Biological anthropology has a long history in the Pacific region, and the focus and trends in this region have very much paralleled the general history of science, and the development of the field of anthropology more broadly and biological anthropology more specifically: from the hierarchical and highly romanticized descriptions of ‘civilized’ Polynesians and ‘savage’ ‘Melanesian’ populations made by the early European explorers, through to the attempts at typological classification of peoples based on various combinations of morphological characteristics of the new ‘scientific’ approaches of the mid nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, to studies of the more invisible characteristics of blood type, and, most recently, to genomic studies of Pacific ‘populations’.