Books by Patrick Vinton (University of California Kirch

This is a comprehensive account of the Lapita people, the common ancestor of the Polynesian, Melanesian and Micronesian peoples who, over the last 4000 years, colonized the islands of the Pacific, as well as New Zealand and territories as far afield as Fiji and Madagascar.

Kirch and Green develop an anthropological approach to long-term history, combining archaeology, comparative ethnography, and historical linguistics. They advance a phylogenetic model for cultural diversification, and apply a triangulation method for historical reconstruction, presenting a detailed reconstruction of Hawaiki, the Ancestral Polynesian culture that flourished some 2,500 years ago.