The Solomon Islands and Their Natives

by H. B. Guppy

I should here allude to the round stones, rather larger than a cricket-ball, which are employed as “cooking-stones” and for cracking the hard kanary-nuts. They are to be seen in the majority of the dwellings in the eastern islands; and they often mark the sites of old villages and the temporary homes of fishing-parties.

The grinding slabs and blocks of rock, which were used for rubbing down the stone axes, are still to be seen in the coast villages, their surfaces being sometimes worn into a hollow. At present these blocks are used for grinding down the shell bead-money and for sharpening the iron tools. I have sometimes come upon them marking the position of an old village, the site of which had been long concealed by the growth of trees and scrub. In some islands where it is not possible to obtain stones of a sufficient hardness, these blocks have been transported from considerable distances. A large block of a crystalline trap-rock, more than a third of a ton in weight, which now lies on the reef-flat in the vicinity of the village of Vanatoga on the east side of Santa Anna, was originally brought down from the summit of the island to be used as a grinding block. Slabs of a quartz-diorite, which is found in the north-west part of Alu, and which is much valued for its hardness, have been transported in canoes to Treasury Island more than twenty miles away and to the other islands of the Straits. From their size, they would weigh usually five or six hundredweight.

Amongst the interesting discoveries which I have made in the Solomon Group, I should refer to that of the occurrence of worked flints, which are commonly found in the soil when it is disturbed for purposes of cultivation, and are frequently exposed after heavy rains. My attention was first directed to this matter on noticing a specimen of flint in the possession of Mr. Howard at Ugi, and I soon obtained a number of specimens from this island, and from the adjacent large island of St. Christoval. The majority of them were of common flint, but fragments of chalcedony and cornelian were frequent, and a jasper also occurred. The largest specimen, which was nearly 4 lbs. in weight, clearly showed traces of artificial working, and, as I am informed by Professor Liversidge, was evidently a large, stone axe or tomahawk. Of the rest, some were cores, others were flakes, resembling in their form, and often in their white colour, the flakes of the post-tertiary gravels; whilst one specimen possessed the shape of an arrow-head. Some of these flints presented the appearance of having been re-fashioned after lying disused for ages. In such specimens, there were two sets of facets or fractured surfaces, the one whitened by weathering or exposure, the other displaying the natural colour of recently broken flint. All were, in fact, of the palæolithic type. The specimens, that I obtained in the islands of Treasury and Alu in Bougainville Straits, were usually of chalcedonic flint, and possessed the form of hammer-stones, scrapers, etc. Worked flints will probably be found in most of the islands of the Solomon Group, except, perhaps, in those of purely volcanic formation (vide [page 80]). They are said to occur in Santa Anna, and I had a specimen given to me from Ulaua.

There are two interesting circumstances in connection with these flints to which I should allude. In the first place, the inhabitants of these islands are ignorant of their nature and their source. I was gravely informed by the natives of Treasury Island, that the flints which they brought me from the disturbed soil of their plantations had tumbled from the sky, a superstition which reminds one of a similar belief prevalent in some rural districts of our own country as to the origin of the polished stone implements or celts. In a similar way the men of the Shortland Islands explained to me the occurrence beneath the soil of lumps of gum, which, like the masses of the kauri gum of New Zealand, mark the original position of the trees from which they were derived.

Concerning these flint implements, we may fitly ask: Who were the race of men that formed and used them? How long a period has elapsed since these men inhabited this region? Whence did they come? Where are their descendants to be sought? Are they to be found amongst the present inhabitants of this group, who, having discarded the rude flint implements for polished stone tools of volcanic rock, regard, with ignorant contempt, the handiwork of their ancestors? To these queries we may with some confidence reply that the original inhabitants of these islands belonged to the once widely spread Negrito race, of which we find the remnants in our own day in the aborigines of the Andaman and Philippine Islands, and that their characters, both physical and linguistic, have been fused with those of other races which have reached the Solomon Islands both from the Malay Archipelago to the west, and from the islands of Micronesia and Polynesia to the east. The present natives of this group may, in truth, be considered as the result of the fusion of the Negrito aborigines with the Malayan, Micronesian, and Polynesian intruders.

The second interesting point with reference to these ancient flint implements is concerned with their original source. Professor Liversidge, in drawing attention to my specimens, which he exhibited at a meeting of the Royal Society of New South Wales in December, 1883, remarked that this discovery of flints in these regions afforded a very strong proof of the probable presence of true chalk of cretaceous age in the South Sea Islands, and he alluded to a soft white limestone undistinguishable from chalk, which had been previously brought from New Ireland by Mr. Brown, the Wesleyan missionary.[45] Chalk-rocks came under my observation in the Solomon Islands; but in no case was I able to find embedded flints (vide Trans. Roy. Soc. Edin., Vol. 32, Part 3). I think it, however, highly probable that when the interior of one of the large islands such as Guadalcanar has been explored, older chalk formations containing flints will be discovered. The island of Ulaua, which I was unable to visit, would probably afford some clue as to the source of these flints. Although in all likelihood this island possesses the general geological structure of the neighbouring island of Ugi, which is described on [page vii.] yet it possesses one peculiar feature. Mr. Brenchley,[46] when landing on the beach of this island of Ulaua in 1865, picked up a great many pieces of flint scattered about among the broken-up coral, and he wondered where they came from. Captain Macdonald, a resident trader in this part of the group, informed me that flints are abundant on the beaches of this island, together with fragments of a white chalk-like rock.[47]

[45] “Journal of the Royal Society of New South Wales:” vol. xvii., p. 223; vide also “Geolog. Mag.” Dec., 1877. Mr. H. B. Brady is at present engaged in working out the Foraminifera of this New Ireland rock. Its age, though still sub judice, is probably comparatively recent.

[46] “Cruise of the ‘Curacoa,’” p. 255.

[47] Should any of my readers in the Western Pacific have the opportunity of visiting the island of Ulaua, it would be well worth their while to pay careful attention to the mode of occurrence of these flints. I am of the opinion that imbedded flints will be found in the recent rocks of this island.