Glenn Summerhayes

Austronesian speaking peoples left Southeast Asia and entered the Western Pacific c.4000-3000 years ago, continuing on to colonise Remote Oceania for the first time, where they became the ancestral populations of Polynesians. Understanding the  impact of these peoples on the mainland of New Guinea before they entered Remote Oceania has eluded archaeologists. New research from the archaeological site of Wañelek in the New Guinea Highlands has broken this silence. Petrographic and geochemical data from pottery and new radiocarbon dating demonstrates that Austronesian influences penetrated into the highland interior by 3000 years ago. One potsherd was manufactured along the northeast coast of New Guinea, whereas others were manufactured from inland  materials. These findings represent the oldest securely dated pottery from an archaeological context on the island of New Guinea. Additionally, the pottery comes from the interior, suggesting the movements of people and technological practices, as well as objects at this time. The antiquity of the Wañelek pottery is coincident with the expansion of Lapita pottery in the Western Pacific. Such occupation also occurs at the same time that changes have been identified in subsistence strategies in the archaeological record at Kuk Swamp suggesting a possible link between the two.

This paper uses strontium isotope (87Sr/86Sr), oxygen isotope (δ18O) and Ba/Sr trace element data in archaeological tooth enamel samples to investigate migration and mobility at the Late Lapita site of SAC, Watom Island in the Bismarck Archipelago. Previous archaeological models have identified Lapita mobility at a community level using obsidian distribution patterns and changes in ceramic design, whereas isotope and trace element data can potentially reconstruct prehistoric mobility on an individual level. Human and pig teeth were sampled from SAC and a selection of human teeth were included from the Late–Post Lapita site of Lifafaesing, Tanga Islands as a geographic/geological comparison.The results indicate that there is a large amount of isotopic variation in the Bismarck Archipelago which is useful for identifying non-local individuals and possibly determining their origins. One human individual and several pigs were suggested as coming from elsewhere in the region. Three potentially separate locations were identified for the non-local pigs. It is argued, using the data from SAC, that Late Lapita communities in the Bismarck Archipelago were more mobile than previously assumed. The potential for identifying individual migrants in a Lapita context are discussed in terms of assessing the more subtle aspects of Lapita society in the Southwest Pacific Islands.

In 2007 a new Early Lapita site called Tamuarawai (EQS) was located on Emirau Island, Papua New Guinea. Two seasons of excavation (2007, 2008) have been undertaken. This paper describes the site and some of the preliminary analyses undertaken. Some unusual results suggest ...

This paper summarises research on obsidian findings across the region of Island Southeast Asia (ISEA), from the first reporting of obsidian on Sumatra as a result of cave excavations in the early 1900s through to the latest published discoveries in 2009. These results are the background for the first region-wide research project focussing on obsidian characterisation and its role in prehistoric inter-island exchange. It is commonly held that distribution of obsidian in ISEA was only localised and inter-island transportation limited. The review, however, suggests that this hypothesis derives from an incomplete knowledge of obsidian distribution in the region rather than typifying prehistoric social patterns. Obsidian sourcing has been carried out only intermittently in ISEA since the 1970s and has generally been focussed only at the single site level, thus explaining this very partial understanding.

After their emergence by 200,000 years before the present in Africa, modern humans colonized the globe, reaching Australia and New Guinea by 40,000 to 50,000 years ago. Understanding how humans lived and adapted to the range of environments in these areas has been difficult because well-preserved settlements are scarce. Data from the New Guinea Highlands (at an elevation of ~2000 meters) demonstrate the exploitation of the endemic nut Pandanus and yams in archaeological sites dated to 49,000 to 36,000 years ago, which are among the oldest human sites in this region. The sites also contain stone tools thought to be used to remove trees, which suggests that the early inhabitants cleared forest patches to promote the growth of useful plants.

... Obsidian sources at Mopir, West New Britain Province, Papua New Guinea Richard Fullagar, Glenn Summerhayes, Baiva Ivuyoand Jim Specht Abstract ... Changes through time in relative proportions of obsidian from Lou Island, Talasea and Mopir suggest fluctuations in ...

This paper emphasises sub-regional variation in the timing and nature of subsistence changes in the New Guinea Highlands at the Pleistocene–Holocene transition. An analysis of the Kiowa lithic assemblage was used to examine the interplay between tool technology, mobility levels, and subsistence strategies by investigating changes in the procurement, manufacture, and use of different raw stone materials in an overall lithic technology. Throughout Kiowa’s occupation local stone was used extensively, and over time people increased their knowledge of the local lithic landscape, using more diverse local raw materials. Since the terminal Pleistocene, people carried reliable polished axes for a variety of activities and made expedient use of locally abundant river pebbles, while smaller nodules were located and carried as mobile toolkits to facilitate longer distance hunting and collecting excursions. In the mid Holocene exotic raw materials were also traded from more distant zones. The abandonment of Kiowa in the late Holocene shows that hunting became less economically important as cultivation developed in the area. Technological changes, in combination with changes in faunal remains are suggestive of increasing activ- ity at Kiowa through the Holocene as the site became specialised for bat hunting, perhaps driven by restricted land use and reduced mobility, reciprocally affected by increasing populations and the inten- sification of plant food production in the Highlands generally. Despite this, evidence for changes to hor- ticulture around Kiowa itself, in the Chimbu area, is limited to the mid-late Holocene, indicating that the early development of agriculture in the Wahgi may have been relatively localised, and did not necessarily displace existing subsistence strategies elsewhere in the Highlands.

Pottery has been the artefact of choice for establishing migrations in the West Pacific as demonstrated by the discovery in the 1960s that dentate-stamped pottery of the Lapita Cultural Complex had a distribution that spanned thousands of kilometres. The decorative attributes of pots are traditionally assessed to infer a cultural connection and establish the migration pattern. In this paper, ceramic technology results are presented that indicate significant variation among early potting groups who colonised different parts of Remote Oceania around 3000 years ago. Expanding the study of ceramics beyond decoration and vessel forms provides new insight to ancient potting traditions and challenges ideas about early migration that are based predominantly on pot decoration.

During the late-Holocene, Papua New Guinea (PNG) was host to the arrival of new pottery making peoples from the west. The interaction between these migrant Austronesian speakers and the indigenous Papuan speakers is poorly understood. In the New Guinea Highlands, new technologies such as pottery were introduced via ancient trade networks. The extent to which this introduction represents a diffusion of ideas, a movement of material culture, or a movement of peoples is important to understanding the nature of interaction during this early colonising phase. As a proxy for prehistoric trade and social interaction, the study undertook ceramic compositional analysis of fifteen sherds from two Highland sites using a Scanning Electron Microscope (SEM) to determine number of distinct production centres, and possible locations of production. This paper will present the results of our work and the implications following.

The recent finds of mid-late Lapita ceramics at Caution Bay near Port Moresby (McNiven et al. 2011) demand a fresh look at more than 40 years of intermittent archaeology along the south coast of Papua New Guinea. The relationship between this colonisation event, dated to c. 2900 calBP, and the previous earliest known ceramic horizon in the region, widely referred to as Early Papuan Pottery (EPP) and beginning c. 2000 calBP (Summerhayes & Allen 2007), remains still to be fully resolved. Oposisi on Yule Island, first excavated by Ron Vanderwal in 1969, is a key site for understanding the EPP period, and therefore the nature of this relationship. A re-excavation of Oposisi in 2007 produced a new sample of ceramics, in addition to seven new AMS radiocarbon dates all in good chronostratigraphic order, confirming an initial settlement of the site around 2000 calBP (Allen et al. 2011). This paper presents the preliminary results of stylistic, fabric and chemical analyses of the new sample of Oposisi ceramics that is being undertaken as a Master of Arts project, expanding a Papuan pottery production study begun by Summerhayes and Allen (2007).

this paper describes preliminary archaeological research undertaken in madang province, on the northeast coast of png in order to clarify networks of trade and interaction from 2000 Bp to the ethnographic present. surface surveys were undertaken along the coast following in the footsteps of egloff’s 1973/1974 work, and excavations were undertaken in June 2014 at two archaeological sites (tilu at malmal village, and nunguri on Bilbil island).