Editing Oceania (section)

===Arts===
{{Main|Oceanian art|Samoan art|Hawaiian art|Māori art|Indigenous Australian art}}
[[File:Bradshaw rock paintings.jpg|thumb|upright=1.05|[[Gwion Gwion rock paintings]] found in the north-west [[Kimberley region of Western Australia]]]]
The artistic creations of native Oceanians varies greatly throughout the cultures and regions. The subject matter typically carries themes of fertility or the supernatural. [[Petroglyphs]], [[tattooing]], painting, wood carving, stone carving, and textile work are other common art forms.<ref name="artino" /> Art of Oceania properly encompasses the artistic traditions of the people indigenous to Australia and the Pacific Islands.<ref name="oce" /> These early peoples lacked a [[writing system]], and made works on perishable materials, so few records of them exist from this time.<ref name="mettime" />

Indigenous Australian [[rock art]] is the oldest and richest unbroken tradition of art in the world, dating as far back as 60,000 years and spread across hundreds of thousands of sites.<ref name="rockart531" /><ref name="nyt051106" /> These rock paintings served several functions. Some were used in magic, others to increase animal populations for hunting, while some were simply for amusement.<ref name="mettime4" /> Sculpture in Oceania first appears on New Guinea as a series of stone figures found throughout the island, but mostly in mountainous highlands. Establishing a chronological timeframe for these pieces in most cases is difficult, but one has been dated to {{circa}} 1500 BCE.<ref name="mettime444" />

By 1500 BCE the [[Lapita culture]], descendants of the second wave, would begin to expand and spread into the more remote islands. At around the same time, art began to appear in New Guinea, including the earliest examples of sculpture in Oceania. Beginning {{circa}} 1100 CE, the people of Easter Island would begin construction of nearly 900 [[moai]] (large stone statues). At {{circa}} 1200 CE, the people of Pohnpei, a Micronesian island, would embark on another megalithic construction, building [[Nan Madol]], a city of artificial islands and a system of canals.<ref name="mettime 453" /> Hawaiian art includes [[wood carving]]s, feather work, petroglyphs, bark cloth (called [[kapa]] in Hawaiian and [[Tapa cloth|tapa]] elsewhere in the Pacific), and tattoos. Native Hawaiians had neither metal nor woven cloth.<ref name="mettime3456" />