History of Bougainville
, an autonomous region of Papua New Guinea, has been inhabited by humans for at least 29,000 years, according to artefacts found in Kilu Cave on Buka Island. The region is named after Bougainville Island, the largest island of the Solomon Islands archipelago, but also contains a number of smaller islands.
The first arrivals in Bougainville were ethnically Australo-Melanesian, related to Papuans and Aboriginal Australians. Around 3,000 years ago, Austronesians associated with the Lapita culture also settled on the islands, bringing agriculture and pottery. Present-day Bougainvilleans are descended from a mixture of the two populations, and both Austronesian and non-Austronesian languages are spoken to this day.
In 1616, Dutch explorers Willem Schouten and Jacob Le Maire became the first Europeans to sight the islands. The main island was named after French admiral Louis Antoine de Bougainville, who reached it in 1768. The German Empire placed Bougainville under a protectorate in 1886, while the remainder of the Solomon Islands became part of the British Empire in 1893. The present-day boundaries between Papua New Guinea and Solomon Islands were established by the Tripartite Convention of 1899. The incorporation of Bougainville into German New Guinea initially had little economic impact, although the associated Catholic missions succeeded in converting a majority of the islanders to Christianity.
The Australian Naval and Military Expeditionary Force occupied German New Guinea in 1914, following the outbreak of World War I. After the war's end, Bougainville and the other occupied territories were named as a League of Nations mandate, which Australia administered as the Territory of New Guinea. During World War II, the Japanese invaded and occupied Bougainville in order to support their operations elsewhere in the Pacific. The subsequent Allied campaign to reclaim the islands resulted in heavy casualties and the eventual restoration of Australian control in 1945.
In 1949, following administrative reforms by the Australian government, Bougainville was incorporated into the Territory of Papua and New Guinea. The Panguna mine was established in 1969 and soon become a source of conflict. The Bougainville independence movement established the Republic of the North Solomons in 1975, but by the following year the newly independent PNG government had re-established control. Tensions continued, and the subsequent Bougainville Civil War resulted in the deaths of thousands of people, as the Bougainville Revolutionary Army sought to secure independence and was resisted by the Papua New Guinea Defence Force. A peace agreement was reached in 2001, by which it was agreed that an autonomous region would be established and an independence referendum would be held; the latter was held in 2019. In March 2025, the Bougainville Leaders Consultation Forum recommended September 1, 2027, as the date for Bougainville to declare independence from Papua New Guinea.
Prehistory
The earliest known site of human occupation in Bougainville is Kilu Cave, located on Buka Island. The bottom-most archaeological deposits in the cave were radiocarbon-dated to between 28,700 and 20,100 years ago. During the Last Glacial Maximum, until approximately 10,000 years ago, present-day Bougainville Island was part of a single landmass known as "Greater Bougainville", which spanned from the northern tip of Buka Island to the Nggela Islands north of Guadalcanal. The "obvious immediate origin for its first colonists" of Bougainville is the Bismarck Archipelago to the north, where sites have been identified dating back 35,000 to 40,000 years.The first settlers of Bougainville were Melanesians, likely related to present-day Papuans and Aboriginal Australians. Approximately 3,000 years ago, a wave of Austronesian peoples arrived in Bougainville, bringing with them the Lapita culture. The Austronesians brought with them a fully agricultural lifestyle, also introducing distinctive pottery and domesticated pigs, dogs and chickens to Bougainville. The advent of the Lapita culture resulted in "a pattern of apparent extinctions of birds and endemic mammals". Both Austronesian and non-Austronesian languages continue to be spoken on Bougainville today. There has been substantial genetic and cultural mixing between the Austronesian and non-Austronesian populations, "such that language is no longer correlated with either genetics or culture in any direct or simplistic way".
Douglas Oliver in his 1991 book discussed one of the unique aspects of the people of Bougainville:
trait shared by the present-day descendants of both northerners and southerners is their skin-colour, which is very black. Indeed, it is darker than that of any population of present-day Pacific islanders, including the present-day indigenes of New Ireland, the larger homeland of the first Bougainvilleans. The presence of Bougainville as a 'black spot' in an island world of brownskins raises a question that cannot now be answered. Were the genes producing that darker pigmentation carried by the first Bougainvilleans when they arrived? Or did they evolve by natural or 'social' selection, during the millennia in which the descendants of those pioneers remained isolated, reproductively, from neighbouring islanders? Nothing now known about Bougainville's physical environment can support an argument for the natural selection of its peoples' distinctively black pigmentation; therefore a case might be made for social selection, namely an aesthetic preference for black skin.
Early European contact
Dutch explorers Willem Schouten and Jacob Le Maire were the first Europeans to sight present-day Bougainville, skirting Takuu Atoll and Nissan Island in 1616. In 1643, another Dutch expedition led by Abel Tasman was the first to make contact with the islanders and describe their appearance. There was no further European contact until 1767, when British naval officer Philip Carteret visited and named the Carteret Islands. Carteret was also the first European to see Buka Island. The following year, Frenchman Louis Antoine de Bougainville sailed along the east coast of Bougainville Island, which bears his name. He also gave Buka Island its name, after a word that was repeatedly called out to him from canoes originating from the island.German protectorate
On 10 April 1886, two years after the establishment of German New Guinea, the United Kingdom and Germany agreed to divide the Solomon Islands archipelago into spheres of influence. As a result of this agreement, the islands of Buka, Bougainville, Choiseul, Santa Isabel, Ontong Java, the Shortland Islands, and part of the Florida Islands were placed under a German protectorate, which was formally established on 28 October 1886 by the commander of. On 13 December, Kaiser Wilhelm I granted the New Guinea Company a charter to govern the protectorate in accordance with the existing arrangements for German New Guinea. The remainder of the archipelago became the British Solomon Islands Protectorate, which was not formally established until 1893. The present-day boundary between Bougainville and the country of Solomon Islands was established following the Tripartite Convention of 1899, which saw some of the northern islands ceded to the UK in exchange for German control over Western Samoa. The Shortlands, Choiseul, Santa Isabel, and Ontong Java were included in the cession.The Northern Solomons were initially grouped with the Bismarck Archipelago for German administrative purposes. The first official visit from the German administration did not occur until November 1888. The acting administrator Reinhold Kraetke arrived accompanied by an imperial judge, a company manager, a visiting German journalist, a missionary, and a local merchant Richard Parkinson who had been recruiting labourers from the area for several years. A native police force was quickly established. The first punitive expedition undertaken by the German administration occurred in April 1899, in response to the killing of two European seamen in Tinputz Bay the previous year. The landed 20 members of the native police force armed with bows and arrows, who killed seven people, burned a village, and took its valuables. It was not until 1905 that a government station was opened in Bougainville. The station, situated in Kieta, was placed directly under the Governor of German New Guinea.
The German protectorate over the islands initially had little economic impact. A handful of copra plantations were established, but proved unproductive, and the area was seen primarily as a source of labour for existing plantations in other parts of New Guinea. As of 1905, "there was apparently not a single permanent trading post manned by a non-native". The first fully commercial plantation was established at Aropa in 1908 by the Bismarck Archipelago Company. In 1910, the New Britain Corporation established a plantation at Toiemonapu. There was subsequently a rush of commercial activity, with ten enterprises established in 1911. By April 1913, land acquisitions of over had been approved by the administration, mostly by Australian companies. About of roads had been built by this time, and construction on a hospital for natives had begun. The total tax revenue for 1913 was almost 28,000 marks, about half of which was collected in Kieta. As of 1 January 1914, there were 74 Europeans in the area, one-third of whom were connected with the Marist mission and 17 of whom were British subjects. There were also 20 "foreign natives", mostly Chinese and Malay.
World War I and Australian administration
Following the outbreak of World War I, the Australian Naval and Military Expeditionary Force occupied Bougainville in December 1914, as part of the broader Australian occupation of German New Guinea. The 1919 Treaty of Versailles established the former German territory as a League of Nations mandate, the responsibility for which was awarded to Australia. The Australian military administration had adopted a "business as usual" approach and secured the support of the existing German business community. It was replaced by a civil administration in 1920, which expropriated the property of German nationals without compensation and deported them.The Australian administration continued the German approach of "pacification", intervening in local conflicts. This allowed labour recruiters to enter new regions and secure more workers for the plantations. In 1915, more than 60 native police officers were deployed to Soraken to protect against raids from mountain tribes, who were known to engage in cannibalism. An expedition was launched against Bowu, an "influential cannibal chief". His village at Kaumumu was attacked and Bowu's severed head was displayed to the local people. However, "it is doubtful if the display of severed heads had the intended effect since these acts had taken place outside the customary ceremonial context".
In 1921, the population of Bougainville was recorded at 46,832. The Australian district officer was based at Kieta and controlled a native police force of 40 constables and five officers. The civil administration "pursued pacification less ferociously than its military predecessor" and recruited Bougainvilleans as interpreters. The administration established larger "line villages" in place of the smaller hamlets, in order to simplify collection and "condition the able-bodied men to the barracks discipline on the plantations". German ethnographer Richard Thurnwald returned to Buin in 1933 following an earlier visit in 1908. He noted a number of changes over the 25-year period, including a large increase in literacy, the introduction of a cash economy, the erosion of chiefly authority, a decrease in headhunting, and the introduction of feast-giving as a surrogate for war.
The Australians had adopted many aspects of the previous German Administration. There was little difference between the two colonisers except for the expropriation policy and the line village consolidation program. The Germans had done the pioneering work in the colony and the Australians made this the foundation for colonial management.
The 1920s saw the introduction of Protestantism to Bougainville, in the form of missionaries from the Methodist Church of New Zealand and the Seventh-day Adventist Church. Tensions arose between the existing Catholic missionaries and the new arrivals, culminating in sectarian disturbances in Kieta in 1929. Father Albert Binois wrote to his superiors that the Protestants were "friends of the devil". The late 1920s and 1930s also produced an influx of anthropologists and ethnographers to Bougainville, among them Australians Ernest and Sarah Chinnery, Catholic priest Patrick O'Reilly, Briton Beatrice Blackwood, and American Douglas L. Oliver.