Chief Roi Mata’s Domain

History

The Mangaasi site on Lelepa, where Roi Mata is said to have lived, contains an archaeological sequence going back some 3,000 years to the Lapita people, the first settlers of Vanuatu and ancestors of later Polynesian and Melanesian populations. Layers of decorated Lapita pottery give way to later local ceramic traditions, and finally to material contemporary with Roi Mata himself in the 17th century.

Oral tradition holds that before Roi Mata, the islands of central Vanuatu were locked in continual clan warfare. He is credited with introducing the tambu system, a set of land-use rules and sacred alliances that made conflict impractical by binding clans into mutual obligation, and with institutionalising cross-clan marriage to cement peace between former enemies. His achievement is described in the tradition as comparable in scale to that of Sundiata Keita in the Mali Empire: a single leader who ended fragmentation through alliance rather than conquest.

In 1967 the French archaeologist José Garanger, working with ORSTOM, excavated the burial site on Artok Island. He was led there entirely by the account given by Ni-Vanuatu elders, who described Roi Mata as buried with many followers who had died alongside him. Garanger found the chief’s skeleton at the centre of a mass grave, surrounded by some 47 other skeletons in concentric arrangement, many still dressed in ceremonial tapa cloth, shell ornaments and pig tusks. The physical evidence matched the oral account in precise detail, a correspondence that reshaped how Pacific oral tradition has since been regarded as a historical source.