Anetchininbeke Point

The waters around Anetchininbeke Point belong to Vanuatu, an archipelago in Melanesia in the South Pacific. The country stretches over a chain of islands of volcanic origin, situated east of New Guinea and the Solomon Islands, north-east of New Caledonia and west of Fiji. Their formation gives the coasts an abrupt, mountainous character and places land and sea in close contact.

The islands were first inhabited by Melanesian people long before Europeans arrived. Archaeologists date settlement to about 3,000 years ago, between roughly 1100 and 700 BC, and associate it with the Lapita culture. Lapita sites occur from the Banks Islands in the north to Aneityum in the south, showing that communities occupied the whole arc rather than only a few favoured islands.

Fernandes de Queirós led the first European expedition to reach the archipelago in 1606, landing at the largest island, Espíritu Santo, and claiming the group for Spain. Later British and French expeditions entered these waters, while the islands' many languages and villages reflected long separate development across the chain. Anetchininbeke Point therefore faces waters whose volcanic islands supported long-standing Melanesian settlement before they became a meeting place of European empires.