A Social Anthropologist's View of Papua New Guinea Highlands Prehistory

Abstract

The Highlands of Papua New Guinea have usually been regarded as relatively homogeneous, socially, culturally, and ecologically. In this article I begin with the view that the ethnography of the Eastern and Western Highlands shows great diversity. I argue that this diversity is also evident in the prehistory of the Highlands and that the Eastern and Western Highlands have followed markedly different paths in the development of agriculture and pig husbandry and in their rates of change and transformation. Intensive agriculture and linked pig exchange are very old in the Western Highlands, nascent in the Eastern Highlands. This difference is clear in the ethnographic present, but I argue that it is upon the very different prehistories of the Eastern and Western Highlands that a synchronic comparison of Highlands societies should be mounted.