THE LONG PAUSE
Pago Pago, AMERICAN SAMOA — The same question drives both the plot of Moana and decades of archaeological research: why, after centuries of relative stability, did Polynesian voyagers suddenly begin settling islands thousands of kilometers away across the Pacific?
The latest Moana movie is a live-...

![Ancestral Polynesians only moved beyond Samoa and Tonga after a 1700-year ‘long pause’. The remaining island archipelagos were then settled rapidly. Was it about climate change, the weather? [graphic: David Sear] Migration map](https://samoanews.com/sites/default/files/styles/teaser/public/field/image/migration_map.jpeg?itok=tmKCst3U)