[ANU Pacific.Institute] New handy maps of the Pacific

[Samuel Bashfield]

Dear fellow members of the Pacific Institute at ANU and other Pacific scholars,

My name is Hedvig, I'm a linguistics PhD student at CHL, ANU, working on Samoan and language diversification in remote Oceania. I recently had CartoGIS here at ANU make some new maps for me displaying the pacific. Perhaps they are useful to you too? They will be made available in the online map collection soon, as far as I understand. The maps were made by Karina Pelling. She has been most helpful as we bounced different versions back and forth, and as more people contributed with corrections. I am particularly thankful to Hilário de Sousa and Antoinette Schapper for commenting on earlier versions. For those who have seen earlier versions: these are the final versions.

The first one shows the regions of Polynesia/Micronesia/Melanesia while at the same time also Near/Remote Oceania. This is helpful as it highlights how different classifications are useful for different approaches. The South Pacific can be divided in many ways, Polynesia/Micronesia/Melanesia is an old division that dates back to perceptions by western colonisers in the 17-1800's. They're not labels or regions that were used by the native peoples of this region at that time. The white colonisers used skin colour, cultural traits, trade paths and other factors to make this division.

The distinction Near/Remote Oceania gets at another perspective, shared pre-colonial history and archaeology. Near Oceania is an area of the world that has been inhabited by humans for a long time, in fact it's one of the first areas to be peopled after the expansion out of Africa. There's been people in Near Oceania for 40-60,000 years. (Note that this does not mean that new people haven't arrived there again since that time, naturally this has happened over and over again.)

Remote Oceania though is a much more recent discovery by humans, we're talking the last 3-4,000 years. This is reflected both in flora and fauna of the regions, as well as the language, cultures and archeological artefacts found there. Remote Oceania is entirely dominated by Austronesian speaking people, i.e. from Taiwan and the Philippines.

When we divide up the world, we do so with different ideas of what it is that is interesting to highlight. This map is one of many ways of segmenting up the Pacific, and if you are interested in pre-colonial history it's a very relevant distinction to keep in mind.

Antoinette Schapper pointed out to me over Facebook that the western borders of Melanesia could be redrawn to include more of eastern Indonesia. In this case, we went with older maps as a reference, and chose not to redraw those borders. It's a very worthwhile point though. If you do use this map in a publication or teaching, it may be good to underline this.



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The second map displays Exclusive Economic Zones (EEZ) labeled and coloured by top-political unit. This is the water territory that a state governs. Displaying the pacific with EEZs instead of just land masses is a good way of making the countries more visible, and also the borders. Since fishing is an important industry in the pacific, it is crucial to take this into account when understanding the region. The top-political unit here is determined by citizenship and power over foreign policy. As you all know, some territories are more governing than others (and New Caledonia is up for a new independence election soon!). The map also displays uninhabited/almost uninhabited atolls and small islands that anglophone or francophone powers governs as as important military outposts. We made the decision to only colour countries that have at least one EEZ in Oceania (i.e. Philippines, Mexico etc are not highlighted).



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I hope you may find these helpful.



Best,
Hedvig




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