Hilary Howes

In December 1905, the Austrian anthropologist and medical practitioner Rudolf Poch unearthed a number of potsherds from a refuse heap in Wanigela, south-eastern New Guinea. Four years later, Otto Meyer, a German Catholic missionary, discovered decorated pottery fragments on Watom Island in the Bismarck Archipelago. His illustrated accounts of these fragments are now recognised as the earliest descriptions of Lapita pottery. Although Meyer and Poch shared a common language and examined similar materials from neighbouring parts of the Pacific at much the same time, their interpretations of these materials differed significantly. By comparing and contrasting their analyses of prehistoric pottery and speculations about its origins, I hope to help contextualise early archaeological work in the Pacific and shed new light on the development of ideas about the settlement of the region.

This article is a historiography, or critical review of the history, of Australian archaeology. It commences with a discussion of the two major regional histories of Australian archaeology, and a survey of the literature on the removal and scientific use of human remains. This is followed by an examination of the two major approaches to the history of Australian archaeology—individual and collective biography, and the use of specific archaeological sites or broader geographical regions—then three complementary but less used historical approaches. Finally, I offer suggestions for further research in the history of Australian archaeology.

Adolf Bernhard Meyer (1840–1911), a German-Jewish medical scientist, naturalist and museum director, travelled and collected in northwest New Guinea between March and July 1873. He was one of the first German-born naturalists to visit New Guinea and the first to publish extensively in German on his field experiences there. Though his subsequent career as a museum director was built on the scientific results and collections from this expedition, after his death the expedition itself was largely forgotten and the publications resulting from it — including a lengthy travelogue and works on New Guinean physical anthropology, language and religious beliefs — were ignored or discredited. This paper re-examines this neglected corpus of scholarship and considers the ways in which Meyer's encounters with indigenous New Guineans influenced his contributions to discussions, in the European metropoles, of racial difference. On the one hand, Meyer's perceptions of ‘Papuan’ physical and cultural identity were shaped by his pre-voyage readings, particularly of works by the British traveller-naturalist Alfred Russel Wallace and the German psychologist and ethnologist Theodor Waitz, and by the constraints, on his post-voyage publications, of genre and discourse. On the other hand, these perceptions were constantly challenged in the field by his actual encounters with indigenous New Guineans and by the diversity and unexpectedness of their physical appearances, initiatives, demeanours and actions.

The indigenous inhabitants of New Guinea and surrounding islands, along with so-called 'Negrito' groups in mainland Southeast Asia and the Malay Archipelago, stood at the forefront of European anthropological and ethnological interest during the second half of the nineteenth century. German researchers interested in these groups frequently engaged in transnational dialogue and debate: they read, reviewed and translated one another's work, corresponded on matters of interest, and corroborated or contradicted one another's conclusions. This chapter illuminates these scholarly connections by focusing on the German traveller-naturalist and museum director Adolf Bernhard Meyer. His connections with English-speaking colleagues, particularly the naturalist Alfred Russel Wallace and the anthropologist Alfred Cort Haddon, shed light on the mutually constitutive nature of metropolitan knowledge and field experience, the role of translation in Anglo-German scholarly dialogue, and the variable interpretation of anthropological data within different national cultures of scientific knowledge. Keywords: Adolf Bernhard Meyer; Alfred Cort Haddon; Alfred Russel Wallace; Anglo-German scholarly dialogue; European anthropological interest; European ethnological interest; Malay Archipelago; Negrito groups; New Guinea; Southeast Asia

this proves them to be exercising a decisive influence on government’ (p. 136). One infers, almost, that detailed and literal instructions are required, an excessive standard of proof (and Hyam’s argument is not enhanced by repeating someone else’s crack about those persuaded by Cain and Hopkins meeting in a telephone box). The abolition of slavery throughout the empire, as well as morally justified, perhaps reinforced a certain British smugness. One interesting essay discusses Peter Peckard, Master of Magdalene over two centuries ago, who agitated for abolition, inspired Wilberforce’s generation, advocated what became the Church Missionary Society, and tutored Samuel Marsden. Hyam’s discussion of African responses to missionaries has obvious comparative interest for Pacific historians. The essay on Smuts is similarly good; Hyam argues that apartheid was qualitatively different from what went before, and discusses British official attitudes to South African Governments. Some might think Hyam is a little generous to Thatcher, but there is no doubt that ‘Eden hated Strijdom’ while Macmillan’s High Commissioner described the country as ‘a police state run by Transvaal thugs’ and compared Verwoerd to Hitler (p. 353). No doubt true, but Kenyan nationalists might have seen less difference between the British and the South African government. Hyam is particularly well known for his writing on sexuality and the empire, a subject which lends itself to one-liners. The empire was ‘not only a matter of ‘‘Christianity and commerce’’, it was also a matter of copulation and concubinage’ (p. 364). The argument, summarised, is that, for many young British men of whatever class, the overseas empire provided sexual opportunity (and running the empire would have been impossible otherwise). What goes on tour stays on tour, and the ‘white man’s status put him in a strong position to get his way’ (p. 371). Prostitution was regarded very differently in Asia and Africa and, in slavery, white men of course enjoyed easy access to black women, circumstances hardly describable as consensual. This is scarcely the same thing as the relationships contracted by Hudson’s Bay Company men with Amerindian women or for that matter whalers and traders with Maori women. In Canada as in New Zealand, some (by no means all) European men abandoned their indigenous wives when European women came along; some missionaries fell by the wayside. Hyam wishes to avoid moral judgements, which on one level is fair enough. Reading, however, of an official in Kenya who enjoyed access to 12-year-old girls and then got into trouble for quarrelling with the husband of one of them — who had in the first place made the young girl available to the Englishman — and of an army officer who had sexual relations with many dozens of young teenage boys in India and elsewhere, I felt that the suspension of judgement can be taken too far, and I wanted a bit less certainty that everybody was happy. Hyam also risks conflating all expressions of sexuality into one experience of imperial libertinism, until ‘interfering busybodies’ mucked things up. Moreover, Hyam almost takes for granted the importance of sexuality as an explanatory factor in imperial history in a way to which he thoroughly objects to when it comes to economic interests. Understanding the British Empire provides plenty of material for reflection and debate. Whether one agrees with Hyam or not, his arguments are weighty. As a survey of many themes and issues, and an overview of the life’s work of an influential scholar of the British empire, the book deserves to be read widely.

Abstract The island of Pohnpei houses the ruins of Nan Madol, currently Micronesia’s only World Heritage site. It is now believed to represent the ceremonial centre of the Saudeleur dynasty, a vibrant period in Pacific Island culture. Western visitors to Pohnpei in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries were fascinated by these ruins, often interpreting them as the dwelling place of kings long past. At the same time, they sought to comprehend the complex socio-political hierarchies of existing Pohnpeian society through the lens of monarchy, identifying multiple ‘kings’ among the island’s elites. This article examines German-speakers’ perceptions of, and interactions with, pre-existing elites on Pohnpei over the years 1870–1914. These dates correspond to a period of significant political change on Pohnpei, from nominal Spanish control to the establishment of an outpost of German imperialism.

Best known today for his involve-ment in the German colonial annexation of northeastern New Guinea and the Bismarck Archipelago, Friedrich Hermann Otto Finsch (1839–1917) was a self-taught ornithologist, ethnologist, and museum curator. He was rec-ognized in his own lifetime as a “perceptive observer” and “collector par excellence,” but struggled to gain traction for his interpretations of Pacifi c peoples and societies among his for-mally trained peers (Luschan 1897: 76; Schmeltz 1894: 268). The town of Finschhafen in Papua New Guinea’s Morobe Province still bears his name, as do several bird species and a crater on the moon (the latter designated posthumously in his honor by the International Astronomical Union in 1976)

On 14 December 1937 the front page of the Australian daily newspaper The Telegraph featured the following headline: PRIEST DIES ON SHIP IN BRISBANE. There followed the information that sixty-year-old Father Otto Meyer MSC had died in his cabin on board the liner Nellore at 6 a.m. that morning. He had just spent two months leave in Sydney and was on his way back to Watom Island in the Bismarck Archipelago, where he had been active as a Missionary of the Sacred Heart of Jesus for the past 35 years. According to the reporter, he was beloved by all who came into contact with him, Europeans and natives alike. Father Meyer was buried in Nudgee Catholic Cemetery in Brisbane, where his headstone can still be seen today

In 1873 the German naturalist A.B. Meyer spent five months in New Guinea. He had expected «bloodthirsty and untamed savages» and was amazed to find «men of milder customs». His compatriot Otto Finsch returned from a voyage through Hawaii, Micronesia, New Zealand and Torres Strait declaring Germany’s most respected anthropologists wrong. Human races could not be neatly distinguished: they «merge into one another to such an extent that the difference between Europeans and Papuans becomes completely unimportant». This richly interdisciplinary book explores the transformative impacts of personal encounters in Oceania on understandings of human difference, and illuminates the difficult relationship between field experience and metropolitan science in late nineteenth-century Europe.