Christophe Sand

Institute of Research for Development | IRD · 220 - Governance, Risk, Environment and Development (GRED)

The prison heritage of French Guiana and New-Caledonia consists of remains of great value, both for their integrity and the fact that they reflect a shared history to those two territories. The prison colonisation of these two old colonies by France from 1852 to 1953 has led to the sending of more than 100,000 convicts with the aim to encourage the...

The chance recovery of a large pottery sherd from a flat‐bottomed dish with dentate‐stamped decoration in Galley Reach, about 50 km northwest of Port Moresby, raises interesting questions concerning interactions between Lapita arrivals and the established Melanesian communities of mainland Papua New Guinea. While the geographical proximity of the f...

The Hoorn Archipelago in Western Polynesia, comprising the islands of Futuna and Alofi, was in May 1616 the place of the very first long encounter between European navigators and Polynesians in the Central Pacific. The potential consequences of the two week stop of the Dutch sailors J. Lemaire and W. Schouten in Leava Bay have been a neglected topi...

The paper presents the initial study of a unique rock‐art site discovered at the northern tip of the Mainland (Grande Terre) of New Caledonia. On the walls of a cliff‐face at the foot of a karst outcrop near Roche Mauprat, people have carved successive layers of geometric and figurative motifs. The fine, detailed engraving style of some human figur...

Journal de la Société des Océanistes 150, année 2020-1, pp. 5-15 RÉSUMÉ L'application d'une nouvelle technique de levé du relief topo-graphique appelée lidar (détection et estimation de la distance par laser), qui permet de pénétrer sous le couvert végétal, offre de grands potentiels d'identification de sites archéologiques pour les îles du Pacifiq...

Journal de la Société des Océanistes 150, année 2020-1, pp. 89-106 RÉSUMÉ La petite île d'Alofi, en face de Futuna en Polynésie occidentale, a été décrite dès les premiers écrits missionnaires de la fin des années 1830 comme étant désertée. Au milieu des années 1980, dans le cadre d'un programme ethnoarchéologique sur Wallis-et-Futuna, a été réalis...

In this paper we present petrographic analyses of 68 Lapita pottery sherds excavated from the St. Maurice-Vatcha Lapita site located on the southeast coast of Île des Pins, New Caledonia and dated between 950 and 800 cal BC. Nearly two-thirds of these samples were without doubt made in the Diahot River valley region at the northwestern end of the m...

The tremendous progress made in Pacific island archaeology in the last 60 years has considerably advanced our knowledge of early Pacific island societies, the rise of traditional cultural systems, and their later historical developments from European contact onwards. Interdisciplinarity is particularly stimulating in the Pacific region, where the...

As part of a wider study of the transfer of Lapita pottery into and within New Caledonia, we studied a sample of Lapita sherds from the site of Kurin on Maré, Loyalty Islands, New Caledonia. The Loyalty Islands lie between the Vanuatu island chain and the rest of New Caledonia, so it has been suggested that they may have been the first part of New...

Historical narratives on Oceania have over the last two centuries mainly focused on the second half of the eighteenth century as the significant period of first encounters between Pacific Islanders and Western explorers. However, the first crossing of the region by Fernando de Magallanes (Ferdinand Magellan) was in 1521. More importantly, it has be...

This book chapter bears my name as a co-author, even the first author did not bother to ask if I wanted to co-author, nor was I presented at any point with a draft, revised draft or final proof of the chapter. I therefore would like the readers to understand that while most of the chapter is factual data from the 2015 operation (which S. Domergue...

Lapita ceramic design analysis has for decades been dominated by the element-motif approach. Here we outline a structural approach for the analysis of Lapita decoration that looks at design density, layout and organisation. It is used and compared to results from element-motif analysis to assess variation within the Eastern Lapita Province. Ceramic...

French colonization of New Caledonia was achieved in the nineteenth century mainly through convict labor. he penal colony was a land of exile for French convicts, but also for people from northern Africa, with a massive over-representation of Algerians. he Algerian convicts had to create a new life for themselves on Kanak lands by becoming "colonis...

As part of a geological survey in southwest mainland New Caledonia, potsherds were recorded in the profiles at four coastal sites. Subsequent archaeological investigations at two of these sites have allowed us to diversify the ceramic data and show them to be local variants of Podtanean, Puen, and Plum ceramic types. These are characteristic of pro...

en Two recent papers, by Lipson et al. and Posth et al., have challenged current interpretations of the initial settlement of Remote Oceania. We invited Stuart Bedford, who is an author on both papers, to outline their importance, and a number of scholars in various disciplines to comment on their findings. RÉSUMÉ fr Deux articles récents, par Lip...

The small island of Manono, positioned between ‘Upolu and Savai‘i in the Sāmoan Archipelago, is known in oral traditions of West Polynesia as having had an important political role during the immediate pre-Christian period. An archaeological programme carried out between 2012 and 2015 has mainly concentrated on the mapping of parts of the Northern...

Although early contact in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries between Europeans and Pacific Islanders have been well documented from historical data, the possible local impacts on Oceanians have rarely been analyzed in any detail. Indigenous oral traditions and archaeology appear today as primary sources that complement the information from wri...

W.R. Dickinson, as part of his wide study of the geological history of the Pacific islands, has linked the unique case of the deeply submerged Lapita site of Mulifanua in western Upolu (Samoa) to the slow subsidence of Upolu island. Recent archaeological research on the neighbouring small island of Manono has yielded new and detailed data on this g...

The giant flightless bird Sylviornis neocaledoniae (Aves: Sylviornithidae) existed on La Grande Terre and Ile des Pins, New Caledonia, until the late Holocene when it went extinct shortly after human arrival on these islands. The species was generally considered to be a megapode (Megapodiidae) until the family Sylviornithidae was erected for it in...

Excel spreadsheet of measurements of megapodes and selected galliforms. (XLSX)

Word document of list of characters used in the Phylogenetic analysis. (DOCX)

Additional plots from the PCA. (DOCX)

The nexus file for the phylogenetic analysis conducted. (NEX)

Results of petrographic analysis for ten New Caledonian Lapita pottery assemblages are presented in this paper. These findings enable us to identify several major pottery production areas during the Lapita period. It could be argued that the rise of pottery production traditions at the northern bank of the Diahot Valley near Ouégoa/Pouébo in the no...

Archaeological excavations on Tiga provide the first vouchered herpetological records for this small island between Lifou and Maré in the Loyalty Islands. Eighty-three skeletal elements from four sites yielded material assignable to skinks (Emoia loyaltiensis, Lioscincus nigrofasciolatus), geckos (Bavayia crass i-collis, B. sp., Gehyra georgpotthas...

What were the social structures of prehistoric Melanesia really like – and how did they evolve? This study of the archaeology of New Caledonia shows how the west has had a double impact on its prehistory. First, explorers altered the social structure by their arrival and the introduction of western diseases, and then anthropologists created an imag...

Rock art in an inland cave on the island of Lifou, New Caledonia, has been radiocarbon dated. A cluster of early paintings date to 2500 years ago, soon after the arrival of the first settlers, who must have quickly gone inland probably in pursuit of fresh water, available near the cave. They left their mark on the cave in the form of numerous hand...

Lithic artefacts of the Lapita period have not often been studied in detail. This state of affairs is due to several local particularities, amongst which poor archaeological record and material, or geological absence of flakeable rocks on island environments leading to shell-based artefacts and tools. Talasean obsidian however, sourcing in general...

The eponymous "site 13" of Lapita on the West Coast of New Caledonia's Grande Terre, has a unique historical importance in the study of the Lapita cultural complex, being the first archaeological locality with dentate stamped sherds to have been dated. It has shown its richness, especially with the discovery of a series of complete pots, burial pit...

A new and extinct species of Austral snipe (Aves : Scolopacidae : Coenocorypha) is described from late Holocene cave deposits in New Caledonia. The new species is larger than all congeners in the New Zealand archipelago, including its subantarctic islands, but is slightly smaller than C. miratropica from Viti Levu, Fiji. Better developed ligamental...

New-Caledonian archaeology mainly started to focus on the last millennium of the pre-European chronology with the creation of the Archaeology Department of New Caledonia, in the early 1990’s. A series of fieldworks specifically investigating what has been labelled « the traditional Kanak cultural complex » were put in place. A set of data and preli...

This paper reports on the discovery and geochemical sourcing of an obsidian flake from a Lapita site on Vorovoro Island off the northeast coast of Vanua Levu, Fiji. The flake is sourced using pXRF to the Kutau/Bao source located on the Willaumez Peninsula, West New Britain in the Bismarck Archipelago.

One of the striking characteristics of Lapita archaeology during the past century has been the very limited number of preserved whole or nearly whole pots found in excavations. This appears odd for ceramics mostly interpreted in the scientific literature as non-utilitarian and carrying social or ritual symbolism. The clear connection between dentat...

In 1995 a small cave near Mé Auré (site WMD007) on the west coast of New Caledonia, about 120 km northwest of Nouméa, was excavated and found to contain mainly owl and human midden deposits. Some of the contents have already been documented and the present paper completes the study by reporting the human-related materials, including human bone frag...

In 1995 a small cave near Mé Auré (site WMD007) on the west coast of New Caledonia, about 120 km northwest of Nouméa, was excavated and found to contain mainly owl and human midden deposits. Some of the contents have already been documented and the present paper completes the study by reporting the human-related materials, in-cluding human bone fra...

Archaeologists have long debated the origins and mode of dispersal of the immediate predecessors of all Polynesians and many populations in Island Melanesia. Such debates are inextricably linked to a chronological framework provided, in part, by radiocarbon dates. Human remains have the greatest potential for providing answers to many questions per...

New Caledonia's Cultural ChronologyRock Art Research in New CaledoniaNew Caledonian PetroglyphsSome Kanak Oral Traditions on PetroglyphsPainted Rock ArtAnalysisConclusion References

Archaeological studies on the mining regions on New Caledonia’s main island have only really started in recent times, as part of impact assessments imposed to mining companies. This paper presents the outcome of partial surveys fulfilled in two mining regions, respectively the Camp des Sapins of Thio and the upper valley of Tontouta. Through the fi...

This paper presents a summary of the excavations fulfilled in 2007 on a seashore site of the Bourail region, on the west coast of New Caledonia's main Island (Grande Terre). The excavation of the "Ecrins de Po6" location (WBR047) was aimed to contribute to the study of a poorly known phase of the cultural chronology of this Island of Southern Melan...

Cet article présente une synthèse des fouilles menées en 2007 sur le site de bord de mer WBR047 des «Écrins de Poé » , dans la région de Bourail, sur la côte ouest de la Grande Terre de la Nouvelle-Calédonie. Ce programme avait pour objectif d’étudier une phase archéologique encore trop peu connue de la chronologie culturelle de cet archipel mélané...

La Nouvelle-Caledonie, archipel de Melanesie occupe depuis 1853 par la France et ayant subi un processus de colonisation complexe, est un condense de tous les paradoxes de notre globalisation. Le peuple autochtone, issu d’une histoire ancienne, a eu a subir entre le milieu du xixe siecle et la premiere moitie du xxe siecle une colonisation majeure...

The region forming Island Melanesia is located in the southwestern Pacific. It stretches from the large island of New Guinea in the northwest to the archipelago of Fiji in the east, at the border of western Polynesia. The islands forming the north of Melanesia were settled more than 30,000 years ago, well before the southern and eastern parts of Me...

Archaeologists have long debated the origins and mode of dispersal of the immediate predecessors of all Polynesians and many populations in Island Melanesia. Such debates are inextricably linked to a chronological framework provided, in part, by radiocarbon dates. Human remains have the greatest potential for providing answers to many questions per...

The terminology presently used for the prehistoric ceramic chronology in the archipelago of New Caledonia in southern Melanesia was defined by J.C. Galipaud in the late 1980s. Divided into two periods named Koné and Naïa-Oundjo, each characterised by different pottery traditions, the terminology of this chronology has been a useful research tool fo...

This article presents the results and perspectives of a preliminary study of woody species manipulation in pre-colonial New Caledonia. The study aims to use anthracological analysis to investigate vegetation changes linked to pre-colonial settlement patterns, and the human management of woody resources. In the first part of the research, archaeolog...