History of Bougainville

Bougainville is a province of Papua New Guinea. It was named after the French navigator Louis Antoine de Bougainville.

Bougainville has been inhabited for at least 33,000 years. Its people speak languages belonging to three language families, the northern and southern Bougainville families, whose origins are unknown and presumably ancient, and languages of the Austronesian family, which arrived from western areas with migrants of the more recent Lapita culture three millennia ago.

Douglas Oliver in his 1991 book discussed one of the unique aspects of the people of Bougainville: "[A] 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 (later called redskins) 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 (and hence reproductive) preference for black skin."

They developed an identity distinct from many other ethnicities in Papua New Guinea, where there are hundreds of linguistic and cultural groups.

The German New Guinea Company established control over Bougainville and Buka, Choiseul, Shortland and Treasury islands in 1885, as part of European colonisation in the area. The British Empire established a protectorate in 1893 for the southern Solomon Islands, expanding it to include the eastern islands in 1899. In 1900, Germany transferred all of its claims in the Solomons, other than Bougainville and Buka Island, to Great Britain. Britain in return withdrew from Western Samoa.

...
Wikipedia