Museum Fellow Seeks Origin Of South Sea Island Dwellers

In search of anthropological and ethnological data about the Negro peoples of the Pacific Ocean, Douglas L. Oliver '34, Itesearch Associate in Anthropology, and his wife spent almost two years in the volcanic jungle island of Bougainville, a British mandate in the Soloman Islands.

A member of the staff of the Peabody Museum, Oliver has recently returned from the island, which he began exploring in 1938. Working and living in the interior of Bougainville, more than thirty miles by trial from the white mission station on the coast, Dr. and Mrs. Oliver made an intensive investigation of this agricultural people, which has lived on the island for thousands of years.

Scarcely a tropical island paradise, Bougainville is ringed by a three-mile coastal belt of swamp, and rises to rugged mountain chains 10,000 feet in altitude, with two active volcanoes, Oliver said. The climate is equatorial, with extremely humid weather and heavy rains.

A major accomplishment of the Olivers was the anthropological measurement of more than 2,000 natives taken from each of the eight main divisions of the island peoples. This was the most ambitious racial study ever undertaken in this region, which is called Melanesia.

After organization and coordination, Oliver's extensive data may go far toward answering the question of whether the interior Negro peoples of Bougainville are descendants of the original inhabitants of Melanesia.

It required ten months for Oliver to obtain a working knowledge of the Siwai. His method of learning the strange, unwritten tongue was to induce villagers to tell him familiar stories and myths of the tribe, while he wrote them down in phonetic spelling.

Then, through pidgin English, the young men would help translate. Oliver also found it helpful to record the ordinary talk of the natives overheard while they were at work in the fields or chatting in the village.