Posts, Thatch and Basalt: Eight Building Traditions from Sumatra to New Zealand

Begin in North Sumatra, where six related Batak peoples build on wooden piles in a form derived from ancient Dong-Son models. Three building types recur: the bale meeting hall, the rumah communal house and the sopo rice barn. Toba houses are boat-shaped with carved gables, while Karo houses rise in tiers.

Cross to New Guinea, where peoples of the East Sepik build ancestral spirit houses, called haus tambaran in Tok Pisin. A tall, decorated front wall carries a ridge pole that slopes steeply toward the rear, and the form was echoed in Papua New Guinea's National Parliament building in Port Moresby.

In Micronesia, Nan Madol on Pohnpei is a city built in a lagoon from 92 artificial islets of stone and coral fill, bordered by tidal canals; its name means within the intervals. Its walls are stacked columnar basalt, most dramatically at the royal mortuary islet of Nandauwas.

Fiji pairs communal and individual houses, the bure and the vale, with defensive and civil works. Ramparts and moats surrounded the most important settlements, and wooden aqueducts carried water into villages.

Tonga builds in stone. The langi are artificial hills raised as royal tombs for the Tuʻi Tonga rulers, ringed with coral slabs in three or more tiers. The Haʻamonga ʻa Maui trilithon, raised in the thirteenth century, has uprights of thirty to forty tons fitted to the lintel with mortise joints.

The Samoan fale is oval or circular, with wooden posts holding a domed roof and no walls. Its frame uses no metal; poles are lashed with plaited coconut fiber cord called afa. Where chiefs, orators and guests sit follows post position and direction, so the plan expresses the chiefly system.

In Hawaii the hale is built of local materials: rock or wood for the lower frame, grass or leaf thatch for the roof, and basalt foundations for the alii. Four classic forms are recognized, among them the open walled hale halawai and the A frame hale waa. Later periods layered imported styles over this base.

End in New Zealand, where Polynesian settlers adapted their building to a colder climate with totara wood and raupo reeds. The wharenui, or carved meeting house, symbolizes an ancestor's body, with the ridge beam as backbone and bargeboards as arms, and it faces the marae, the open ceremonial plaza. Fortified pa sat on hilltops.