate for all Oceania a manageably small number of distinctive artistic traditions, thereby providing social scientists with some new and stimulating possibilities for investigation (Linton &Wingert 1946; Guiart 1963a).

Ideology and social structure

In the foregoing discussion we have dwelt mainly on what islanders did and what they made in connection with daily living. However, it should at least be pointed out that islanders did not go about the business of making a living without reflection, in slavish response to "custom" On certain occasions islanders undoubtedly acted because of time-honored and sanctioned precedent, but their actions were more frequently pragmatic. Perhaps the many different and often difficult kinds of physical environments met with in the course of their histories in Oceania had something to do with this, by placing a premium on flexibility and adaptability. Many of their actions were based on premises that we would call magical, but this is not to deny the presence of a "scientific"attitude toward their environment.

As for the magical ingredient of their thinking, neither its logic (homeopathic, sympathetic) nor its content (animism, animatism) is distinctively Oceanian in any essential way.

Turning now to the islanders' pre-European social behavior, we begin by acknowledging our inability to generalize about the region as a whole or about large segments of it. A great deal is known about the social life of certain island peoples, but there are many more societies about which nothing, or next to nothing, is known-with no prospect of ever gaining such knowledge in many cases because the islanders' native forms of society have completely disappeared under the impact of alien influences. And even with what is known-and among the studies of single island societies there are some of the world's most complete ethnographies-scholars are just beginning to push beyond local description toward wider regional typologies of the kind formulated for Australia (e.g.,Hogbin & Wedgwood 1953; Sahlins 1958; Goldman 1960).

Settlement patterns. Although many excellent ethnographic descriptions treat patterns of residence, few attempts have been made at the comparative study of settlement patterns. Perhaps the most typical form of settlement pattern in the islands-this is an impression, not an established fact-is the small four-to-five household hamlet or neighborhood; but there are also numerous instances of dispersed homesteads, at one extreme, and of densely settled villages, at the other. In this connection it is an interesting fact that some of the largest and most tightly integrated political units -e.g., on Tonga-comprised widely scattered homesteads. Villages rarely contained more than a thousand inhabitants; the average number was probably more like two to three hundred. Some of the larger villages were to be found alongside rivers or lagoons, but they have been noted in other kinds of settings as well. In some instances residences were clustered near the public places-temples, council houses, dance grounds, men's clubhouses, etc.; in others the public places and dwellings were kept far apart. Some settlements were surrounded by stockades; others lacked defensive constructions despite their involvement in periodic warfare.

Family. The nuclear family was certainly the most ubiquitous type of social group in island Oceania, although polygyny was permitted in most societies. Polygyny was practiced by only the most affluent-i.e., those men who could afford the bride price or other expenditures associated with marriage-but in some of the wealthiest societies even the most influential leaders had only one official wife at a time.

There is evidence that polyandry was formerly practiced in some Polynesian-speaking societies, but little or nothing is known about its wider social contexts.

With regard to matrimonial rules of residence, couples tended to reside near or with the husband's male patrilineal kinsmen. The next most prevalent pattern among those societies surveyed (Murdock 1957) was residence near the wife's female matrilineal kinsmen; but in several other societies these alternatives were about equally favored. Still other alternatives have been recorded for other societies, e.g., residing close to the husband's matrilineal kinsmen.

Even in societies allegedly ignorant of the male's biological role in reproduction (Malinowski 1922) social roles of "maternity" and "paternity" were institutionalized, although the nature of such roles, both in theory and practice, varied widely. At one extreme were those societies in which both mother and father shared the job of nurturing and socializing their children, with property being transmitted through both parents. In contrast, there were some other societies wherein the sociological father had little or nothing to do with his children's specific upbringing or equipping beyond contributing generally to the domestic commissary. In between these extremes were numerous permutations, usually reflecting each society's general conceptualization of kinship.

Two other fairly characteristic-but of course not distinctive-features of island life had to do with membership in the family group. In some societies, even when a child was recognized as the "biological" offspring of a man, the latter was called upon to validate the relationship before it could become socially operative. The other feature of widespread occurrence was the facility and the popularity of adoption, especially practiced in the eastern parts of the region.

It is our impression that nuclear families-plus one or two other dependent relatives-constituted the most typical residential units in the majority of island societies, but there were numerous variants. In some places households were much larger and consisted of composite families-either polygynous, stem, joint fraternal, joint sororal, or some other type. In other places a man spent most of his sleeping and waking hours in his community men's house, visiting his wife and children in their household only on occasion. Variations in household composition were wide, as were variations in collective activity, in kinds and amounts of goods owned corporately, in symbols of unity, etc.; and all these facets of family and household life were surely related more or less directly to each society's more general institutionalization of kinship.

Although ties of kinship were not the only kind of social bond recognized and institutionalized in island societies, they were by all odds the most important. In most island societies, every member could claim (if not actually trace) some kinship tie with every other member. These kinship categories each implied some normative pattern of behavior no matter how attenuated by the remoteness of the tie or the influence of extraneous factors such as locality and social stratification. Indeed, relations across tribal and societal boundaries were more often than not dominated by considerations of kinship.

Within the context of all-inclusive kinship, which characterized most island societies, there were, however, some wide differences in the actual groupings of kinfolk. In size such groups varied from small, sharply defined units to large ones with vague or overlapping boundaries. Some groups were bilateral in descent, others patrilineal or matrilineal. Some were stringently exogamous, while in others membership appears to have played no direct role in choice of mate. In some societies, like certain ones of highland New Guinea, groups formed by the male members of patrilineages were all-important-maritally, residentially, economically, politically, and ritually. In other places actual groups of kinsmen-qua kinsmen-were scarcely discernible, either interactionally or symbolically.

What little collation has been done in this domain of social structure indicates that patrilineally structured groups predominated in New Guinea and matrilineal ones in central Micronesia and in parts of western Melanesia. Throughout most of Polynesia and in the rest of Micronesia the aggregates of kinfolk defined by common ownership of land and other valuables were ideally more "nonunilinear" in membership, although in actuality patrilateral ties preponderated. Elsewhere, in central and eastern Melanesia, there existed in close juxtaposition all these variants of kinship structure (Murdock 1957).

Other social groups. In most island societies there were other kinds of associational ties which crosscut those of kinship-ties of coevality, of cult commitment, of occupation, and, most important, of coresidence.

Age itself was less influential in island Oceania than it was in Australia. Authority and privilege did derive from seniority in some societies-especially in some of those with patrilineal kin groups -but coevality as an organizing principle was only sporadically important (e.g., in parts of New Guinea and Melanesia, where painful male initiation rites served to usher boys into cult-focused men's clubs).

In many island societies, as throughout Australia, the mythical charters which rationalized and legitimatized kin groupings were embodied in congregational ritual. But, in addition, many island societies incorporated cult groups whose members were only incidentally kinfolk. Examples of such were the masoniclike men's clubs of New Hebrides and the intertribal "Dionysiac" Arioi sect of eastern Polynesia.

Occupational specialization was more marked in island Oceania than in Australia, but groupings of specialists were rare. In Samoa there were "guilds"of housebuilders, and in some other island societies one might discern the beginnings of other craft guilds or of "schools" of savant-priests, but that is about all.

Political organization. In most island societies neighbors were also kinfolk-in fact or by nationalization-but coresidence was often more influential than kinship as a basis for association. On the other hand, the size and degree of integration of such political units varied widely. At one extreme were numerous societies having no collective-action groups larger than localized extended families. At the other extreme were a few Polynesian societies containing highly organized, territorially based tribal units with many thousands of members. In between, and most typical, were societies whose political units were conterminous with small village or neighborhood communities, or with clusters of such communities, averaging perhaps a few hundred citizens and rarely exceeding fifteen hundred.

Island political units differed not only in size but also in domain. Units for waging war varied from tightly knit regiments to undependable confederacies of separate kin groups. Actions for the maintenance of internal order ranged from comprehensive, centralized policing to uneasy interkingroup feuding, wherein the over-all leaders did little more than protect their own kin groups' interests. In some places a political unit's members were all linked in redistributive networks involving frequent and copious flows of objects and services;in other places little or nothing was exchanged among the strata of social hierarchies. And finally, whereas in some societies the identities of the political units were symbolized and validated in influential myths and impressive ceremonies, in other places only the most discerning observer would have discovered clues to collective notions of unity.

Succession to political leadership was hereditary in some island societies, nonhereditary in others;and there were differences within each category. In instances of hereditary succession, the principle of patriliny predominated; and even in societies whose kinship groups were matrilineal political offices usually passed from male to male. However, there were a few recorded instances, mainly in Polynesia, of high political office devolving upon females.

Nonhereditary succession to political office characterized large portions of Melanesia. In what was perhaps its most distinctive variant, wealth was an important steppingstone to power. In such cases, however, the prestige upon which power was based derived not so much from accumulating valuables but rather from disposing of them-in potlatchlike feasting or in conspicuous waste.

But many island societies may not be so exclusively typed: in some, individuals born to high office had also to prove themselves capable of exercising it; in other cases they had to vie for office with low-born individuals of outstanding ability. And in some societies these contrasting principles of succession served to maintain situations of unresolved internal conflict.

Relations between political units were of many different kinds. Hostility colored most such relations over the long run, but it was usually tempered either by periods of general truce or by only individual kin-group feuding. Moreover, even between traditionally hostile tribes it was customary for women to be exchanged and goods to be bartered. Some of the intertribal circuits extended over hundreds of miles, and while some of the transactions were conducted without direct contact between the principals (i.e., "silent trade"), others-including the famous kula trade of southeast New Guinea-involved mass expeditions and elaborate ceremonies (Malinowski 1922). Another institution typical of many parts of island Oceania was that of the trade partnership-i.e., a pact between two friends or kinsmen from separate political units providing reciprocal visiting and bartering rights even in periods of intertribal conflict.

Many societies in island Oceania were to some degree stratified, but the phenomenon was most highly institutionalized in Polynesia, notably in Hawaii, Tahiti, Samoa, and Tonga, where three or even four strata were distinguishable. In these societies class status derived almost wholly from birth and birth order, and for higher-ranking individuals class endogamy was so prescriptive that there developed castelike common-interest upper classes which cut across political boundaries. Political and ceremonial leadership were closely linked with class status, but ability sometimes outweighed birth, resulting occasionally in the relegation of highest-ranking persons to positions of little more than ceremonial pre-eminence (Sahlins 1958;Goldman 1960).

In view of the wide variety of cultural traditions and social structures found throughout island Oceania, it becomes next to impossible to generalize comprehensively about the behaviors of individuals in these societies. Individual life cycles, for example, were institutionalized in many different ways. In some societies the onset of puberty was marked by physical mutilation and community-wide ritual, in others it was virtually ignored. In some places the aged were revered and deferred to, in others they were socially devalued. Females were perhaps nowhere treated as chattel, but their social and ritual roles ranged from that of a magically polluted minor to that of a semidivine chieftainess. Even innovation received widely differing valuations, not only from society to society but within the same society as well. In some communities, for example, the invention of new graphic designs was discouraged while the composing of new songs was honored. Or, craft techniques remained rigidly traditional, while the "discovery" of new religious doctrines or magical formulas was socially rewarded. In fact, perhaps the only generalization one can make about islanders as individuals (and this in a manner both imprecise and impressionistic) is that in nearly all available descriptions of them they stood out as individuals-as distinctive, at least partly autonomous persons, not as mere faceless units of this or that social aggregate.

Prior to the sixteenth century there may have been direct contacts between Oceania and Asian, or even American, high civilizations, although they were not enough to revolutionize native ways of life. But Magellan's discovery of the Marianas Islands in 1521 ushered in a new era which is still going on and which is destined to transform most of the region's native societies.

During the four and a half centuries since Magellan's voyage tens of thousands of Westerners (also Japanese, Chinese, and Indians) have visited or resided in Oceania-not to mention the millions now established in Australia, New Zealand, and Hawaii, and the additional hundreds of thousands who swept through the islands during World War II. Many Oceanians have also visited the outside world, but up to now their influences upon their own native communities have been minimal. With the exception of Australia, New Zealand, and Hawaii, where the process of Westernization has proceeded at a faster tempo, the history of culture contact in Oceania can be described in terms of five distinctive but overlapping phases.

(1)The phase of exploration began with Magellan and is still going on in parts of New Guinea. By 1830 the consequences of these visitations from the West were well underway, in the shape of depopulation (mainly through introduced disease) and murderous warfare (with the help of firearms).

(2)Whalers, traders, and missionaries commenced their operations about 1780, continuing until about 1850. (Spanish Catholic missionaries were active long before 1780 but only in the Marianas.) Depopulation and political turmoil continued during this phase and were accompanied by widespread collapse of indigenous religious institutions and of religion-sanctioned political structures.

(3)Around 1860, planters, labor recruiters, and merchants initiated change consequent upon the removal or shifting about of large segments of the male population for long periods of virtually forced labor, the introduction of money and cashcrop economy, and the heightened desire for Western manufactured goods.

(4)Foreign governments began to assert administrative control over island populations over a hundred years ago, but interference with native political structures-including total replacement-was most direct during the half century before World War II. This phase also witnessed an increase in the native population, mainly because of improved medical services and an increased flow of Westerners into parts of the region where mineral deposits were located.

(5)The events of World War ii served not only to speed up kinds of change already in process, including urbanization and money-based economy, but to stimulate other changes as well. The postwar improvement in interisland communication and transport gave rise to several dramatic developments. Locally inspired movements to weaken political ties with the overseas ruling metropolitan powers and to advocate strengthened interregional cultural ties are among these new developments, although they are not necessarily fundamental to change.

Despite the homogenizing effects of these several but predominantly Western influences, the various Oceanian societies retain a large measure of local variation. None are at exactly the same stage of Westernization: for example, one can contrast industrialized Nauru with the New Guinea population, only now exchanging stone tools for those of steel. And no two native societies have experienced the same mixture of Western influence: even in New Guinea, for example, a community near a large coconut plantation has adjusted very differently from one near a mine;and the Polynesians in French Tahiti have become quite different from their ethnic cousins in British Samoa.

Although there are increasingly pressing political reasons why the rest of the world should begin to know something about Papuans or Fijians or Samoans, our present concern is with Oceania's significance for social science in general-with the research opportunities it has provided for formulating and testing universally valid methods and theories, and with the uses that have been made of such opportunities. The reaction, for example, by the natives of Bikini to resettlement away from their radiation-polluted home island is of course poignantly interesting and of some relevance to international politics; but study of this situation would have had little value for social science if its procedures had not provided possibilities for testing social science methods and making innovations in these methods and if its findings were not widely applicable (Mason 1957).

Oceania has offered social scientists a very wide variety of social and cultural systems, many of them so strikingly exotic as to require major accommodations in some aspects of Western-based social scientific thinking. In addition, even as late as a few decades ago, when trained social scientists began their study of this region, they were observing the end products of centuries or millennia of isolation from the rest of the world and even largely from one another. And third, the relatively small sizes, sharp boundaries, and (perhaps consequently) internal cultural homogeneity of most of these societies made it possible and indeed inevitable for individual observers to investigate the functional relationships of many domains of behavior-not just technology or kinship or art, but all three in themselves and in relation to each other.

Research into Oceanian ways of life began nearly two centuries ago, when men like Banks, Bligh, and the Forsters went beyond the mere recording of personal experiences and of native bizarreness to carry out more or less pointed inquiries into native institutions. Moreover, the reports contributed by such men were empirically significant to the beginnings of comparative sociology in Europe. For the next century and a quarter, as more and better descriptions of Oceanians' ways of life came to be produced by missionaries, administrators, and other island residents, the professors back home were able to use these data to support theories or to compile vast syntheses (for example, Morgan, Durkheim, Frazer, Freud). But it was not until 1898 that social scientists left their armchairs to confront their subjects in person.

In that year the Cambridge anthropological expedition to the Torres Strait islands (between northern Queensland and New Guinea) took place and included such men as Haddon, Rivers, and Seligman. It was during this expedition that Rivers developed his genealogical method for recording kinship data, which has subsequently been such an indispensable tool in social anthropological research everywhere. Between this expedition and the outbreak of World War I amateur and more or less competent observers residing in the region continued to produce ethnographic accounts which were used by scholars in their compilations, but field research by trained social scientists was carried out by only a handful, notably Malinowski, Radcliffe-Brown, Thurnwald, Sarasin, Reche, Williamson, Poech, Haddon, and Rivers. It is probably fair to say that only the first three (and Rivers, to a lesser extent) produced publications from their Oceanian data that have been influential in the subsequent development of general social science theory and method.

Undoubtedly the outstanding landmark in social science research in Oceania was the work of Malinowski, whose monographs on the Trobriand Islanders have never been surpassed in ethnographic artistry. His studies ushered in a new world-wide approach to anthropological research that has come to be known as functionalism. Radcliffe-Brown drew upon his field experiences in Australia (and elsewhere) to produce essays that have led him to be identified as a cofounder of "functional" anthropology, although he himself disavowed the label. Through their teaching and writings these two men virtually dominated social anthropology throughout the interwar period; and their students, and students' students, still hold most of the important teaching positions throughout the British Commonwealth.

In the interwar period more and more professionally trained social scientists went to Oceania to carry out sociologically and psychologically oriented research, and after World War II the influx reached flood proportions and is not now visibly diminishing. Moreover, these research activities have been aided by a number of journals, monograph series, museums, libraries, and university departments devoted exclusively or at least primarily to Oceania. The rich ethnographic data resulting from field research in Oceania have been drawn on heavily by many other social scientists for inspiration and for information respecting the range and variation of human social behavior.

The most influential innovation in social science research strategy and methodology to come out of Oceania was Malinowski's experience of long residence in a native community and active participation in its activities. He worked exclusively in the native vernacular, focused his attention upon the prosaic as well as the dramatic aspects of native life, and collected (and published) masses of documentary evidence to support and enrich his generalizations. It is somewhat ironic that Malinowski's style of field research has been more faithfully followed in Africa than in Oceania, with the outstanding exception of Raymond Firth's work in Tikopia (Firth 1936; 1939; 1940).

Malinowski aimed at more or less total coverage of his native subjects' way of life, and for some time after him this remained the objective of most social scientists working in the region. But this goal has increasingly given way to a narrower focus upon special aspects of native life, including economics, law, religion, ecology, acculturation, and education.

Malinowski's example of one-man field work has tended to prevail, although field research is coming to be conducted within the framework of larger-scale programs, such as the Coordinated Investigation of Micronesian Anthropology, the Tri-Institutional Pacific Program, the long-range New Guinea research program of the Australian National University, the University of Oregon's study of resettled populations, the University of Washington's study of cultural and physical evolution in New Guinea, the Harvard study of social change in the Society Islands, etc. In this connection, attention should be called to the research activities of such organizations as the South Pacific Commission (an international body designed to improve the welfare of Pacific islanders) and the French government's Office de la Recherche Scientifique et Technique Outre Mer, which though aimed primarily at the solution of practical problems have contributed useful data on some rapidly changing aspects of Oceanian ways of life.

Turning now to the substantive contributions to general social science theory that have come out of research in Oceania-contributions in addition to the enrichment of the world's ethnographic corpus-one again begins with the writing of Malinowski, who audaciously-although not always justifiably-challenged some of the basic assumptions of economics, comparative law, semantics, and psychoanalysis, and who in addition popularized the functional viewpoint already mentioned (Firth 1957). For Malinowski functionalism consisted mainly of a proposition to the effect that all of a society's customs are mutually interdependent and an analytical principle based on viewing institutions as instruments for satisfying basic human needs. The proposition has subsequently become an almost universally accepted canon among anthropologists, but not much use has been found for the analytical principle. Radcliffe-Brown's contributions to general social science theory have been mainly in the field of comparative sociology(see Radcliffe-Brown 1922), and although his interests were somewhat narrower than Malinowski's he has left a comparably deep imprint. Perhaps the most successful implementations in Oceanian research of the general methods and theories of Malinowski and Radcliffe-Brown have been done, respectively, by Firth (1936) and Warner (1937).It now remains to list some other investigations in Oceania which, in my opinion, have served most to enrich social science either by proposing or testing theory or by describing novel or comparatively important institutions.

Major contributions to the sociology of kinship are to be found in the writings of Firth (1936),Warner (1937), Malinowski (1929), Radcliffebrown (1922), Elkin (1938), Mead (1934), R. M. Berndt and C. H. Berndt (1951), Meggitt (1962),and Goodenough (1951). Only from Africa have come works of comparable quality. Government and social control of relatively un-Westernized societies are usefully documented in the works of Malinowski (1926), Hogbin (1934), Guiart (1963),Oliver (1955), Pospisil (1958), and Berndt (1962).Useful studies of Oceanian economies are those by Malinowski (1922), Bell (1953), Salisbury(1962), and, especially, Firth (1939; 1959). The published works of Firth provide probably the fullest and most sophisticated treatment available on the economics of "primitive" societies.

Among the most useful studies of the social contexts of belief and ritual are those of Firth (1940), Fortune (1932; 1935), Malinowski (1935),Warner (1937), Guiart (1951), and Williams (1940). In this connection should be mentioned Bateson's stimulating, and in some respects novel, multifaceted analysis of ritual behavior (1936), which deserves far wider attention than it has thus far received.

Many richly illustrated works have been published concerning the widely varied and extraordinarily elaborated graphic art tradition of Oceania, but only a few seek to relate these to social behavior, mainly those of Elkin et al. (1950),Mountford (1956), Firth (1936), and Guiart (1963b).

For all the relevance of the ecological approach to Oceania, only a few investigators have dealt intensively and theoretically with the ecological aspects of Oceanian society: for example, Fosberg (1963), Sahlins (1958; 1962), Warner (1937), Mead (1938-1949), Thompson (1949), Firth (1959), and Raulet (1960). Nor has much advantage been taken of the region's inviting prospects for exploring the relationships between biology and society (Oliver & Howells 1957; Oliver 1954; Borrie et al. 1957), although a project along these lines is now underway at the University of Washington (Watson 1963).

Every reliable description of a contemporary Oceanian society will of necessity touch on the processes and results of Westernization; in addition there are numerous published reports directly focused upon such events. Such studies range from comprehensive, multitopic community or "tribal"ethnographies, including those of Firth (1959),Hogbin (1939; 1951), Mead (1956), Sahlins (1962),and Barnett (1949), to narrowly delimited concern with single institutions. Among the studies of changing economic systems those of Belshaw (1954; 1955) are outstanding; and Salisbury's quantifiably documented description of the introduction of Western goods into a stone-age New Guinea society is unique (1962). Studies of changing leadership are also well represented in the works of Spoehr (1949), Force (1960), Keesing and Keesing (1956), Guiart (1952), and Oliver (1951).

Studies of urbanization are also beginning to proliferate, as are those of resettlement (Belshaw 1957; Spoehr 1963). But the phenomenon of change that has excited most interest among social scientists in Oceania has been nativistic movements of various kinds, especially the so-called

"cargo cults" that have proliferated with such energy and speed throughout many parts of New Guinea (Worsley 1957; Mead 1956).

And finally, in the subdiscipline of psychological anthropology, it may be justifiably claimed that ethnically oriented field research actually began in Oceania, and that the region has provided the inspiration and the testing grounds for some of the subdiscipline's most gifted and productive investigators. In Gladwin's excellent survey of the subject he notes that practically all explicit anthropological contributions to the study of cognitive process have stemmed from Oceania; two major approaches to a genuinely anthropological (i.e., cultural) theory of personality development have been developed by Mead, Beaglehole, and their colleagues (Gladwin 1961).

In conclusion, although Oceania is everywhere undergoing change, and at varied but generally accelerated rates, the region continues to offer unexcelled research opportunities in social science. The terms of reference for such research are changing, but the phenomena are if anything more dynamic and more directly relevant to phenomena elsewhere. It would be surprising, to this writer at least, if any future investigator should equal the marks set by Malinowski, Radcliffe-Brown, Firth, or Mead in methodological pioneering or in theoretical achievement. But the very size of the legions of researchers now engaged in the region will ensure rich returns for social science, including a measure of data reliability not always characteristic of work done in the days of sporadic and solitary research.

Douglas L. Oliver

[ Other relevant material may be found in Componential Analysis; Exchange AND Display; and the biographies of Codrington; Haddon; Malinowski; Radcliffe- Brown; Rivers; Thurnwald.]

Barnett, Homer G. 1949 Palauan Society: A Study of Contemporary Native Life in the Palau Islands. Eugene: Univ. of Oregon.

Barrau, Jacques 1958 Subsistence Agriculture in Melanesia. Bernice P. Bishop Museum of Polynesian Ethnology and Natural History, Bulletin No. 219. Honolulu: The Museum.

Bateson, Gregory (1936) 1958 Naven: A Survey of the Problems Suggested by a Composite Picture of the Culture of a New Guinea Tribe Drawn From Three Points of View. 2d ed. Stanford Univ. Press.

Bell, Francis L. S. 1953 Primitive Melanesian Economy: An Analysis of the Economic System of the Tanga of New Ireland. Sydney: Australian National Research Council.

Belshaw, Cyril S. 1954 Changing Melanesia. Oxford Univ. Press.

Belshaw, Cyril S. 1955 In Search of Wealth: A Study of the Emergence of Commercial Operations in the Melanesian Society of Southeastern Papua. Memoir No. 80. Menasha, Wise: American Anthropological Association.

Belshaw, Cyril S. 1957 The Great Village: The Economic and Social Welfare of Hanuabada, an Urban Community in Papua. London: Routledge.

Berndt, Ronald M. 1962 Excess and Restraint: Social Control Among a New Guinea Mountain People. Univ. of Chicago Press.

Berndt, Ronald M. 1965 Marriage and the Family in North-eastern Arnhem Land. Pages 77-104 in M. F. Nimkoff (editor), Comparative Family Systems. Boston: Houghton Mifflin.

Berndt, Ronald M.; and BERNDT, CATHERINE H. 1951 Sexual Behavior in Western Arnhem Land. Viking Fund Publications in Anthropology, No. 16. New York: Viking.

Borrie, W. D.; Firth, Raymond W.; and Spillius, James1957 The Population of Tikopia: 1929 and 1952. Population Studies 10:229-252.

Capell, Arthur 1956 A New Approach to Australian Linguistics. Handbook of Australian Languages, Part 1. Univ. of Sydney.

Capell, Arthur 1962 Oceanic Linguistics Today. Current Anthropology 3:371-428. → Includes comments by a number of scholars and Capell's reply.

Elkin, Adolphus P. (1938) 1954 The Australian Aborigines. 3d ed. Melbourne: Angus & Robertson. → A paperback edition was published in 1964 by Doubleday.

Elkin, Adolphus P. 1953 Social Anthropology in Melanesia: A Review of Research. Oxford Univ. Press.

Elkin, Adolphus P. Berndt, Catherine H.; and Berndt,Ronald M. 1950 Art in Arnhem Land. Melbourne: Cheshire.

Firth, Raymond W. 1936 Art and Life in New Guinea.New York: Studio.

Firth, Raymond W. (1939) 1965 Primitive Polynesian Economy. 2d ed. Hamden, Conn.: Shoe String Press.

Firth, Raymond W. 1940 The Work of the Gods in Tikopia. 2 vols. London: Humphries.

Firth, Raymond W. (editor) (1957) 1964 Man and Culture: An Evaluation of the Work of Bronislaw Malinowski. New York: Harper.

Firth, Raymond W. 1959 Social Change in Tikopia: Re-study of a Polynesian Community After a Generation. New York: Macmillan; London: Allen & Unwin.

Force, Roland 1960 Leadership and Culture Change in Palau. Fieldiana, Anthropology, Vol. 50. Chicago Natural History Museum.

Fortune, Reo F. (1932) 1963 Sorcerers of Dobu: The Social Anthropology of the Dobu Islanders of the Western Pacific. Rev. ed. London: Routledge.

Fortune, Reo F. 1935 Manus Religion: An Ethnological Study of the Manus Natives of the Admiralty Islands. American Philosophical Society, Memoirs, Vol. 3. Philadelphia: The Society.

Fosberg, Francis R. (editor) 1963 Man's Place in the Island Ecosystem: A Symposium. Honolulu: Bishop Museum Press.

Gladwin, Thomas 1961 Oceania. Pages 135-171 in Francis L. K. Hsu (editor), Psychological Anthropology: Approaches to Culture and Personality. Homewood, 111.: Dorsey.

Goldman, Irving 1960 The Evolution of Polynesian Societies. Pages 687-712 in Culture in History: Essays in Honor of Paul Radin. Edited by Stanley Diamond. New York: Columbia Univ. Press.

Goodenough, Ward H. 1951 Property, Kin, and Community on Truk. Yale University Publications in Anthropology, No. 46. New Haven: Yale Univ. Press.

Grace, George W. 1964 Movement of the Malayo-Polynesians; 7500 B.C. to A.D. 500: The Linguistic Evidence. Current Anthropology 5, no. 3:361-368.

Guiart, Jean 1951 Societe, rituels et mythes du Nord Ambrym (Nouvelles Hebrides). Journal de la Societe des Oceanistes 7:5-103.

Guiart, Jean 1952 L'organisation sociale et politique du Nord Malekula. Journal de la Societe des Oceanistes 8:149-259.

Guiart, Jean 1963a Structure de la chefferie en Melanesie du Sud. Universite de Paris, Institut d'Ethnologie, Travaux et memoires, Vol. 66. Paris: The Institute. GUIART, JEAN 1963b The Arts of the South Pacific. New York: Golden.

Hogbin, Herbert I. (1934) 1961 Law and Order in Polynesia: A Study of Primitive Legal Institutions.Hamden, Conn.: Shoe String Press.

Hogbin, Herbert I. 1939 Experiments in Civilization:The Effects of European Culture on a Native Community of the Solomon Islands. New York: Humanities.

Hogbin, Herbert I. 1951 Transformation Scene: The Changing Culture of a New Guinea Village. London: Routledge.

Hogbin, Herbert I.; and WEDGWOOD, CAMILLA H. 1953 Local Grouping in Melanesia. Oceania 23:241-276;24:58-76.

Keesing, Felix M. (1941) 1945 The South Seas in the Modern World. Rev. ed. New York: Day.

Keesing, Felix M. 1953 Social Anthropology in Polynesia: A Review of Research. Oxford Univ. Press.

Keesing, Felix M.; and Keesing, Marie M. 1956 Elite Communication in Samoa: A Study of Leadership.Stanford Anthropological Series, No. 3. Stanford Univ. Press.

Klieneberger, H. R. 1957 Bibliography of Oceanic Linguistics. Oxford Univ. Press.

Linton, Ralph; and Wingert, Paul S. 1946 Arts of the South Seas. New York: Museum of Modern Art.

Malinowski, Bronislaw (1922) 1960 Argonauts of the Western Pacific: An Account of Native Enterprise and Adventure in the Archipelagoes of Melanesian New Guinea. London School of Economics and Political Science, Studies, No. 65. London: Routledge; New York: Dutton.

Malinowski, Bronislaw (1926) 1961 Crime and Custom in Savage Society. London: Routledge. → A paperback edition was published in 1959 by Littlefield.

Maltnowski, Bronislaw (1929)1962 The Sexual Life of Savages in North-western Melanesia: An Ethnographic Account of Courtship, Marriage, and Family Life Among the Natives of the Trobriand Islands, British New Guinea. New York: Harcourt.

Malinowski, Bronislaw 1935 Coral Gardens and Their Magic. 2 vols. London: Allen & Unwin.

Mason, Leonard 1957 Ecologic Change and Culture Pattern in the Resettlement of Bikini Marshallese. American Ethnological Society, Proceedings of the Meeting [1957]: 1-6.

Mead, Margaret 1934 Kinship in the Admiralty Islands. New York: American Museum of Natural History.

Mead, Margaret 1938-1949 The Mountain Arapesh. 4 vols. American Museum of Natural History, Anthropological Papers, Vol. 36, part 3; Vol. 37, part 3; Vol. 40, part 1; Vol. 41, part 3. New York: The Museum.

Mead, Margaret 1956 New Lives for Old: Cultural Transformation- Manus, 1928-1953. New York: Morrow.

Meggitt, Mervyn J. 1962 Desert People: A Study of the Walbiri Aborigines of Central Australia. Sydney: Angus & Robertson.

Mountford, Charles P. 1956 Art, Myth and Symbolism,. Melbourne Univ. Press.

Murdock, George P. 1957 World Ethnographic Sample. American Anthropologist New Series 59:664-687. Murdock, George P. 1964 Genetic Classification of the Austronesian Languages: A Key to Oceanic Culture History. Ethnology 3:117-126.

Oliver, Douglas L. (1951) 1961 The Pacific Islands. Rev. ed. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday.

Oliver, Douglas L. (1954) 1956 Somatic Variability and Human Ecology on Bougainville, Solomon Islands. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ., Department of Anthropology.→First issued as an unpublished report prepared for the Office of Naval Research.

Oliver, Douglas L. 1955 A Solomon Island Society:Kinship and Leadership Among the Siuai of Bougainville. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press.

Oliver, Douglas L.; and Howells, W. W. 1957 Microevolution: Cultural Elements in Physical Variation. American Anthropologist New Series 59:965-978.

Pospisil, Leopold 1958 Kapauku Papuans and Their Law. Yale University Publications in Anthropology, No. 54. New Haven: Yale Univ. Press.

Radcliffe-Brown, A. R. (1922) 1948 The Social Organization of Australian Tribes. Glencoe, III.: Free Press.

Raulet, Harry M. 1960 Some Ecological Determinants of Social Structure in Northwest Melanesia. Unpublished manuscript. -→ Available from University Microfilms, Ann Arbor, Mich.

Sahlins, Marshall D. 1958 Social Stratification in Polynesia. Seattle: Univ. of Washington Press.

Sahlins, Marshall D. 1962 Moala: Culture and Nature on a Fijian Island. Ann Arbor: Univ. of Michigan Press.

Salisbury,Richard F. 1962 From Stone to Steel: Economic Consequences of a Technological Change in New Guinea. London and New York: Melbourne Univ. Press; Cambridge Univ. Press.

Solheim, Wilhelm G. 1964 Pottery and the MalayoPolynesians. Current Anthropology 5:360, 376-384.

Spoehr, Alexander 1949 Majuro: A Village in the Marshall Islands. Chicago Natural History Museum, Publication No. 641. Chicago: The Museum.

Spoehr, Alexander (editor) 1963 Pacific Port Towns and Cities. Honolulu: Bishop Museum Press.

Thompson, Laura 1949 The Relations of Men, Animals, and Plants in an Island Community (Fiji). American Anthropologist New Series 51:253-267.

Warner, W. Lloyd (1937) 1958 A Black Civilization: A Social Study of an Australian Tribe. Rev. ed. New York: Harper.

Watson, James D. 1963 A Micro-evolution Study in New Guinea. Journal of the Polynesian Society 72: 188-192.

Williams, Francis E. 1940 Drama of Orokolo: The Social and Ceremonial Life of the Elema. Oxford: Clarendon.

Worsley, Peter 1957 The Trumpet Shall Sound: A Study of "Cargo" Cults in Melanesia. London: Macgibbon & Kee.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Oceania facts, information, pictures | Encyclopedia.com articles about Oceania

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Ethnography of Australia Ethnography of island Oceania History of European contact Social science research in Oceania bibliography Oceania refers to Australia and to those Pacific islands situated between (and including) the Hawaiian archipelago and the Marianas Islands in the north, Easter Island in the east, New Zealand in the south, and New Guinea in the west.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Magma and lava from a Japanese volcano is forming new geography in a remote part of the Pacific Ocean. The Japanese Coast Guard took video of it.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Alfred Wegener, the pioneer of continental drift, thought that the continents as plates move through the oceanic crust, implying thus that the shorelines of the continents are the margins of the continental plates. However, even though that may be initially a reasonable assumption (the shorelines being major geographic features), continental margins need not necessarily be plate margins.