The postponed agenda: Archaeology and human biogeography in the twenty-first century

Scholarly views on the prehistory of the Pacific Islanders are currently undergoing a major shift in perspective and underlying assumptions. This shift is driven by new research data and a need for new theoretical perspectives on space, time, and causal process. A new research agenda is coming to the fore, replacing the agenda guiding Pacific studies since the 1950s. Instead of looking at these islands as remote, undeveloped human colonies scattered across a vast and empty expanse of sea, we are finding that the Pacific was a notably early sphere of human accomplishments, on land and sea, where the ocean was more an avenue than a barrier for cultural interchange. The roots of this new perspective can be traced back, in part, to the Wenner-Gren/Smithsonian conference on human biogeography held in Washington, D.C., in 1974.