A template for recording material culture, and a comparison of four Oceanic societies (original) (raw)
Related papers
University of Otago Studies in Archaeology, 2020
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
The people living on the islands and the coastal fringe of eastern Papua New Guinea, the so called Massim region, have widespread similarities in their art forms which attest to close cultural connections in the past. Whether local Massim cultural practices can be recognised in the non-decorated aspects of the material culture record remains unclear. It is also uncertain if they developed locally or were part of a cultural milieu which once spanned a larger geographic area. To investigate this archaeological problem, shell objects from five prehistoric sites on two islands (Rossel and Nimowa) in the Louisiade Archipelago are analysed to determine how they were manufactured and used. Temporal and spatial patterns of shell technology are identified by including a comparative review of artefacts from previously excavated assemblages in the Massim and surrounding cultural areas spanning the last 2800 years. The shell currency system and shell bead manufacture were identified on Rossel Island by 500 BP, with ethnographically recorded practices elsewhere in the Massim becoming visible by 1000–500 BP. Yet, many aspects of Massim shell technology are found along the Papuan south coast prior to this time suggesting wider spheres of interaction existed before the regionalisation of cultural practices occurred.
The introduction and exchange of pottery between Pacific Islands can provide insight into interaction and social organisation from both regional and local perspectives. In the Massim island region of far eastern Papua New Guinea, pottery is present in the archaeological record from 2800 to 2600 calBP. However, on Rossel Island, a relatively isolated landmass in the far east of the Louisiade Archipelago, archaeological excavation and AMS dating of several sites has determined that pottery on this island was a late prehistoric introduction, from 550–500 calBP. The introduction of pottery coincided with the establishment of increasingly complex exchange networks in the Massim, namely the Kula. It is argued in this paper that the desire for Kula participants to obtain high-quality shell necklaces (bagi), which are prominently manufactured on Rossel, led to the island becoming more actively involved in down-the-line regional exchange. Pottery is largely found on the western end of Rossel, where most bagi are manufactured. The uneven distribution of pottery across the island is further argued to indicate a socio-economic/political divide between the populations living on the western and eastern ends, which is supported by linguistic and anthropological evidence.
Small-scale excavationwas undertaken at the Malakai site on the small island of Nimowa, located in the Louisiade Archipelago, Massim region, Papua New Guinea. This is the first excavation to be reported in detail from the archipelago,with the Malakai site providing insight into cultural practices on the island and pottery exchange in the southern Massim region. A stratified deposit was revealed with dense cultural material, first inhabited from 1350 to 1290 cal. BP, with a subsequent period of settlement within the last 460–300 cal. years. Pottery, shell, and stone artifacts were recovered, as well as human skeletal remains in a primary burial context,which contributes to understanding regional patterns of prehistoric mortuary activity. It is argued that Nimowa was already part of an exchange network that encompassed many of the southern Massim islands when the Malakai site was first occupied.There is increased diversity in the number of vessel forms in later prehistory, but with remarkable continuity in the decorative motifs over time, suggesting some degree of regional social cohesion in the southern Massim. It appears that the northern Massim islands were not a major supplier of pottery to Nimowa. The implications for the prehistory of the wider region are subsequently discussed.
Finding the right question: Learning from stone tools on the Willaumez Peninsula, Papua New Guinea
Archaeology in Oceania, 2011
As the most abundant, and frequently the only, archaeological evidence preserved within the volcanic soils of the Willaumez Peninsula, Papua New Guinea, stone artefacts carry a heavy burden for scholars seeking to write the prehistory of subsistence and land use. Efforts to squeeze information from these recalcitrant informal assemblages of obsidian tools have produced contradictory and unsatisfactory results. Although alternative approaches should certainly be sought to find ways to make these silent stones speak about topics that archaeologists want to hear, other important stories concerning social process and exchange are beginning to be told by ongoing research being developed in West New Britain. These new results raise broader questions about the social functions of humble stone tools in other parts of the world.
Language and culture on the north coast of New Guinea
American Anthropologist, 1992
Statistical analysis of variability in assemblages of material culture obtained at dzfferent villages on the North Coast of New Guinea indicates that similarities and differences among these assemblages are most strongly associated with geographic propinquity, irrespective of linguistic a@ities. When assemblage similarity is adjustedfor the effect of distance, diversity in material culture appears unrelated to the linguistic relationships of these communities. This study shows that similarity in material culture assemblages can mask marked heterogeneity in language. Language, however, isjequently used to index people in Melanesia on the assumption that language is a usejid key to their other human characteristics. This analysis does not lend support to this common practice, and it has implicationsfor how prehistoric cultural complexes in Melanesia are deJined and interpreted.
Journal of Social Archaeology, 2019
The Gulf of Papua, Papua New Guinea, is a rapidly changing geomorphic and cultural landscape in which the ancestral past is constantly being (re)interpreted and negotiated. This paper examines the importance of subsurface archaeological and geomorphological features for the various communities of Orokolo Bay in the Gulf of Papua as they maintain and reconstruct cosmological and migration narratives. The everyday practices of digging and clearing for agriculture and house construction at antecedent village locations bring Orokolo Bay locals into regular engagement with buried pottery sherds (deposited during the ancestral hiri trade) and thin strata of 'black sand' (iron sand). Local interpretations and imaginings of the subsurface enable spatio-temporal interpretations of the ancestor's actions and the structure of ancestral settlements. These interpretations point to the profound entanglement of orality and material culture and suggest new directions in the comparative study of alternative archaeologies.