For different reasons, mostly for conferences, I have prepared posters summarizing my research – posters designed to reach broad audiences, sometime through languages other than English. A selection of these posters is shown below, from latest to earliest. I hope you find some informative – you are free to reproduce them with appropriate acknowledgement (contact me if you want a higher-resolution pdf).
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Ancient Hill Forts of Ono Island (Kadavu, Fiji) – June 2023
The Kadavu Island group (southern Fiji) is a series of high volcanic islands. Several 19th-century accounts of Kadavu comment on its hill forts. Take this comment about the fort on Naborua on the slopes of Nabukelevu, the young volcano in the west of Kadavu …
Three long rock headlands jut out from Nabukelevu, the extinct volcano, like the buttress roots of rain-forest trees, narrow with blunt ends and a precipice on each side. The fortress [of Naborua] was perched on the central ridge. Its only path led along the mountain side, very narrow so that approach had to be in single file. The fort had a death drop on all sides.
Alan Tippett (1958)
Keen to learn more about the age and function and histories of Kadavu’s hill forts, I led a team from the Fiji Museum and University of the Sunshine Coast (and others) to the island of Ono in the eastern part of the group. We mapped five hill forts and reported our results in two posters – one in English (below) and one in iTaukei Bauan (next).
Ancient Hill Forts of Bua (Fiji) – June 2019
In December 2015, with my colleagues Sepeti Matararaba and Mereoni Camailakeba from the Fiji Museum, I took the inter-island ferry from Natovi (Viti Levu Island) to Nabouwalu (Vanua Levu Island). From Nabouwalu in the heart of Bua Province, we drove to the chiefly village (Bua Lomanikoro) where we asked permission to undertake a study of Bua’s ancient hillforts. We stayed three days, permission granted, connections made, and a promise elicited from us to undertake an honest and inclusive study – and to return the results to the community when it was over. We finished in 2019, published an excellent and comprehensive study, and prepared posters explaining our results in four languages. You can see the English version below but we also wrote a version in three other Fijian languages – iTaukei Bauan (the standard Fijian language), Fiji Hindi (the standard Hindi language of Fiji), and iTaukei Buan (the local dialect) – the latter perhaps the first time this had ever been used in written scientific communication.
I took printed copies of these posters in full colour at A0 size back to Bua in June 2019 and presented them to the Tui Bua (the paramount chief of the province) for display in local schools and communities. Oru sa vakavinavinaka vakalevu vei kemiau a turaga kaya marama ni vanua vakaturaga ko Cakaunitabua ina omiau veivakaitaukeitaki kaya veitokoni ina sasaga ni vakadidike qoi.
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Underestimating God – Spiritual Beliefs and Climate Change – July 2017
Anyone who has spent any time in the Pacific Islands – and countless other “developing” countries – will undoubtedly be aware that their inhabitants are generally far more religious, more frequent churchgoers, than is the case in many richer countries. In the Pacific Islands, as elsewhere, religious beliefs (often woven together with longstanding cultural understandings and practices) influence people’s attitudes towards risk. In the Pacific, religion gives people hope, it underwrites self-belief, it helps recover from disaster.
Outsiders sometimes characterize religion as a “barrier” to climate-change adaptation but it is of course an opportunity, just one not easily reconciled with science agendas. Complemented with an article in The Conversation, this poster was produced for a conference of the Institute of Australian Geographers in July 2017.
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Adolescent Understandings of Climate Change in the Pacific – July 2017
Most people agree that the people of the Pacific Islands region face the disruptive effects of climate change sooner than people in most other parts of the world. The importance of preparing Pacific Island peoples to cope with and to endure future climate change is clear. But it’s a steep climb. Research done with psychologist Bridie Scott-Parker and Rosie Kumar led to the second poster with which I was associated at the Institute of Australian Geographers conference in July 2017. Here it is –
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“Which Island are You Going To Destroy?” – the Tale of Mad Roraimenu and his Vengeful Sinking of Teonimenu – June 2016
Ancient stories that may appear to us to be fictions, entertainments, celebrations of cultural richness, or just great yarns … often have other meanings. Recent research suggests that many ancient stories were created following some catastrophic event when the eyewitnesses (who could not read or write) sought to rationalize what had happened – and pass their insights on to subsequent generations.
This poster represents research conducted with Tony Heorake and others in Solomon Islands (Southwest Pacific Ocean) about an island named Teonimenu that disappeared abruptly one day. Local residents ascribed its disappearance to the revenge of cuckolded Roraimenu who bought a charm from a nearby island and paddled his canoe back to Teonimenu, the island where his wife and her lover lived. People who saw Roraimenu pass discerned his purpose and called out nervously to him across the water, “Hanua i wei oto a nai warea?” … “Which island are you going to destroy?”
This was my third successive attempt to win a prize at the annual Research Week of the university where I work. It fared no better than the previous attempts (see below)!
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Coastal Stability of Pohnpei Island – June 2015
You may not know that some oceanic islands move up and down: pushed from below, from the side, their foundations intermittently bulldozed or undermined. It’s a problem for some. Consider for instance that in an era of rising sea level (such as we live in today), a sinking island will experience much amplified submergence.
The island of Pohnpei is a wondrous place … but pack an umbrella for it is also one of the wettest places in the world. The reason for this is that it is so high – the island is the remains of a single volcano reaching nearly eight hundred metres above the ocean on the highest parts of which around eight metres of rain is dumped each year.
In the past, geologists have argued about whether the island volcano of Pohnpei is sinking (perhaps under its own great weight) or not. It makes a difference to the people living there along its coast. Here is a poster I produced from my research in Pohnpei with Rosie Kumar that shows the island is not sinking significantly.
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Aboriginal Traditions about Flooding of the Australian Coast – the first publication in July 2014
Over the last few years, I have written much about Australian Aboriginal (Indigenous) traditions that may recall the drowning of Australia’s coastline after the last great ice age ended. Since the rise in the ocean surface that caused this drowning ended about 7000 years ago, all these traditions must be older. Back in July 2014, I was tentatively exploring these ideas, hardly daring to think about their astonishing implications. Here is the poster I produced for the annual Research Week at the university where I work – the six groups of stories have now increased to twenty-seven.
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Climate-Driven Sea-Level Fall causes Food Crises and Settlement-Pattern Changes in the Pacific Islands – July 2012
Most people in the world don’t live on islands in the middle of an ocean, so we don’t really know what it is like to do so. But what is clear is that islands are often resource-constrained in ways that larger landmasses generally are not. When we look back across the sweep of history of the Pacific Islands, we see several occasions when islands were impacted by some extraneous change (like a cyclone, an earthquake or tsunami, or a longer-term change in the temperature or the sea level) that forced the islanders to adapt – to rethink and reconfigure the way they lived. It was a matter of survival.
In the tropical Pacific islands, there have been at least two periods when comparatively rapid yet sustained falls in the ocean surface (sea level) forced such change. One occurred about 2500 years ago and saw the end – across the island groups of the western Pacific – of the archaeologically-visible early period of human settlement, what we call the Lapita Period in the southwest Pacific. The other occurred around the year AD 1300 and led – within a few decades – to the wholesale abandonment of coastal settlements and the establishment of upland settlements in fortifiable locations. These examples illustrate exactly what it means to live on an island in the middle of the ocean … and what it sometimes takes to survive there.
This poster was displayed at the 34th International Geological Congress in Brisbane in July 2012. The research on the societal collapse thought to be driven by sea-level fall around 2500 years ago was also the subject of an article in The Conversation while the “AD 1300 Event” was the main focus of my 2007 book. Note the photo of the archaeologist, my old friend and collaborator, Sepeti Matararaba posing (in his 70s) with his trowel on one of the rock walls hundreds of metres above the coast on the Vatia Peninsula in Fiji.
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Fiji’s Earliest Human Settlement – January 2012
In December 2003, walking along a beach in southwest Viti Levu Island (Fiji), we were astounded at the numbers of intricately-decorated potsherds we could see. We were Sepeti Matararaba (Fiji Museum), Roselyn Kumar (University of the South Pacific) and myself. We did a preliminary excavation, then returned a further seven times with hundreds of students, scientists and volunteers, to undertake a comprehensive excavation of what is still likely to have been the earliest human settlement anywhere in the Fiji Islands, established perhaps 3100 years ago on what was then a reef-fringed island off the coast of large Viti Levu Island (to which it is now attached. The site is called Bourewa. Here is a map of all the pits we dug.
None of our research there would have been possible without the permission and hospitality of the people of nearby Vuhama Village. Vina valevu lemuju vivuke o Taukei Guhuituva qeniru na koi Vuhama.
Posters summarizing our research have been published in English (shown below) and iTaukei Bauan.
In addition to the summary poster above, a few years earlier we produced a set of six thematic posters about the Bourewa excavations which can be found here.