Analysis of the spatial and temporal structure of global island colonization allows us to frame t... more 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 t... more 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.
We explore changes to settlement and mobility in the northern Raja Ampat Islands (Waigeo, Gam, an... more We explore changes to settlement and mobility in the northern Raja Ampat Islands (Waigeo, Gam, and Batanta) over the past five centuries, a time when speakers of several Austronesian languages were moving throughout the archipelago. The evidence shows: (1) some settlement relocations were rapid, occurring within a generation, while other settlements remained fixed for hundreds of years; and (2) there were numerous clan and family scale movements that led to high levels of intermarriage between language groups and settlements. The results demonstrate that far from being a place of stasis caught between the worlds of Maluku and New Guinea, Raja Ampat settlement and mobility were highly dynamic. This dynamism prompts us to rethink the relationship between today's settlement locations, their language affiliations, and the meta-narratives about their recent population histories. We propose that the deeper past of Raja Ampat may have also been characterized by dynamic movement and social flux.
Abstract Moving into montane rainforests was a unique behavioural innovation developed by Pleisto... more 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 Ampa... more 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 pip... more 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. Speci... more 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 di... more 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...
The Oxford Handbook of the Archaeology of Indigenous Australia and New Guinea
This article examines three key aspects of New Guinea Highlands prehistory, with important implic... more 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 technolog... more 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...
Moving into montane rainforests was a unique behavioural innovation developed by Pleistocene Homo... more 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 PleistoceneeEarly 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.
Pleistocene water crossings, long thought to be an innovation of Homo sapiens, may extend beyond ... more 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.
New Guinea was host to some of the most complex maritime interaction networks in the tropics. We ... more New Guinea was host to some of the most complex maritime interaction networks in the tropics. We take a multi-proxy approach to investigate the foodways at the heart of the extensive Madang exchange network in the last millennium before the present: 1) invertebrate zooarchaeological analysis identifies the dependence on shellfish collecting from the coral reef and sandy floor littoral zone; 2) examination of vertebrate remains demonstrates the rearing and consumption of key domesticated animals (pigs and perhaps dogs), alongside reef fish, birds, and possibly snakes; 3) human dental calculus analysis distinguishes that marine plants, palm, betelnut, and probably banana were consumed; 4) pottery residue analysis suggests that a variety of starchy crops were being cooked in locally made ceramics. We use this information to develop interpretations about the nature of land-use, mobility, and exchange along New Guinea's coastal fringe, as well as how foodways have transformed throughout the Late Holocene.
Analysis of the spatial and temporal structure of global island colonization allows us to frame t... more 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 t... more 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.
We explore changes to settlement and mobility in the northern Raja Ampat Islands (Waigeo, Gam, an... more We explore changes to settlement and mobility in the northern Raja Ampat Islands (Waigeo, Gam, and Batanta) over the past five centuries, a time when speakers of several Austronesian languages were moving throughout the archipelago. The evidence shows: (1) some settlement relocations were rapid, occurring within a generation, while other settlements remained fixed for hundreds of years; and (2) there were numerous clan and family scale movements that led to high levels of intermarriage between language groups and settlements. The results demonstrate that far from being a place of stasis caught between the worlds of Maluku and New Guinea, Raja Ampat settlement and mobility were highly dynamic. This dynamism prompts us to rethink the relationship between today's settlement locations, their language affiliations, and the meta-narratives about their recent population histories. We propose that the deeper past of Raja Ampat may have also been characterized by dynamic movement and social flux.
Abstract Moving into montane rainforests was a unique behavioural innovation developed by Pleisto... more 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 Ampa... more 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 pip... more 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. Speci... more 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 di... more 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...
The Oxford Handbook of the Archaeology of Indigenous Australia and New Guinea
This article examines three key aspects of New Guinea Highlands prehistory, with important implic... more 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 technolog... more 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...
Moving into montane rainforests was a unique behavioural innovation developed by Pleistocene Homo... more 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 PleistoceneeEarly 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.
Pleistocene water crossings, long thought to be an innovation of Homo sapiens, may extend beyond ... more 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.
New Guinea was host to some of the most complex maritime interaction networks in the tropics. We ... more New Guinea was host to some of the most complex maritime interaction networks in the tropics. We take a multi-proxy approach to investigate the foodways at the heart of the extensive Madang exchange network in the last millennium before the present: 1) invertebrate zooarchaeological analysis identifies the dependence on shellfish collecting from the coral reef and sandy floor littoral zone; 2) examination of vertebrate remains demonstrates the rearing and consumption of key domesticated animals (pigs and perhaps dogs), alongside reef fish, birds, and possibly snakes; 3) human dental calculus analysis distinguishes that marine plants, palm, betelnut, and probably banana were consumed; 4) pottery residue analysis suggests that a variety of starchy crops were being cooked in locally made ceramics. We use this information to develop interpretations about the nature of land-use, mobility, and exchange along New Guinea's coastal fringe, as well as how foodways have transformed throughout the Late Holocene.
During the late-Holocene, Papua New Guinea (PNG) was host to the arrival of new pottery making pe... more 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.
Studies of the Pleistocene-Holocene transition in the Papua New Guinean Highlands have emphasised... more 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.
this paper describes preliminary archaeological research undertaken in madang province, on the no... more 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).
Permanent link to open access version: http://hdl.handle.net/10523/10586
Materialising Ancestral... more 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
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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