A kingdom made across water

A shard, and the journeys behind it

At Nukuleka, near the entrance to the lagoon on eastern Tongatapu, archaeologists found pottery with patterns pressed into clay. The style is known as Lapita. Some of the earliest designs resemble pottery from much farther west in the Pacific. Researchers dated coral tools and other material from the site and placed its first settlement roughly 2,800 years ago. The date is an archaeological estimate. The important thing it changes is the map: Tongatapu belongs near the beginning of the human settlement of western Polynesia.

The sea linked the new settlements. Later, a study of stone from Heketa and Lapaha found that roughly two-thirds of the worked adzes and flakes in its sample came from outside Tonga, especially Samoa and Fiji. Their chemistry gave away their origins. A tool made of a different island’s volcanic rock could end up on Tongatapu because people travelled, exchanged objects and maintained relationships across water.

Where power left its mark

The dynastic title Tuʻi Tonga is associated with a polity whose influence reached across the archipelago and into the wider Pacific. At Heketa, the stone trilithon Haʻamonga ʻa Maui still stands. At Lapaha, the layered stone platforms of the royal tombs, called langi, belong to a later centre of power. Tonga’s UNESCO tentative-list submission treats the former capitals as parts of a landscape that still matters to people living there.

To look at one of those tombs is to see more than an engineering problem. Moving stone took coordinated labour. Burying people there marked rank and kinship. The continuity of royal burial at Lapaha is one reason the site matters today. There are several ways to tell Tonga’s political history, and a visit to an old capital begins with stone, labour and memory.

How the monarchy changed

In the nineteenth century, the chief Tāufaʻāhau united the islands under his rule as George Tupou I. In 1875 the kingdom adopted a written constitution. The Legislative Assembly traces one of its precedents to the fakataha, a meeting of chiefs. The written system gave the kingdom institutions through which it could negotiate with foreign powers as well as govern internally.

Under the 1900 agreement with Britain, Tonga retained its own monarchy and institutions while the British took authority over foreign affairs. The protectorate ended in 1970. A later change came in 2010, when reforms expanded the elected people’s representation in the Legislative Assembly and shifted the choice of prime minister to a parliamentary process. Tonga’s distinctive place in Oceania lies in that institutional continuity through substantial change.

The work of gathering

Nukuʻalofa, on the north coast of Tongatapu, is the seat of government and a point of departure for other islands. Haʻapai lies farther north, followed by Vavaʻu. The Niuas are more distant still. ʻEua is close to Tongatapu across a channel, with a notably different landscape. In a country arranged like this, government, commerce and family life all have to work across islands.

Sunday is an important day of worship and family gathering in a predominantly Christian country. Tongan and English are used officially. Mālō e lelei is an everyday greeting in Tongan. At feasts, dishes cooked in an earth oven, or umu, might be served alongside fish, coconut, taro and yams. A dish of ʻota brings raw fish and citrus together. Feke, octopus, can be served in coconut sauce. A pola, a long tray woven from coconut fronds, makes the scale of the occasion visible as food is brought to the group.

Art can hold a relationship long after the gathering ends. In Te Papa’s collection is a ngatu, or decorated barkcloth, made by Maʻata Tavake Savou of Vavaʻu for her grandson’s first birthday. It travelled to his paternal grandmother in New Zealand and later became part of her funeral. And in lakalaka, performed at major celebrations, movement and sung speech carry stories together. At the annual Heilala festivities these arts have a public setting, while their meaning also lives in households, churches and communities far beyond the islands.