Dating Lapita Pottery in the Bismarck Archipelago, Papua New Guinea (original) (raw)
Related papers
New dates for the Makekur (FOH) Lapita pottery site, Arawe Islands, New Britain, Papua New Guinea
Debating Lapita: Distribution, Chronology, Society and Subsistence, 2019
Estimates for the start of Lapita pottery in the Bismarck Archipelago, Papua New Guinea, have ranged from 3550-3450 cal. BP to 3300-3200 cal. BP. These estimates in turn overlap date ranges of 3480-3150 cal. BP and of 3360-3040 cal. BP for the W-K2 volcanic eruption in northern New Britain and reoccupation of the area by people with Lapita pottery (Petrie and Torrence 2008, 95.4 per cent probability). Here we review issues surrounding existing 14 C dates for the start of Lapita pottery throughout the archipelago and present six new dates for the Makekur Lapita site in the Arawe Islands. Based on a non-Bayesian assessment of the dates, we estimate a possible start of Lapita pottery around 3250-3150 cal. BP, at the late end of the ranges for the Witori eruption and reoccupation of the Willaumez Peninsula and close to initial dates for the Lapita expansion into Remote Oceania. Refinement of this estimate for the introduction of pottery to the Bismarck Archipelago through application of Bayesian statistics requires resolution of issues relating to existing dates and pottery analyses, and incorporation of results from current and planned redating programs of Lapita pottery sites within the archipelago. 9. New dates for the Makekur (FOH) Lapita pottery site, Arawe Islands, New Britain, Papua New Guinea 171 terra australis 52 which occurs here only in the palaeosol formed on the W-K2 tephra (Specht et al. 1991:284, 287). These results led Torrence (2016:7) to suggest that the W-K2 event and the start of Lapita pottery were essentially 'synchronous', though they potentially open a wide window between the appearance of pottery in the archipelago and the dispersal into Remote Oceania. A problem with these attempts to define a starting date for Lapita pottery has been a reluctance to apply rigorous 'chronometric hygiene' (Spriggs 1989) to the various date sets. One exception to this was the reassessment of dates for Lapita pottery in the Bismarck Archipelago that excluded all marine shell samples on the grounds that there were too few locality-specific ΔR values to enable meaningful calibrations (Specht 2007: Table 1), though the 26 plant samples used were only lightly vetted. Here we apply more rigorous culling protocols for both marine and terrestrial samples than have been used in previous studies, taking advantage of locality-specific ΔR values for parts of the archipelago (Petchey and Ulm 2012). The study incorporates six new AMS dates on plant materials from the Makekur Lapita site in New Britain (Gosden and Webb 1994). Combining these new dates with the existing ones throughout the Archipelago, this chapter concludes that the starting date for Lapita pottery in the Bismarck archipelago could be younger than existing estimates and close to the initial dates for the settlement of Remote Oceania. Materials and methods Radiocarbon dates used in this chapter have been calibrated in OxCal 4.2.4 (Bronk Ramsey 2009) using the IntCal13 and Marine13 curves (Reimer et al. 2013). Within the main text, age ranges are rounded to the nearest five-or 10-year interval and are cited at 68.2 per cent probability to 'reflect the central tendency in the probability distributions' (Denham et al. 2012:43), except where a quoted range was published elsewhere only at 95.4 per cent probability. The tables show both probability distributions. Significance tests for comparing date results, and calculation of pooled means were carried out using Calib 7.0.2. We employ an 'eyeballing' approach rather than a Bayesian statistical analysis, which we believe would be premature at this stage for several reasons. As Bronk Ramsey (2009:358) observes, 'any analysis of this [Bayesian] kind is very strongly dependent on the information that goes into it', noting: however much statistical analysis we do, 14 C dates are still reliant on the underlying assumptions of the 14 C method-any problems with the samples, their contexts, their associations with each other, or with the calibration curve, will have implications for the accuracy of our chronologies. (2009:358) This warning is relevant in the present context as there are issues of sample material, context, association and calibration that have to be resolved before there can be consensus on the corpus of dates to be used.
Forum Introduction: Recent Lapita pottery from the south coast of New Guinea
Australian Archaeology, 2012
Expansion of Austronesian-speaking peoples from the Bismarck Archipelago out into the Pacific commencing ca 3300 cal BP represents the last great chapter of human global colonisation. The earliest migrants were bearers of finely-made dentate-stamped Lapita pottery, hitherto found only across Island Melanesia and western Polynesia. We document the first known occurrence of Lapita peoples on the New Guinea mainland. The new Lapita sites date from 2900 to 2500 cal BP and represent a newly-discovered migratory arm of Lapita expansions that moved westwards along the southern New Guinea coast towards Australia. These marine specialists ate shellfish, fish and marine turtles along the Papua New Guinea mainland coast, reflecting subsistence continuities with local pre-Lapita peoples dating back to 4200 cal BP. Lapita artefacts include characteristic ceramics, shell armbands, stone adzes and obsidian tools. Our Lapita discoveries support hypotheses for the migration of pottery-bearing Melane...
As a part of the research initiative: Globalization in the past and the present — a Joint Anthropological- Archaeological Research Project in Manus Papua New Guinea, initiated by Professor Helle Vandkilde — a team of eight persons, archaeologists and anthropologists from Aarhus University, went to do fieldwork in the Manus Province and its surrounding islands, Baluan and Mbuke. This paper presents the results of a season of fieldwork in the Manus region, including the discovery of a rare prehistoric skeleton and features from an open-area settlement site.
2020
Pottery has long been the artefact of choice for establishing migrations in the West Pacific, as demonstrated by the discovery in the 1940s that dentate-stamped pottery of the Lapita Cultural Complex had a distribution that spanned thousands of kilometres (Kirch 1997: 6-70. Traditionally the decorative attributes of pots were assessed to infer cultural connections and establish migration patterns (ibid: 12). More recently archaeologists have turned to methods of physicochemical analysis to provide insight into these migrations with much greater resolution. Previous investigations of Early Lapita settlement all recognise a high degree of mobility (Anson 1983: 1986; Hennessey 2007; Hunt 1989; Summerhayes 2000a; Thomson and White 2000). There are however, two quite different interpretations of these mobility patterns. The first of these interpretations, “Specialised Regional Production” (Hogg 2012: 28), suggests that pottery production is being conducted by sedentary specialist potters...