10 Dollars - Elizabeth II Lapita art

The Lapita people, ancestors of the Polynesian and many Melanesian populations, produced some of the Pacific's earliest identifiable pottery traditions — geometric, dentate-stamped ware dated from roughly 1600 BCE. Fiji sits at the western edge of what archaeologists define as the Lapita cultural complex, making it a geographically defensible choice for this commemorative. The KM#236 issue is part of a broader wave of sub-gram gold miniatures produced for the collector market in the mid-2000s, most struck by external minting contractors rather than any domestic facility.