A MULTIVARIATE ANALYSIS OF CRANIOMETRIC DATA FROM THE TERRITORY OF PAPUA AND NEW GUINEA

Abstract

T3R0VENIENCED human skeletal remains from the Territory of Papua and New ■*· Guinea are very few, and until 1968 the only well-documented ones consisted of a fragmented frontal bone and other cranial fragments from Aitape, West Sepik, found in 1929 by Hossfeld and later described by Fenner (1941), which have since been assigned a date of 5000 b.p. (Hossfeld, 1964). In 1968, archaeological excavations in the Port Moresby area recovered material that is to date the largest assemblage of well-documented prehistoric human skeletal remains from New Guinea now available for study by physical anthropologists. With the addition of this important assemblage of skeletal material it can be hoped that a better appreciation of the prehistory of the area and the biological relationships of the people will be had through an osteological study of these and other remains from the Territory. In this paper multivariate analyses are applied to craniometrie data from two archaeological sites for a comparison with data from three widely separated and linguistically distinct areas of the Territory of Papua and New Guinea.