Spatial organization and materiality in Polynesia’s earliest Catholic cemeteries, Mangareva Islands, French Polynesia

Processes of religious conversion in Oceania during the nineteenth century involved transformations of everyday life, belief, and worship, alongside a re-evaluation of relationships with ancestors, spirits, and the worlds of the dead. These changes were materialized in the creation of different types of cemeteries that departed from long-established mortuary practices. In French Polynesia, the first long-term foothold for Roman Catholicism was established by an 1830s mission to the Mangareva Islands, located approximately 1600 km southeast of Tahiti. The earliest formal Catholic cemeteries were created in the 1840s, with a particularly well-preserved example on Akamaru Island providing key evidence, including spatial layout and headstone inscriptions, for transformed burial practices relating to the new belief system.