There is always a need to deconstruct the terminologies in our discourses to see where they come from, what they meant originally, and how their meanings may have changed often in subtle but important ways. We must understand the intellectual baggage we carry with us. We should therefore examine our culture historical labels such as ‘Lapita style’, ‘Lapita ware’, and ‘Lapita culture’, We think we know what they mean and how they came to be. But do we? Deconstruction of such terms and their associations can only occur through an historical approach, one that allows us to understand what people knew when they wrote what they wrote, and what explanations were even possible for the phenomena observed at the time given the collective knowledge base. I attempt just such an approach here for ‘Lapita’.