LAPITA PEOPLE: The most vivid direct evidence of Lapita occupation in the Lau Group comes from a discovery made during Simon Best’s 1976 fieldwork on Lakeba.

Best, an archaeologist at Auckland University working with a scientific team directed by Professor John Young of Adelaide University, was investigating a cave on a small island approximately eleven miles off Lakeba when the team noticed large pieces of pottery nestling in the mud beneath a clear pool.

Divers brought up two virtually complete pots and many additional pieces. The two complete pots were transported to Auckland sealed in damp sawdust and plastic bags — carried on the archaeologists’ laps for the entire return journey.

Radiocarbon analysis dated the pots at approximately 2,300 years old, or 325 BC.

Best identified them as probable cooking pots, possibly left at the pool when being washed.

The pots were among the rarest of Lapita finds: most ancient pottery is reconstructed from tiny sherds, like a jigsaw assembled with glue and imagination.

These two were almost completely whole, preserved by the water in the cave for over two millennia.

One pot was later donated to the Fiji Museum, where it was handed carefully into the arms of the then-director Mr Charles Hunt in December 1978.

Best’s subsequent PhD thesis (Lakeba: A Prehistory of a Fijian Island, University of Auckland, 1984) established from radiocarbon analysis across multiple sites that Lakeba was first occupied by humans around 1300 BC…

[Source: Vunirewa, Rusiate. ‘The Priceless Pot.’ Fiji Times, 2 December 2022 (republishing and contextualising the original Fiji Times report of 15 December 1978); Best, S. Lakeba: A Prehistory of a Fijian Island. Unpublished PhD thesis, Department of Anthropology, University of Auckland, 1984.]

Best’s 1300 BC date for Lakeba’s first human occupation is significant for the Matuku research, but it is not the earliest possible date for the Yasayasa Moala group as a whole.

If Lakeba was first occupied around 1300 BC, the pot found in the cave — dated to 325 BC — was made approximately 1,000 years after first occupation.

The Lapita sherds confirmed at Totoya (Udu, Lawakilevu, Waroka) by Clark (1999) suggest settlement of the Moala group from approximately 1,000 BC.

However, the Yasayasa Moala, including Matuku, may well have been occupied earlier — around 1400 to 1500 BC — consistent with the Lapita settlement timeline at Naigani in the Lomaiviti Group and with the broader pattern of Lapita expansion across Fiji during this period. Naigani Island (northeast of Ovalau) is one of the earliest confirmed Lapita sites in Fiji, with settlement dates broadly consistent with a 1400–1500 BC horizon.

The Yasayasa Moala sits geographically between the Lomaiviti Group and the outer Lau islands — precisely the migration corridor along which Lapita peoples moved as they expanded eastward from the Bismarck Archipelago through the Melanesian and Polynesian island chains.

An earlier occupation horizon of 1400–1500 BC for the Yasayasa Moala, predating the Clark (1999) confirmed Totoya date by two to five centuries, would be consistent with both the regional pattern and the depth of oral tradition documented in this research. [Author’s note: Based on Best (1984), Clark (1999), and the regional Lapita settlement sequence.

This is a working hypothesis, not yet confirmed by specific radiocarbon dating at Matuku.]

A further dimension of Fiji’s deep-time human history is raised by the linguistic anthropologist Dr Paul Geraghty, whose research findings — brought to wider community attention by the Fijian digital historian Elaine Lini Falita Schroeder — posit the existence of a pre-Lapita human population in Fiji approximately 5,000–6,000 years ago.

Geraghty’s analysis suggests that this earlier population may have survived into the historical period as a very small remnant — perhaps one to two percent of the population by the time of European contact — with the majority having died out or been absorbed into the arriving Lapita and post-Lapita populations.

The question of whether this earlier population is connected to the skeletal remains found at the Sigatoka Dunes — excavated across three distinct archaeological phases — remains open.

From an entirely independent direction, Ronald Gatty — a lifetime Fiji resident with seventy-five years of engagement with highland oral tradition, NLC access, and the Fiji National Archives collection — provides corroboration for the pre-Nakauvadra population layer from the highland perspective.

Gatty states explicitly that ‘the highlanders are not people primarily of Nakauvadra Mountain origin. They were here much earlier than immigrants who settled around Nakauvadra.

Those were a later people, associated with the ancestral god Degei’ (Gatty, Naitasiri).

He further reports that ‘Ratu Sukuna’s study of official records shows that not a single tribe of Naitasiri Province claimed its origin from the Nakauvadra Mountain range of Ra Province.’ American archaeologist E.W. Gifford’s survey of NLC yavutu (founding settlement sites) likewise found none in Naitasiri attributing Nakauvadra origins.

Gatty’s central thesis is that the kaiColo (Viti Levu highlanders) represent a Melanesian cultural and genetic stratum that predates the Polynesian-influenced Nakauvadra migrations — exactly the cultural division that Geraghty’s linguistic analysis and the Sigatoka Dune skeletal evidence suggest at the physical-anthropological level.

Gatty further identifies the yavusa concept itself as a Polynesian import: ‘the term yavusa developed from the Polynesian immigrants who mostly settled around the Nakauvadra mountain range,’ and ‘the concept of paramount chiefs is a foreign concept, imported from Polynesia,’ taking root first in Laucala before extending through Verata to the wider Fijian world.

The constitutional hierarchy of the Roko Sau, Tui Ketei, Tui Yaroi, and Tui Nayau documented in this research is therefore, in Gatty’s analysis, a Polynesian-origin paramountcy system layered over an earlier Melanesian social order — precisely the process that the Kubunavanua/Tuivanuakula founding wave enacted when it brought the yavusa framework to Moala and the Yasayasa Moala.

Gatty also identifies a moiety system among central highlanders called tako and lavo — a dual-category system governing marriage and social roles, found in Naitasiri, Namosi, Ra, Navosa, and Ba — which he notes ‘does not exist among the diluted highlanders who came under Bauan influence along the Waidina River.’

This dissolution of the moiety system on contact with Bauan/Polynesian culture maps the social transition undergone by highland communities as they descended via the Wainibuka corridor to the Tailevu coast — the same corridor through which Tuivanuakula’s genealogical world connected the Nakauvadra interior to Verata and the outer islands.

[Source: Gatty, Ronald. Naitasiri: Custom and Culture of the ‘Real’ Fijians. Province series on Fijian Tribes and Territories. Wainadoi Gardens, Namosi Province, n.d.]”

Prologue 1B — Pre-Migration Highland Traditions: The Tako/Lavo System and the Five Siblings of Tomaniivi!!

Kitione Vuataki’s ‘Softly Fiji’ (WestBow Press, 2013) adds a theological dimension to the tako/lavo moiety system that Gatty’s account (above) identifies only as a social institution. Vuataki records: ‘In the hills of the Nalawa district, to the west of Namatakula and on the coast of Nadroga to the south, are the Father and the Son, who are remembered by custom as Tako-Lavo.

The word Tako means “Father”, and Lavo means “Son”.’ Vuataki interprets the surviving tako/lavo tradition — which his book documents as a pre-Christian theological memory preserved in geographical and ceremonial form across the Nalawa-Nadroga highlands — as encoding the names of a Father-and-Son divine pair.

His reading is explicitly from within the community’s own explanatory tradition, not an external scholarly imposition.

Whether this interpretation is accepted as pre-Christian theology or as a Christian interpretive overlay onto an indigenous moiety system, Vuataki’s record adds a significant dimension to Gatty’s social description: the tako/lavo distinction that Gatty documented as governing marriage and social roles in Naitasiri, Namosi, Ra, Navosa, and Ba was, in the community’s own explanatory tradition, named after divine figures — Father and Son — rather than being merely a classificatory social device.

This cosmological grounding of the moiety system is consistent with the research’s documentation of the pre-Christian sacred landscape of Viti Levu’s highlands, including the Kalinimolikula Scroll’s recording of the 899 AD TuaLeiTa assembly and the Five Siblings of Tomaniivi tradition recorded in the Lomaidreketi corpus (see Prologue 3; Part XII).

Vuataki’s book also records that the Nakauvadra oratory tradition — in which blessings end with the words ‘mudu o’ (‘to end with He who comes in the pillar of clouds’) — was later changed by Degei’s followers to end ‘in Nakauvadra’, encoding a religious transition from the Father-and-Son cosmology to the snake-god tradition. [Source: Vuataki, Kitione. Softly Fiji.

Bloomington, IN: WestBow Press (A Division of Thomas Nelson), 2013. ISBN 978-1-4497-8995-4. Period 1, Chapter 1.]

Two newly available sources confirm and substantially extend the Tako/Lavo analysis already documented in this research. First, a community-produced Fijian-language text titled ‘Na veiwekani Qaqa ni TAKO kei na LAVO’ provides an authoritative insider account of the system.

It confirms that Tako/Lavo is ‘a very ancient relationship found in the Colo (highlands) of Viti Levu’ (‘dua na veiwekani makawa sara ka kunei ena Colo ni noda Veivanua e Viti Levu’).

Its documented distribution extends across: Ra, parts of Naitasiri, Serua, Namosi, NAVOSA, and specifically the Ba highlands (Colo i Ba) — a geographic spread that precisely encompasses the Nadrau/Taladrau highland world, the Nadakuni/Waimaro world, and the Navosa corridor from which both branches of the Matuku migration originated. The text states the constitutional mechanism explicitly: ‘kevaka e Lavo na iTubutubu Turaga, o ratou na Luvena (Tagane se Yalewa) era na Tako taucoko’ — if the founding ancestor is Lavo, ALL of his children are Tako; their children are Lavo again; and so on in strict patrilineal alternation.

The social binding function is equally explicit: ‘kevaka e rau mani sota e lewe rua ka rau Lavo se Tako ruarua rau wili me rau Veitacini dina’ — if two strangers meet and both are Lavo or both Tako, they count as true blood siblings (veitacini dina). And: ‘ke rau sota e dua e Tako ka dua tale e Lavo, rau sa na wili vaka Veiluveni se Veitamani. O koya e Tako ena wili me Tama vua e Lavo’ — if one is Tako and the other Lavo, they relate as parent-and-child: the Tako is the Father (Tama) of the Lavo.

This constitutional-social mechanism is the living operational form of the Tako=Father / Lavo=Son theology documented by Vuataki (above): the two names encode not only a cosmological Father-and-Son pair but a practical social technology for binding dispersed highland communities into an extended kin network across hundreds of kilometres.

The Two Brothers tradition can now be read through this lens: the elder brother who travels (becomes the founder of the new Matuku community) may be the Tako (Father/elder), while the younger brother who stays at Nadakuni (Buinimasi) holds the Lavo (Son/younger) role — and their descendants across the highland-island distance would recognise each other as veitacini dina (true siblings) by virtue of their shared Tako or Lavo classification.

Second, Adrian Tanner’s peer-reviewed article in Oceania (66[3]:230–251, 1996) provides independent scholarly confirmation: ‘Throughout the interior there is an unusual moiety system.

Membership in each moiety is alternating patrilineal… One implication of the moieties, named “Tako” and “Lavo”, is that they effectively extend familiar kin relationships to otherwise socially distant individuals.’

Tanner adds, citing Paul Geraghty (personal communication, 1994): ‘These moieties do not exist anywhere else in Fiji, including the Vitilevu coast, except for small areas of Serua and Ra.’

The Navatusila founding legend — as recorded by Tanner’s fieldwork in the western interior — states that the yavusa that scattered from Navatusila ‘can be identified today as all those having the tako-lavo moiety system’: making the moiety distribution map a direct tracing of the Navatusila dispersal.

Tanner’s article further documents (relevant to the name BUINIMASI) that masi (barkcloth) in the western interior was manufactured by MEN, unlike elsewhere in Fiji where it is a women’s practice (citing Roth 1934, who documented this in Navatusila, Viti Levu).

A man named Buinimasi — ‘the heart/core of the masi’ — would thus be the custodian of a specifically male highland ceremonial craft tradition, fully consistent with the ‘keeper brother’ role at Nadakuni.

[Source: Community text, ‘Na veiwekani Qaqa ni TAKO kei na LAVO’ (unpublished Fijian-language community document); Tanner, Adrian. ‘Colo Navosa: Local history and the construction of region in the western interior of Vitilevu, Fiji.’ Oceania 66(3):230–251, 1996; Geraghty, Paul. Personal communication, 1994 (cited in Tanner 1996); Roth, G.K. ‘The Manufacture of Bark-cloth in Fiji (Navatusila, Viti Levu Island).’ J. Royal Anthropological Institute 64:289–303, 1934.] – THE MIGRATION OF THE WAIMARO PEOPLES TO YASAYASA MOALA AND THE ISLE OF MATUKU — (A Genealogical and Constitutional History of Matuku Island, Lau, Fiji.)