Island Melanesia is a
subregion
A subregion is a part of a larger region or continent and is usually based on location. Cardinal directions, such as south are commonly used to define a subregion.
United Nations subregions
The Statistics Division of the United Nations (UN) ...
of
Melanesia
Melanesia (, ) is a subregion of Oceania in the southwestern Pacific Ocean. It extends from Indonesia's New Guinea in the west to Fiji in the east, and includes the Arafura Sea.
The region includes the four independent countries of Fiji, Va ...
in
Oceania
Oceania (, , ) is a geographical region that includes Australasia, Melanesia, Micronesia, and Polynesia. Spanning the Eastern and Western hemispheres, Oceania is estimated to have a land area of and a population of around 44.5 million ...
.
It is located east of
New Guinea
New Guinea (; Hiri Motu: ''Niu Gini''; id, Papua, or , historically ) is the world's second-largest island with an area of . Located in Oceania in the southwestern Pacific Ocean, the island is separated from Australia by the wide Torr ...
island, from the
Bismarck Archipelago to
New Caledonia.
[Steadman, 2006. ''Extinction & biogeography of tropical Pacific birds'']
See also
Archaeology and social history
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Lapita culture
The Lapita culture is the name given to a Neolithic Austronesian people and their material culture, who settled Island Melanesia via a seaborne migration at around 1600 to 500 BCE. They are believed to have originated from the northern Philipp ...
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Micronesian navigation
Micronesian navigation techniques are those navigation skills used for thousands of years by the navigators who voyaged between the thousands of small islands in the western Pacific Ocean in the subregion of Oceania, that is commonly known as Mi ...
*
Polynesian navigation
Polynesian navigation or Polynesian wayfinding was used for thousands of years to enable long voyages across thousands of kilometers of the open Pacific Ocean. Polynesians made contact with nearly every island within the vast Polynesian Triangl ...
Human geography
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East Melanesian Islands
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Near Oceania
Near Oceania is the part of Oceania settled 35,000 years ago, comprising Australia, New Guinea, and north-western Island Melanesia: the Bismarck Archipelago and the Solomon Islands.
Prehistory
The great nineteenth-century naturalist Alfred ...
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Remote Oceania
Remote Oceania is the part of Oceania settled within the last 3,000 to 3,500 years, comprising south-eastern Island Melanesia and islands in the open Pacific east of the Solomon Islands: Fiji, Micronesia, New Caledonia, New Zealand, Polynesia, t ...
Languages
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Central–Eastern Oceanic languages
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Oceanic languages
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Remote Oceanic languages
A family of some 200 Remote Oceanic languages has traditionally been posited as a subgroup of the Central-Eastern Oceanic languages. However, it was abandoned by Lynch, Ross, & Crowley in 2002, as no defining features of the family could be fou ...
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Southern Oceanic languages
The Southern Oceanic languages are a linkage of Oceanic languages spoken in Vanuatu and New Caledonia. It was proposed by Lynch, Ross, and Crowley in 2002 and supported by later studies. They consider it to be a linkage rather than a language g ...
Nations
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Bougainville
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Fiji
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New Caledonia
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Solomon Islands
Solomon Islands is an island country consisting of six major islands and over 900 smaller islands in Oceania, to the east of Papua New Guinea and north-west of Vanuatu. It has a land area of , and a population of approx. 700,000. Its capit ...
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Vanuatu
Vanuatu ( or ; ), officially the Republic of Vanuatu (french: link=no, République de Vanuatu; bi, Ripablik blong Vanuatu), is an island country located in the South Pacific Ocean. The archipelago, which is of volcanic origin, is east of no ...
References
Geography of Melanesia
Regions of Oceania
Geography of New Caledonia
Geography of Papua New Guinea
Geography of the Solomon Islands
Bismarck Archipelago
Louisiade Archipelago
Solomon Islands (archipelago)
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