Dylan Gaffney

Analysis of the spatial and temporal structure of global island colonization allows us to frame the extent of insular human cultural diversity, model the impact of common environmental factors cross-culturally, and understand the contribution of island maritime societies to big historical processes. No such analysis has, however, been undertaken since the 1980s. In this paper we review and update global patterns in island colonization, synthesizing data from all the major island groups and theaters and undertaking quantitative and qualitative analysis of these data. We demonstrate the continued relevance of certain biogeographic and environmental factors in structuring how humans colonized islands during the Holocene. Our analysis also suggests the importance of other factors, some previously anticipated—such as culturally ingrained seafaring traditions and technological enhancement of dispersal capacity—but some not, such as the relationship between demographic growth and connectiv...

ABSTRACTThis paper examines the archaeological collections accumulated by Sue Bulmer during her time in the New Guinea Highlands. Bulmer used this collection as a basis to investigate key themes in the island's prehistory. We focus on several of these research themes, established in the early years, but which remain pertinent: the occupation of the interior during the Late Pleistocene, the establishment of agriculture and horticulture in the Holocene, and the routes of trade and exchange from the coast into the Highlands. Case studies of recent research produced from the collection revisit these themes, providing valuable updates.

Abstract Moving into montane rainforests was a unique behavioural innovation developed by Pleistocene Homo sapiens as they expanded out of Africa and through Southeast Asia and Sahul for the first time. However, faunal sequences from these environments that shed light on past hunting practices are rare. In this paper we assess zooarchaeological evidence from Yuku and Kiowa, two sites that span that Pleistocene to Holocene boundary in the New Guinea Highlands. We present new AMS radiocarbon dates and a revision of the stratigraphic sequences for these sites, and examine millennial-scale changes to vertebrate faunal composition based on NISP, MNI, and linear morphometric data to shed light on variability in hunting practices, processes of natural cave deposition, and the local palaeoenvironment at the end of the LGM through to the Late Holocene. We show that Yuku was first occupied at least c. 17,500 years ago and that Late Pleistocene–Early Holocene hunters targeted a wide range of small-bodied and agile species from the mid-montane forest, with a particular focus on cuscus (Phalanger spp.). At Kiowa, occupied from around 12,000 years ago, a similar range of species were targeted, but with an added emphasis on specialised Dobsonia magna fruit bat hunting. We then integrate other zooarchaeological data from the wider Highlands zone to build a model of generalist-specialist hunting dynamics and examine how this more broadly contributes to our understanding of tropical foraging during the Late Pleistocene and Holocene.

This paper is the first ethnographic description of ceramic sago oven production in the Raja Ampat Islands of West Papua. These rectilinear ovens are widespread throughout eastern Indonesia, used to bake sago flour into small 'cakes, ' which can be stored during times of food shortage or used in exchange. Little is known about the emergence of this technology in the past and so this modern baseline serves as an important link to understand production sequences in the archaeological record. This record will be central to understanding sago processing in the deeper past, a key part of a wider system of forest exploitation in the far western Pacific Islands. Full text at: https://pacificarchaeology.org/index.php/journal/article/view/281

This paper reports on aspects of the production and trade of nineteenth century Chinese opium pipe bowls based on an examination of an assemblage from a Chinese goldfields settlement in New Zealand. Using energy dispersive X-ray fluorescence (EDXRF) and laser ablation inductively coupled plasma mass spectrometry (LA-ICP-MS) we characterised the clay sources used for pipe production. Comparing those results with a stylistic analysis of the pipe bowls we developed a model for the production of opium pipe bowls and their distribution to nineteenth century Chinese diaspora communities. This is the first study to investigate Chinese opium pipe bowls using a combination of geochemical and stylistic analysis and is a novel application of archaeological science methodologies in Overseas Chinese Archaeology. The work reveals information about a group of potters and their production structures in Southern China and their trading connections in the Trans-Pacific region that had previously been...

This book details investigations into the archaeology of Madang District, Papua New Guinea. Specifically, several important archaeological sites on the coast and offshore islands are examined. In 2014, the authors completed a survey around Madang Lagoon along with Bilbil Island and Yabob Island, and excavated two sites: Tilu at Malmal village and Nunguri on Bilbil Island. Our excavations uncovered archaeological deposits dating to 600-500 years ago. This was associated with distinctive red-slipped pottery in the ‘Madang-style,’ obsidian, shell ornaments and tools, animal bone, and shellfish food remains. The report also examines how modern pots are made around Madang, and different material culture produced and traded around the northeast coast generally.

How early human foragers impacted insular forests is a topic with implications across multiple disciplines, including resource management. Paradoxically, terminal Pleistocene and Early Holocene impacts of foraging communities have been characterized as both extreme—as in debates over human-driven faunal extinctions—and minimal compared to later landscape transformations by farmers and herders. We investigated how rainforest hunter-gatherers managed resources in montane New Guinea and present some of the earliest documentation of Late Pleistocene through mid-Holocene exploitation of cassowaries (Aves: Casuariidae). Worldwide, most insular ratites were extirpated by the Late Holocene, following human arrivals, including elephant birds of Madagascar (Aepyornithidae) and moa of Aotearoa/New Zealand (Dinornithiformes)—icons of anthropogenic island devastation. Cassowaries are exceptional, however, with populations persisting in New Guinea and Australia. Little is known of past human expl...

This article examines three key aspects of New Guinea Highlands prehistory, with important implications for regional and global archaeology, including evidence for (1) adaptive flexibility at high altitudes, particularly within montane rainforests and grasslands; (2) plant-food production and cultivation in the tropics; and (3) the emergence of incipient social stratification and how it was transformed by the production and redistribution of material culture, plants, and animals. After synthesizing the archaeological evidence, we propose that social transformations amongst highland groups were intraregionally variable and involved a sequential diversification of subsistence practices that overlapped and persisted through time. Because communities, and their sociotechnical practices, were differently interconnected across the mountains, and at times to the lowlands, coasts, and islands as well, each subregion transformed asymmetrically at different rates and scales through time. The ...

This paper examines a central concern in archaeological research: the interplay between technological and social flux over the longue durée. This is done by describing ceramic technological continuity and change, and its correspondence with broader social processes, on the northeast coast of New Guinea in the recent past. It presents new ethnographic information from Madang, Papua New Guinea, involving Bilbil and Yabob potters, to outline the chaîne opératoire of pottery production at present. Comparisons with ethnohistorical texts then allow us to model technological change over a longer period of c. 150 years, following the direct historical approach. This shows distinct continuity, but also substantial modification throughout the nineteenth–twenty-first centuries, as the potters negotiated major social upheavals during the colonial and post-independence periods, such as forcible relocation from their offshore islands onto the mainland. This expands our understanding of how social...

Pleistocene water crossings, long thought to be an innovation of Homo sapiens, may extend beyond our species to encompass Middle and Early Pleistocene Homo. However , it remains unclear how water crossings differed among hominin populations, the extent to which Homo sapiens are uniquely flexible in these adaptive behaviors, and how the tempo and scale of water crossings played out in different regions. I apply the adaptive flexibility hypothesis, derived from cognitive ecology, to model the global data and address these questions. Water-crossing behaviors appear to have emerged among different regional hominin populations in similar ecologies, initially representing nonstrategic range expansion. However, an increasing readiness to form connections with novel environments allowed some H. sapiens populations to eventually push water crossings to new extremes, moving out of sight of land, making return crossings to maintain social ties and build viable founder populations, and dramatically shifting subsistence and lithic provisioning strategies to meet the challenges of variable ecological settings.

This paper is the first ethnographic description of ceramic sago oven production in the Raja Ampat Islands of West Papua. These rectilinear ovens are widespread throughout eastern Indonesia, used to bake sago flour into small 'cakes, ' which can be stored during times of food shortage or used in exchange. Little is known about the emergence of this technology in the past and so this modern baseline serves as an important link to understand production sequences in the archaeological record. This record will be central to understanding sago processing in the deeper past, a key part of a wider system of forest exploitation in the far western Pacific Islands.

Full text at: https://pacificarchaeology.org/index.php/journal/article/view/281

Technology is a process. As a process, it materialises knowledge, identity and society. In this essay, I introduce the concept of technological process, which draws on the tenets of process archaeology and the anthropology of technology in describing materials and people as dynamic, mutually constitutive lines of flow. These lines are best codified as a chaîne opératoire (operational sequence), which allows us to tease apart socially meaningful, diachronic variation and change. How technological process, as a narrative device and interpretive concept, can be uniquely applied to the pre-colonial past in Melanesia is explored through the production and exchange of red-slipped pottery around Madang in the recent pre-colonial past. Common themes in this research, and other case studies from the area, draw attention to unique aspects of the technological process in northeast New Guinea, which involves growth, personification, magic and ritual. This has implications for how we understand technology in deeper archaeological time.

Full text at: https://press.anu.edu.au/publications/series/terra-australis/archaeologies-island-melanesia

Shell valuable exchange in the New Guinea Highlands has been a key interest in anthropology, providing insight into economics, aesthetics, and social stratification among banded communities. This article describes how shell exchange at ethnographic present reflects deeper historical processes. We trace the origins and subsequent changes in shell use from the terminal Pleistocene to the Late Holocene at the site of Kiowa in Chimbu Province, Papua New Guinea. Zooarchaeological and technological analyses of Kiowa’s shell artifacts indicates riverine mussel was procured locally from the terminal Pleistocene (9,500–10,000 years ago) and featured as a minor component in the diet into the recent precolonial period. In contrast, evidence for marine shell valuables only appears in the Late Holocene in the form of Trochus armbands and Tegillarca granosa and Polymesoda cf. erosa multifunctional tools. This challenges ideas that associate the gradual dispersal of marine shell into the highlands with the spread of agriculture around the Wahgi Valley at the start of the Holocene and supports punctuated pulses of coastal contact. In doing so, we formulate a testable model for the development of shell exchange into the highlands, with implications for the emergence of stratification and the conduits between the interior and coast.

Full paper available at https://doi.org/10.1007/s12520-018-0713-8 via Open Access

This paper investigates how coastal mobility and a community's place within regional trade networks intersect with technological organisation. To do this, we identified different types of lithic production and exchange during the late pre-colonial period at three coastal sites around Madang in northeast New Guinea. The study is the first major technological and sourcing study in this area. Consistent with terrestrial models, lithic technological analysis crucially shows that groups with higher levels of coastal mobility (1) were reducing a wider range of lithic materials and (2) reduced material less intensively than groups with indirect access. Conversely, groups with lower coastal mobility levels (1) were flaking a restricted range of lithic materials and (2) reduced material more intensively. Geochemical analysis, using X-ray fluorescence, shows that at all three sites obsidian artefacts exclusively derived from Kutau/Bao (Talasea) in West New Britain. This indicates that, by about 600 years ago through to the late nineteenth century, the Kutau/Bao source had become a specialised export product, being fed into major distribution conduits operational along the northeast coast. Importantly, there is no evidence for exchange with other sources such as Admiralties or Fergusson Island obsidian. This is contrastive to the Sepik coast, where obsidian from the Admiralties Islands featured prominently alongside West New Britain obsidian, and suggests the emergence of different coastal supply lines feeding the northeast Madang coast and the north Sepik coast.

This paper examines a central concern in archaeological research: the interplay between technological and social flux over the longue durée. This is done by describing ceramic technological continuity and change, and its correspondence with broader social processes, on the northeast coast of New Guinea in the recent past. It presents new ethnographic information from Madang, Papua New Guinea, involving Bilbil and Yabob potters, to outline the chaîne opératoire of pottery production at present. Comparisons with ethnohistorical texts then allow us to model technological change over a longer period of c. 150 years, following the direct historical approach. This shows distinct continuity, but also substantial modification throughout the nineteenth–twenty-first centuries, as the potters negotiated major social upheavals during the colonial and post-independence periods, such as forcible relocation from their offshore islands onto the mainland. This expands our understanding of how social and technological change can take place amongst small-scale, part-time pottery specialists over the longue durée and how this change is reflected in the finished products and raw materials.

This book details investigations into the archaeology of Madang District, Papua New Guinea. Specifically, several important archaeological sites on the coast and offshore islands are examined. In 2014, the authors completed a survey around Madang Lagoon along with Bilbil Island and Yabob Island, and excavated two sites: Tilu at Malmal village and Nunguri on Bilbil Island. Our excavations uncovered archaeological deposits dating to 600-500 years ago.  This was associated with distinctive red-slipped pottery in the ‘Madang-style,’ obsidian, shell ornaments and tools, animal bone, and shellfish food remains.  The report also examines how modern pots are made around Madang, and different material culture produced and traded around the northeast coast generally.

Studies of the Pleistocene-Holocene transition in the Papua New Guinean Highlands have emphasised how cultural change occurred as a response to changing environments, with particular attention paid to the independent innovation of agriculture during the early to mid-Holocene.  An analysis of the lithic assemblage from Kiowa rockshelter, in Chimbu Province, was used to investigate changes in people’s mobility and subsistence at this important time. This study shows that human activity at Highlands’ rockshelters at the Pleistocene-Holocene transition was not intensive, but in the early and mid-Holocene, occupation increased simultaneous with the intensification of agriculture and the increase of Highlands’ population size. People at this time used a combination of strategies to provision themselves with stone tools. These included mobile toolkits of small flakable stone to enable hunting and collecting, while primarily reliant on abundant local stone for more local activities and on site processing. In the mid-late Holocene, occupation of Highland rockshelters diminished, probably corresponding to agriculture being introduced to these higher altitudes. Kiowa itself was no longer used as a habitation space as permanent villages and gardens arose near the site.

Permanent link to open access version: http://hdl.handle.net/10523/10586

Materialising Ancestral Madang documents the emergence of pottery production processes and exchange networks along the northeast coast of New Guinea during the last millennium before the present. This dynamic period in the Pacific’s human past involved important fluctuations to people’s mobility, social interaction, and technological organisation. It therefore remains crucial to understanding and historicising the expansive maritime subsistence trading networks that famously characterised the coast in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. This book investigates these transformations by exploring the archaeology of Madang District; the heart of the Madang exchange network that revolved around the production and distribution of distinctive red-slipped pots. Potsherds of this style have been previously found spanning a 200 km radius, reaching Karkar Island, the Bismarck Archipelago, and even the New Guinea Highlands. By combining archaeological survey, excavation, craft ethnography, and archaeometric analyses, the volume systematically delineates the production groups that were working within this broader community of practice. The study shows that pre-colonial potters made use of a range of local raw materials and were free to improvise with their forming and decorating techniques but learned and reproduced similar technological sequences over the past 500–600 years. It is likely that social restrictions permitted only potters from a small number of clans to produce ceramics and that the finished vessels were then distributed both informally within the local area and strategically during extensive trade voyages along the northeast coast of New Guinea. These results therefore cast light on an important but previously obscured aspect of Pacific culture history and provide a model for how craft production and exchange processes have manifested and co-modified across the generations