In much of the Pacific, a funeral was never the end of the story. Across a wide sweep of islands, families once buried their dead, waited for the body to decompose, then exhumed the remains, cleaned the bones and reburied them — sometimes in caves, sometimes in sacred sites, sometimes at home. Archaeologists call it secondary burial, and it turns up from New Zealand to Papua New Guinea to the Marianas.
In Aotearoa New Zealand, Māori tradition included the hahunga ceremony. The dead were first placed in shallow graves, caves or trees, and once decomposition was complete a spiritual leader would return to collect the bones. These were cleaned, scraped and painted with red ochre, then brought to a sacred meeting ground where the community gathered to feast and mourn again — a second funeral, essentially, that was as much about strengthening bonds among the living as about honouring the dead. The bones were finally interred in a secret spot, deliberately hidden so enemies could never disturb them.
The practice goes back a long way. At the Teouma cemetery on Efate Island in Vanuatu, archaeologists studying the roughly 3,000-year-old Lapita culture found that skulls and other bones had been removed after burial and interred elsewhere, with treatment varying by the deceased's social standing. In Papua New Guinea, a study by Simon Coxe and Ben Shaw examined nine sites on the islands of Panaeati and Pana Vara Vara, turning up more than 1,200 skeletal fragments from 166 individuals — skulls, teeth and jaws deliberately rearranged in caves and niches alongside pottery and shell ornaments. Communities there have practised secondary burial for centuries and, in places, still do.
Elsewhere the traditions took different forms. In the Solomon Islands, some pre-Christian families kept a deceased relative's body for weeks before removing the skull, washing it in the sea and carrying it to its resting place; for a chief or priest, the skull might be entombed with a wooden figure. In the Mariana Islands, the ancient CHamoru kept cleaned ancestral skulls in the home, treating them as living members of the household — offering food and drink, asking for guidance, and calling on a fisherman ancestor before a big catch. Traditional healers known as makahna used the skulls in prayers and rituals.
Why should a traveller care? Because these customs explain a lot about what you'll see across the region: the tapu sites and hidden burial caves of New Zealand, the Lapita heritage sites of Vanuatu, ancestral shrines in the Solomons and the Marianas. Understanding that, for many Pacific societies, death kept a person inside the family rather than ending that relationship adds real depth to any visit — and a reminder to treat burial sites, caves and marae with respect, since many remain sacred to descendant communities today.
Raquel Bagnol's feature for Pacific Island Times
