Wal Ambrose

Norfolk Island lies 1300 km east of Australia and is equidistant 700 km from New Caledonia and New Zea-land. It is one of a group of so-called 'mystery islands' in the Pacific. These have archaeological evidence of former habitation but were lacking people in residence at the time of ...

Newly developed methods and calibrations for determining the age of flaked obsidian surfaces have been described and applied to New Zealand archaeological obsidians. Hydration bands were measured under high magnification (1000 ×) using a MOCHA imaging system to an ...

A REVIEW is made of known and potential sources of volcanic glasses throughout Oceania. Data obtained by spectrometric analyses of material available from deposits are given and these chemical characterisations are used to delimit potential sources of raw material in prehistory. It is shown that each known deposit for which analyses are available can be described uniquely in terms of the analytical data. Suggestions are made as to the way in which these data can be used to argue for attribution of artefact raw material to a particular source; new analyses of volcanic glasses from both geological and archaeological contexts are presented; some problems are noted, and suggestions made for new directions in methodology.

A new obsidian source from northwest Manus, Papua New Guinea, is reported for the first time. The chemical signature for this new source was obtained using the electron microprobe, ICP-MS, and PIXE-PIGME, and the results were compared with known sources and artifacts from this region. The results show for the first time a more complex scenario of obsidian procurement and exchange than previously thought. Archaeological excavation and survey of Manus is so far very limited, with only one excavated Pleistocene site. Much more archaeological work is needed to find more early sites, to assess the distributions of material from Lepong and other obsidian sources, and model obsidian transfers in more detail.

Measurements made at the Australian National University using laser ablation ICPMS show that none ofthe 88 analyzed obsidian artifacts from East Timor match either the known Papua New Guinea or the fiveIsland SE Asian source samples in our ANU collections. There is a coastal journey of more than 3000 kmbetween the occurrence of obsidians from the Bismarck Archipelago volcanic province of Papua NewGuinea and the Sunda-Banda Arc volcanic chain, yet obsidian artifacts from the two important PNGsources of Talasea and Lou Island are found at coastal Bukit Tengkorak in eastern Sabah at a imilardistance along with material that has no known source. Timor lies south of the eastern section of theactive volcanic Banda Arc island chain but it is within range of possible rhyolite sources from there.Although there is a continuous chain of around 60 active volcanoes stretching from west Sumatra to theMoluccas most are basaltic to andesitic with few areas likely to produce high silica dacite–rhyolitedeposits. This does not exclude the possibility that the volcanic landscapes may contain obsidian, butwithout detailed survey and chemical analysis of sources from the Sunda-Banda Arc the attribution ofthe Timor obsidian artifacts remains to be demonstrated. Timor may seem to be an unlikely source forthe presence of obsidians as it lacks reports of the silica-rich rhyolite volcanic centers necessary toproduce this material. Despite the absence of detailed survey and analysis of Indonesian obsidiansources, especially from the volcanically active Banda Arc, this paper presents evidence that one of twoobsidian sources is clearly from Timor while the other, with less certainty, is also from an unknown localsource.

Proposals that large-scale interaction and ceremonial exchange in the Pacific region began during the time of Lapita pottery (c. 3300–2000 b.p.) (e.g., Friedman 1981; Hayden 1983; Kirch 1997; Spriggs 1997) are seriously challenged by the extensive areal distribution of a class of retouched obsidian artifacts dated to the early and middle Holocene (c. 10,000–3300 b.p.) and known as ‘‘stemmed tools’’ (Araho et al. 2002). Find spots of obsidian stemmed tools stretch from mainland New Guinea to Bougainville Island and include the Trobriand Islands, various islands in Manus province, New Britain and New Ireland (Araho et al. 2002; Golson 2005; Specht 2005; Swadling and Hide 2005) (Fig. 1). Although other forms of tanged and waisted stone tool are known in Melanesia (e.g., Bulmer 2005; Fredericksen 1994, 2000; Golson 1972, 2001), the two types defined by Araho et al. (2002) as ‘‘stemmed tools’’ comprise distinctive classes because they usually have deep notches that delineate very well-defined and pronounced tangs.