The settlement of Remote Oceania, which encompasses all of the
islands from the Reef/Santa Cruz Islands in the southeast Solomon
Islands through to the extremes of the Polynesian Triangle and
Micronesia, has a much shorter colonization history. The earliest
archaeological sites in Remote Oceania date to around 3000 years
BP (Petchey et al., 2014) and are associated with the Lapita Cultural
Complex, though slightly earlier dates have been suggested
(Rainbird, 1994) for initial settlement of the Mariana Islands, in
Western Micronesia, which currently have no evidence of Lapita
occupation. The earliest Lapita sites are found in the St. Matthias