Abstract

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 been widely neglected that during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, Spanish, Dutch, and Portuguese explorers navigated through parts of Polynesia, Melanesia, and Micronesia, making regular landfalls and contact with many islands and archipelagos. The potentially devastating consequences of these early encounters (i.e., with interpersonal violence between natives and newcomers as well as the potential introduction of new deadly diseases) are well known for islands like Guam. They possibly also influenced the cultures and traditions of other archipelagos of Oceania before the better known voyages of Cook, La Perouse, and others more than 150 years later. Drawing on historical data and the scarcely available archaeological evidence, this paper aims to show that there is an urgent need to reconsider the early phase of Pacific-Western contacts as a key period in the shaping of the “traditional” indigenous cultural behaviors in parts of Oceania. This assessment has the potential to profoundly change our understanding of the ethnographical observations of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries that have been produced and used in the last two centuries to define a baseline of the beginning of Western impacts on Indigenous societies in the region.

摘要

在过去的两个世纪里，关于大洋洲的历史叙述主要集中在 18 世纪下半叶，这是太平洋岛民与西方探险家首次相遇的重要时期。然而，费尔南多·德·麦哲伦 (Ferdinand Magellanes) 第一次穿越该地区是在 1521 年。 更重要的是，在 16 和 17 世纪期间，西班牙、荷兰和葡萄牙的探险家曾航行过波利尼西亚、美拉尼西亚的部分地区，这一点一直被广泛忽视和密克罗尼西亚，定期登陆并与许多岛屿和群岛接触。这些早期遭遇的潜在破坏性后果（即当地人和新来者之间的人际暴力以及可能引入新的致命疾病）在关岛等岛屿上是众所周知的。150 多年后，在库克、拉佩鲁斯和其他人更广为人知的航行之前，它们可能还影响了大洋洲其他群岛的文化和传统。本文利用历史数据和稀缺的考古证据，表明迫切需要重新考虑太平洋-西方接触的早期阶段，将其视为部分地区“传统”土著文化行为形成的关键时期。大洋洲。这项评估有可能深刻地改变我们对过去两个世纪中产生和使用的 18 世纪和 19 世纪初的人种学观察的理解，以定义西方对该地区土著社会影响开始的基线。