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Military history of Oceania
Although the military history of Oceania probably goes back thousands of years to the first human settlement in the region, little is known about war in Oceania until the arrival of Europeans. The introduction of firearms transformed conflict in the region; in some cases helping to unify regions and in others sparking large-scale tribal and civil wars. Force and the threat of force played a role in the annexation of most of Oceania to various European and American powers, but only in Australia and New Zealand did wars of conquest occur. Western Oceania was a major site of conflict in World War II as the Japanese Empire sought to expand southwards. Since 1945 the region has been mostly at peace, although Melanesia has suffered from Indonesian expansionism in some areas and civil wars and coups in others. The Australian Defence Force is by far the largest military force in Oceania.〔(''Defence Annual Report 2005-06'' ). Pages 219-220.〕
==Pre-European warfare==
Violent conflict was common to nearly all the peoples of Oceania in the period before European arrival, although there is much debate about the frequency of warfare, which of course varied between different societies. Some scholars have argued that peaceful societies are very unusual, with Lawrence H. Keeley of the University of Illinois calculating that 87% of tribal societies were at war more than once per year, and some 65% of them were fighting continuously.() For instance, in Arnhem Land in northern Australia, a study of warfare among the Murngin people in the late-19th century found that over a 20-year period no less than 200 out of 800 men, or 25 percent of all adult males, had been killed in intertribal warfare.() On the other hand, New Zealand historian James Belich cautions against the assumption that tribal societies were inevitably in a constant state of war, pointing out that oral histories tend to emphasise warfare rather than peace even if there is far more of the latter than the former, and that estimating the frequency of war based on the number of weapons and fortifications is like estimating the number of house fires based on the number of insurance policies. However it is clear that in most societies warriors were held in high esteem and that completely pacifist societies were very unusual. One exception was the Moriori of the Chatham Islands.
A range of weapons were used in Oceania. These included the woomera and boomerang in Australia, and the bow in some parts of Melanesia and Polynesia. Nearly all Oceanic peoples had spears and clubs, although the Māori of New Zealand were unusual in having no distance weapons. Weapons could be very simple or elaborately crafted, with distance weapons in particular requiring a great deal of craftsmanship to be accurate. It has been estimated that Aboriginal spears were more accurate than nineteenth-century European firearms.
Most pre-European conflicts in Oceania took place between peoples with a shared culture, and often language. However, there were also wars between peoples of different cultures, for example in Australia and Papua New Guinea, each of which contains many different cultures, and in central Polynesia, where island groups are close enough for parties of war canoes to travel to other territories.
抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』
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