128 SISSANO. 
region forms only one corner of a vast area of distribution extending through 
New Guinea and the Malay Archipelago to India. 
There are indications that the area of distribution has extended its limits 
in Oceania in relatively late times, even if it is not still extending. In Vani- 
kolo and Tikopia betel and kava occur together, but while betel is chewed 
in everyday life, the use of kava is limited to religious ceremonial. In this 
case there can be no doubt that the offerings of kava represent the more 
ancient custom and that betel chewing is a later practice. The existence of 
both substances in these islands and the difference in their mode of use sug- 
gest the presence of two cultures, one of which is encroaching upon the area 
of the other. The Santa Cruz Islands, with Tikopia as an outlier, would 
seem to be a field in which the encroachment of the later culture is still in 
progress. 
The distribution of kava and betel thus suggests the presence in Oceania 
of two cultures which may be called the kava culture and the betel culture, 
respectively. I propose to adopt as a working assumption for the rest of 
this book that these two cultures belong to two immigrant peoples whom I 
shall call the kava people and the betel people. When I use these terms in 
future it must be borne in mind that they are not terms for the people of 
Oceania who use kava and betel now, but are terms for the hypothetical 
bodies of immigrants who introduced the use of these two substances. 
I propose also to adopt a special name for the indigenous population which 
the kava people found in Melanesia. We have seen that the earliest form 
of social organization of which we have evidence was on a dual basis asso- 
ciated with matrilineal descent, dominance of the old men, and the peculiar 
forms of marriage which are either known to exist in Melanesia or have been 
revealed by the analysis of its systems of relationship. It will be convenient 
to have a name for the people on whom the immigrants exerted so great an 
influence, and as the most essential feature of their social organization was 
its dual character, I propose to call them the dual people. Here, as in the 
case of the terms kava people and betel people, I do not use the term dual 
people for those who now possess the dual system of society, but for the 
hypothetical element in the existing population of Melanesia formed by the 
people inhabiting its islands when they were first visited by the immigrants. 
Since the argument has shown reason to believe that the inhabitants of the 
Solomon Islands and Fiji once possessed the dual system, we must suppose 
that these islands were at one time inhabited by the dual people; I make 
this the working assumption of the argument which follows: 
It follows from the distribution of kava and betel that the kava people 
settled in southern Melanesia, Fiji, and Polynesia, while the betel people 
did not extend in their southeasterly movement beyond the Solomon and 
Santa Cruz Islands. It is, of course, possible that certain elements of the 
culture of the betel people may have been carried directly or indirectly to 
southern Melanesia, Fiji, and Polynesia, but it seems more probable that 
we have in the culture of these regions the results of the influence of the kava 
people uncomplicated by the culture of the betel people. 
In the Santa Cruz Islands, where both betel and kava are used, it is clear 
that we have to do with elements belonging to the three cultures; and for 
reasons I have already considered we can be confident that in these islands 
the kava people were the earlier and the betel people the later comers. It 
must at present be left an open question whether the betel people themselves 
reached these islands or whether certain elements of their culture, including 
betel, may not have reached these islands indirectly. We can be fairly con- 
fident that the betel chewing of Tikopia is the result of intercourse with the 
Santa Cruz Islands rather than of a settlement of the betel people themselves. 
