<P> The Lapita culture was a prehistoric Pacific Ocean people who flourished in the Pacific Islands from about 1600 BCE to about 500 BCE . Archaeologists believe that the Lapita are the ancestors of historic cultures in Polynesia, Micronesia, and some coastal areas of Melanesia . The characteristics of the Lapita culture are the extension of human settlement to previously uninhabited islands scattered over a large area in the Pacific Ocean, the spread of Oceanic languages in that area, the distinctive geometric dentate - stamped pottery, and the use and widespread distribution of obsidian . </P> <P> The Lapita were expert seafarers and navigators, reaching out and finding islands separated from each other by hundreds of miles of empty ocean . Their descendants, the Polynesians, went on to populate islands across the Pacific, ranging from New Zealand to Hawaii and Easter Island . </P> <P> The term' Lapita' was coined by archaeologists after mishearing a word in the local Haveke language, xapeta'a, which means' to dig a hole' or' the place where one digs', during the 1952 excavation in New Caledonia . The Lapita archaeological culture is named after the type site where it was first uncovered in the Foué peninsula on Grande Terre, the main island of New Caledonia . The excavation was carried out in 1952 by American archaeologists Edward W. Gifford and Richard Shulter Jr at' Site 13' . The settlement and pottery sherds were later dated to 800 BCE and proved significant in research on the early peopling of the Pacific Islands . More than 200 Lapita sites have since been uncovered, ranging more than 4,000 km from coastal and island Melanesia to Fiji and Tonga with its most eastern limit so far in Samoa . </P> <P>' Classic' Lapita pottery was produced between 1350 and 750 BCE in the Bismarck Archipelago . A late variety might have been produced there up to 250 BCE . Local styles of Lapita pottery are found in the Solomon Islands, Vanuatu and New Caledonia . Pottery persisted in Fiji, whereas it disappeared completely in other areas of Melanesia and in Siassi . </P>

Who were the lapita and what did they do