Vanuatu, officially the Republic of Vanuatu (French: République de Vanuatu; Bislama: Ripablik blong Vanuatu), is an archipelagic country in Melanesia located in the South Pacific Ocean. The archipelago, which is of volcanic origin, is 1,750 km (1,090 mi) east of northern Australia, 540 km (340 mi) northeast of New Caledonia, east of New Guinea, southeast of Solomon Islands, and west of Fiji.
Vanuatu was first inhabited by Melanesian people. The first Europeans to visit the islands were a Spanish expedition led by Portuguese navigator Fernandes de Queirós, who arrived on the largest island, Espíritu Santo, in 1606. Queirós claimed the archipelago for Spain, as part of the colonial Spanish East Indies and named it La Austrialia del Espíritu Santo.
In the 1880s, France and the United Kingdom claimed parts of the archipelago, and in 1906, they agreed on a framework for jointly managing the archipelago as the New Hebrides – through an Anglo-French condominium.
In the 1970s, an independence movement arose, and the Republic of Vanuatu was founded in 1980. Since its independence, the country has become a member of the United Nations, the Commonwealth of Nations, the Organisation internationale de la Francophonie, and the Pacific Islands Forum.
Vanuatu's name was adopted upon independence in July 1980, replacing the name New Hebrides previously used for the archipelago. Vanuatu is derived from the word vanua, which means "land" or "home" in several Austronesian languages, and the word tu, meaning "to stand" or "remain". According to the country's first prime minister Walter Lini, the name was intended to connote "a country that has stood alone and will continue to stand alone".
There was historically no indigenous name for the archipelago as a whole. The name New Hebrides was given by British explorer James Cook in 1774 in honour of the Hebrides archipelago of Scotland; on the same voyage he named New Caledonia after the Latin name for Scotland. A few years earlier French explorer Louis Antoine de Bougainville had named the islands Archipel des grandes Cyclades ("Archipelago of the Great Cyclades"), but this name was replaced in French by Nouvelles-Hébrides, a translation of Cook's name.
The first locally coined name for the New Hebrides was Vanuaaku (also spelled Vanua'aku or Vanua-Aku). This name was adopted in 1977 by the pro-independence New Hebrides National Party, which simultaneously renamed itself the Vanua'aku Pati (VP), and was translated as "my land" or "our land" deriving from vanua and the pronoun aku. It was used in the proclamation of independence made by the Vanuaaku People's Provisional Government in 1978. In February 1980, the New Hebrides Representative Assembly formally voted by 26 votes to 2 to adopt Vanuatu as the country's name on independence. The modified name was put forward by a subcommittee on national symbols, which felt that Vanuaaku was too closely associated with the VP, and has been credited to Tom Tipolomata of Tongoa.
The history of Vanuatu before European colonisation is mostly obscure because of the lack of written sources which predate European contact and because only limited archaeological work has been conducted; Vanuatu's volatile geology and climate are also likely to have destroyed or hidden many prehistoric sites. Archaeological evidence gathered since the 1980s supports the theory that the Vanuatuan islands were first settled about 3,000 years ago, in the period roughly between 1100 BCE and 700 BCE. These were almost certainly people of the Lapita culture. The formerly widespread idea that Vanuatu might have been only marginally affected by this culture was rendered obsolete by the evidence uncovered in recent decades at numerous sites on most of the islands in the archipelago, ranging from the Banks Islands in the north to Aneityum in the south.
Notable Lapita sites include Teouma on Éfaté, Uripiv, and Vao off the coast of Malakula, and Makue on Aore. Several ancient burial sites have been excavated, most notably Teouma on Éfaté, which has a large ancient cemetery containing the remains of 94 individuals. There are also sites – on Éfaté and on the adjacent islands of Lelepa and Eretoka – associated with the 16th–17th century chief or chiefs called Roy Mata. (This may be a title held by different men over several generations.) Roy Mata is said to have united local clans and instituted and presided over an era of peace.
The stories about Roy Mata come from local oral tradition and are consistent with centuries-old evidence uncovered at archaeological sites. The Lapita sites became Vanuatu's first UNESCO World Heritage Site in 2008.
The immediate origins of the Lapita lie to the northwest, in the Solomon Islands archipelago and the Bismarck Archipelago of Papua New Guinea, though DNA studies of a 3,000-year-old skeleton found near Port Vila in 2016 indicates that some may have arrived directly from the Philippines or Taiwan, pausing only briefly en route. They brought with them crops such as yam, taro, and banana, as well as domesticated animals such as pigs and chickens. Their arrival is coincident with the extinction of several species, such as the land crocodile (Mekosuchus kalpokasi), land tortoise (Meiolania damelipi) and various flightless bird species. Lapita settlements reached as far east as Tonga and Samoa at their greatest extent.
Over time, the Lapita culture lost much of its early unity; as such, it became increasingly fragmented, the precise reasons for which are unclear. Over the centuries, pottery, settlement and burial practices in Vanuatu all evolved in a more localised direction, with long-distance trade and migration patterns contracting. Nevertheless, some limited long-distance trade did continue, with similar cultural practices and late-period items also being found in Fiji, New Caledonia, the Bismarcks and the Solomons. Finds in central and southern Vanuatu, such as distinctive adzes, also indicate some trade connections with, and possibly population movements of, Polynesian peoples to the east.
Over time, it is thought that the Lapita either mixed with, or acted as pioneers for, migrants coming from the Bismarks and elsewhere in Melanesia, ultimately producing the darker-skinned physiognomy that is typical of modern Ni-Vanuatu.
Ancient DNA has revealed a major demographic transformation in Vanuatu following the initial Lapita settlement. The earliest Lapita-associated populations had predominantly East Asian-related ancestry and little or no detectable Papuan-related ancestry. From around 2,500 years ago, populations related to Near Oceania began arriving in Vanuatu, contributing to an extensive but gradual replacement of the earlier Lapita-related ancestry. Later research has shown that this process involved several phases of migration, including substantial ancestry derived from populations of the Bismarck Archipelago. The subsequent population turnover was strongly sex-biased, with evidence for repeated admixture involving Papuan-related men and women of Austronesian ancestry.
Linguistically, the Lapita peoples' Austronesian languages were maintained, with all of the numerous 100+ autochthonous languages of Vanuatu being classified as belonging to the Oceanic branch of the Austronesian language family.
This linguistic hyperdiversity resulted from a number of factors: continuing waves of migration, the existence of numerous decentralised and generally self-sufficient communities, hostilities between people groups, with none able to dominate any of the others, and the difficult geography of Vanuatu that impeded inter- and intra-island travel and communication. The geological record also shows that a huge volcanic eruption occurred on Ambrym in c. 200 CE, which would have devastated local populations and likely resulted in further population movements.
Human cannibalism, at least for some parts of Vanuatu, is often mentioned, both by indigenous sources (myths, oral history, popular culture) and by foreign observers. However, its existence and exact prevalence remain to be confirmed with empirical evidence.