Washington and Lee University
For the last three weeks, thanks to an agreement with the Vanuatu Kaljoral Senta (VKS, the national cultural centre of Vanuatu), and a Lenfest Grant from Washington and Lee, I have been conducting archaeological fieldwork studying the lives of the first missionaries to Erromango and Tanna Islands in the southern province of Tafea, Vanuatu. This work will build on my research focused on the interaction between European and Pacific Islander communities during the 19th century.
Shortly after arriving in Vanuatu, I set off for remote Erromango Island, landing on the one open airstrip at Ipota, and taking a boat to Dillon's Bay on the other side of the island (there are no serviceable roads on Erromango, so all travel was by small motorboat or on foot). Dillon's Bay was where some of the first encounters between Erromangan people and Christian Missionaries took place. Initially, interactions were brief, as John Williams, the first missionary to arrive in 1839, and his companion James Harris were murdered by local people shortly after arriving at Dillon's Bay. This was in retaliation for brutal acts by some of the white sandalwood traders operating in the area, for whom the unwitting missionaries were mistaken. Some years later, after four years in Dillon's Bay from 1857-1861, missionary George Gordon and his wife Ellen were likewise murdered because of atrocities committed by traders, who by this time were also kidnapping native people for slave labor on plantations in Fiji and Australia.
Part of my research, which was done with local "Filwoka" (field workers affiliated with VKS), was to document different sites associated with these first missionaries. The goal is to tie local histories to places on the ground as a way of bringing the past to life for visitors and local people. Besides the places where these dramatic events happened, archaeological work has shed some light on some of the ways that people created memorials for these martyrs in the context of the indigenous landscape. In the case of the Gordons, I am also interested in using archaeology to see what their daily lives were like in the course of working at the mission during their four years on Erromango.
In Dillon's Bay I also documented the mission station of Erromango's first successful long-term European missionary, Hugh Angus Robertson, resident from 1872-1904. One of the churches Robertson built along with native laborers is still standing in the modern village at Dillon's Bay (see first picture). In addition, we made detailed maps of the stone foundation of Robertson's mission house, where he lived with his wife, and a number of stone walls that marked off different spaces in the mission compound.
After our work in Dillon's Bay, we took another boat around to Port Narvin, the closest inhabited village to Potnuma, which was the mission site of James Gordon (brother of George), who lived on the island from 1864-1872. Gordon was also killed by local people after several years of service on the island. Again, we worked to make detailed notes and maps of different features, including James Gordon's house, mission church (see second picture), and his tomb. We also mapped and photographed two petroglyph (rock art) fields, where people had pecked images onto smooth slabs of volcanic stone by the shore. These were particularly interesting, because in addition to images typical of rock art, such as faces, circles, and lines of cupules (small round depressions), these fields had images recording some things that were new to the islands, such as European ships and bottles (see third picture). When our work was finished in Port Narvin, we walked south, back to Ipota, where I caught a small plane from the grass airstrip back to Port Vila, the capitol city of Vanuatu on Efate Island.
Life on Erromango was "rustic". Electricity on the island is limited to unreliable gasoline generators (as evidenced by a fried laptop cable!), and there is no running water. That said, my crew and I were always welcomed by the friendly local communities, and stayed in fine thatched roof houses. Food was always plentiful, consisting mostly of starchy tubers like yams, taro, and manioc, supplemented at times by fresh fish and local greens. I quickly picked up bislama, the local pidgin language spoken throughout Vanuatu, and I even learned a few words of Sie, the local Erromangan language where I was working. In addition to fieldwork, we made a number of presentations on this research to the local communities, who will be closely involved with this project throughout its development. It is my hope that, in addition to contributing to scholarly work on the archaeology of missionization, I can produce some historical material that will be useful for local people in understanding and interpreting their own past.
After returning to Port Vila, I spent some time in the Nasonal Laebri (National Library), exploring some of the literary sources on the early missions in Vanuatu. I also began to reflect on some of the questions raised over the course of this research. One of the interesting questions is what drove these missionaries, who came from England, Scotland, Nova Scotia, and New Zealand to work in Vanuatu, especially once they knew of the potential dangers of working in the islands? How did they think of themselves in relation to the local people, and how did they express this in terms of their dress, housing, and other habits? How did they adapt to everyday life once arriving on Erromango? From the other perspective, what did the native Erromangans think of these missionaries and their strange customs? How would the two groups have interacted and changed one another over the long-term? Where did the missionaries fit within the larger context of capitalistic and imperialistic endeavors in the Pacific?
As is typical of the early stages of a research project, I have many questions but few answers. That is encouraging, though, as I hope this will be a multi-year project studying both the European and Native sides of this story from the unique perspective of archaeology. While the missionaries left behind some books, diaries, and letters, there is an untapped resource in the material record that might speak to the unwritten parts of this history.
Tomorrow, I take off again for two more weeks of fieldwork among the mission stations at Lenakel, Kwamera, and Port Resolution on Tanna Island, also in the south of Vanuatu. Hopefully this work will expand my perspective on the lives of the early missionaries and the native communities with which they interacted. If the patterns are similar between the two islands, it might tell me about some of the phenomena that structured these interactions. If the archaeological patterns are different, why? Erromango and Tanna are geographically, linguistically, and culturally distinct today as they were in the 1800s, so is this reflected in the archaeology of mission sites on the two islands?
Likely the results will show a mixture of both similarities and differences. Untangling the different threads of evidence to find relevant patterns that allow us to interpret the past in new ways is one of the challenges, but also one of the exciting things about archaeology. I look forward to reporting again upon my return from Tanna in a few weeks!
-Port Vila, Vanuatu, 6 July 2011
Picture on the left: Church at Dillon's Bay, possibly built in 1883 by H.A. Robertson after the destruction of an earlier church in a cyclone.
