The Samoan Islands were first settled some 3,500 years ago as part of the Austronesian expansion. Both Samoa's early history and its more recent history are strongly connected to the histories of Tonga and Fiji, nearby islands with which Samoa has long had genealogical links as well as shared cultural traditions.
European explorers first reached the Samoan islands in the early 18th century. In 1768, Louis-Antoine de Bougainville named them the Navigator Islands. The United States Exploring Expedition , led by Charles Wilkes, reached Samoa in 1839. In 1855, J.C. Godeffroy & Sohn expanded its trading business into the Samoan archipelago. The first Samoan Civil War led to the so-called Samoan crisis, a struggle between Western powers for control of the area. This in turn led to the Second Samoan Civil War , which was resolved by the Tripartite Convention, in which the United States, Great Britain and Germany agreed to partition the islands into German Samoa and American Samoa.
After World War I, New Zealand took over the administration of what had been German Samoa, and the area was renamed the Western Samoa Trust Territory. This area became independent in 1962 and was renamed Samoa. American Samoa remains an unincorporated territory of the United States.
Early history
Archeologists estimate that the earliest human settlement of the Samoan archipelago was around 2900–3500 years before the present . This estimate is based on dating the ancient Lapita pottery shards that are found throughout the islands. The oldest shards found so far have been in Mulifanua and in Sasoa'a, Falefa. The oldest archaeological evidence found on the islands of Polynesia, Samoa and Tonga all date from around that same period, suggesting that the first settlement occurred around the same time in the region as a whole. Little is known about human activity in the islands between 750 BC and 1000 AD, though this may have been a period of mass migrations that led to the settlement of present-day Polynesia. Mysteriously, during this period, the making of pottery appears to have suddenly stopped. The Samoan peoples have no oral tradition that purports to explain this. Some archaeologists have suggested that Polynesia lacked pottery-making materials, and that most of the pottery used during the migration period in Polynesia was imported rather than sourced or crafted locally.
