INDONESIAN ANNOTATIONS ON THE VOCABULARY. 129 
I have now to consider the question whether the Solomon Islands are also 
the seat of the mixture of three cultures. It is possible that the kava people 
never reached these islands, so that, when the betel people arrived, they 
blended directly with an indigenous population possessing a dual organiza- 
tion comparable with that of southern Melanesia. If, on the other hand, 
the kava people settled in the Solomons and blended with the dual people 
and were later joined by the betel people, it is evident that we shall have a 
far more complicated problem than appears to be presented by the more 
southern islands. 
We shall have in this case to consider the results of the blending of one 
people with another whose culture was already complex; we shall have to 
inquire how far elements of the culture introduced by the earlier settlers 
were obliterated or obscured by the betel people. An obvious fact to be 
dealt with will be the absence of kava in the Solomons, for if those I have 
called the kava people once settled in the Solomons a practice has since 
disappeared which forms so striking a feature of their culture elsewhere that 
I have chosen it as the means of their designation. All traces of their cul- 
ture, however, are not likely to have disappeared, and I have now to con- 
sider what evidence we possess of the presence of the culture of the kava 
people in the Solomons. 
When formulating my scheme of the origin and development of the Sukwe 
and Tamate societies of the Banks Islands I pointed out that certain promi- 
nent features of the secret organizations are present in the Solomons as part 
of the general and public culture of these islands. These features are a 
cult of the dead, the institution of totemism, and the practice of taboo. If 
now we examine the culture of the Solomon Islands we find that all three of 
these features are only present, so far as we know, in one region, that com- 
prising Florida, Ysabel, Guadalcanar, and Savo, and many parts of San 
Cristoval, which may conveniently be spoken of as the matrilineal region. 
The religious cult of this region is essentially a cult of ghosts; its social 
organism stands alone in the Solomons in being based on totemism, and the 
protection of property by means of taboo marks connected with the ghostly 
tindalo is a prominent feature of the culture. It is in this matrilineal region 
that the resemblance between the secret ritual of the Tamate societies and 
the open culture of the Solomons comes out most strongly. Further, it is 
only in this matrilineal region that we have any evidence of secret societies 
similar to those of southern Melanesia. 
According to my scheme it is the kava people who founded the Tamate 
societies, and it is the culture of this people which is enshrined in their ritual; 
it will therefore follow that, if the kava people settled in the Solomons, it is 
the matrilineal region which has preserved their culture most purely. I 
propose to adopt as my working hypothesis that the kava people settled in 
the Solomons, and that in the matrilineal region of these islands there has 
been preserved the culture resulting from the blend of the kava people with 
the dual people but relatively little influenced by the betel people, while 
other parts, such as Ulawa and Malaita and the more western islands, are 
places where the influence of the betel people has been predominant. It is 
noteworthy that the matrilineal islands occupy the central portion of the 
Solomons, suggesting that the betel people have gradually invaded the 
islands from several sides; it is probable that their culture was still encroach- 
ing on that of the earlier settlers when the islands were first visited in the 
last century. 
The complete absence of betel chewing in Fiji shows that the betel people 
can have had no direct influence in these islands; on the assumption I am 
