Fiji Native Races

The first inhabitants of Fiji arrived long before contact with European explorers in the seventeenth century. Pottery excavated from Fijian towns showed that Fiji was settled before or around 1000 BC. This question of Pacific migration still lingers. Native Fijians, who were a minority in their own country at independence, are mainly of Melanesian stock. Records for the native Fijians do not exist until the first Europeans settled on the islands in 1834. Civil Registration began in 1874 for all nationalities on the islands.