# Lapita pottery decoration ends in Tonga (c. 700 BCE)

URL: https://allhistories.com/tonga/timeline/-700-lapita-pottery-decoration-ends-in-tonga
Location: Tongatapu, Tonga
Themes: main-event

According to Wikipedia's history of Tonga, the decoration of Lapita pottery stopped abruptly about 200 years after the first settlers arrived. Placed against a landing at about 900 BCE, that gives a date near 700 BCE. The pottery that followed was plainer, a pattern also recorded in Samoa and Fiji. The same article says early life was based on small household communities that relied mostly on marine resources, with domesticated animals and plants contributing little for roughly the first 200 years of settlement. The Lapita culture article adds that, in Western Polynesia, pottery became less decorative and simpler over time, though it gives differing dates for when production stopped. Archaeologists use the end of decoration as a marker of cultural change as the settlers adapted to island life. Plain pottery continued for centuries before it also ceased, and the community's identity was carried forward by other crafts and by oral tradition, which preserved Tongan precontact history until European contact. At this point in the timeline (c. 700 BCE), no single ruler governed the islands (c. 900 BCE – c. 900 CE); Lapita settlers and their Polynesian descendants lived in village and chiefdom polities, and no list of rulers survives for the time before the first Tu'i Tonga.

## Why it matters
The fading of Lapita decoration marks the moment settlers' culture began to diverge from its Melanesian roots toward the later Tongan and Polynesian world.

Ruler at the Time: [Prehistory, Lapita settlement and the pre-Tu'i Tonga era](https://allhistories.com/tonga/rulers/prehistory-lapita-settlement-and-the-pre-tui-tonga-era-1)

## Sources
- [Wikipedia — History of Tonga](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Tonga)
- [Wikipedia — Lapita culture](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lapita_culture)