8 - Conclusion

Summary

Before discussing the applicability of my analysis of the Tannese case to other parts of Melanesia, it is appropriate to retrace the steps of my argument. The starting point was the observation that the known distribution of kava drinking in the Pacific is puzzling. If the properties of Piper methysticum were independently discovered in a number of places there would be no problem. But the accumulated weight of botanical, linguistic and ethnological evidence indicates that this is extremely unlikely. There are very strong grounds for believing that kava drinking had a single source, and that its known distribution is a consequence of diffusion from this place of origin. Yet the distances which separate some of the kava-using regions are such that direct links between them before the period of European contact seem out of the question. And while such links could have been established in the decades after European contact, all the evidence suggests that kava drinking predated contact in the crucial regions of New Guinea. So we are left with the conclusion first put forward by W. H. R. Rivers in a paper to the British Association for the Advancement of Science over three-quarters of a century ago (1910), and developed in The History of Melanesian Society: kava was once drunk over a much wider area of Melanesia, but it was abandoned before European contact by many of the people who used it.