Coastal mobility and lithic supply lines in northeast New Guinea

Dylan Gaffney,Glenn R Summerhayes

doi:10.1007/s12520-018-0713-8

Dylan Gaffney, Glenn R Summerhayes

Open Access

https://doi.org/10.1007/s12520-018-0713-8

Copy DOI

Abstract

This paper investigates how coastal mobility and a community’s place within regional trade networks intersect with technological organisation. To do this, we identified different types of lithic production and exchange during the late pre-colonial period at three coastal sites around Madang in northeast New Guinea. The study is the first major technological and sourcing study in this area. Consistent with terrestrial models, lithic technological analysis crucially shows that groups with higher levels of coastal mobility (1) were reducing a wider range of lithic materials and (2) reduced material less intensively than groups with indirect access. Conversely, groups with lower coastal mobility levels (1) were flaking a restricted range of lithic materials and (2) reduced material more intensively. Geochemical analysis, using X-ray fluorescence, shows that at all three sites obsidian artefacts exclusively derived from Kutau/Bao (Talasea) in West New Britain. This indicates that, by about 600 years ago through to the late nineteenth century, the Kutau/Bao source had become a specialised export product, being fed into major distribution conduits operational along the northeast coast. Importantly, there is no evidence for exchange with other sources such as Admiralties or Fergusson Island obsidian. This is contrastive to the Sepik coast, where obsidian from the Admiralties Islands featured prominently alongside West New Britain obsidian, and suggests the emergence of different coastal supply lines feeding the northeast Madang coast and the north Sepik coast.

Highlights

IntroductionInstead of conceiving ‘sedentary’ communities as static and coherent, we are being encouraged to think about the dynamic lines of movement and flow that bind and sever people, places and objects (Greenblatt 2009: 2; Ingold 2011: 145; Mazzullo and Ingold 2008; Pooley 2017)
Mobility and movement in the human past have recently been described as key theoretical concerns in archaeology (Close 2000; Kahn 2013; van Dommelen 2014), and in the social sciences more generally (Cresswell 2011, 2012, 2014; Electronic supplementary material The online version of this article contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.Department of Archaeology, University of Cambridge, Cambridge CB2 3DZ, UKMagdalene College, University of Cambridge, Cambridge CB3 0AG, UKDepartment of Anthropology and Archaeology, University of Otago, Dunedin 9054, New ZealandSchool of Social Science, University of Queensland, St Lucia 4072, AustraliaGreenblatt 2009; Sheller 2014)
Many of these connections are materialised by supply lines, linking producers with distributors and consumers. This is especially the case as archaeologists increasingly try to tap into the emergent globalising material networks that characterised different geographic areas of the world at different times (Hodos 2017). One such area was the northeast coast of New Guinea in the recent pre-colonial past (Lilley 2017), which is here presented as a case study to examine how coastal mobility and a community’s place within regional trade networks intersected with technological organisation

Summary

Introduction

Instead of conceiving ‘sedentary’ communities as static and coherent, we are being encouraged to think about the dynamic lines of movement and flow that bind and sever people, places and objects (Greenblatt 2009: 2; Ingold 2011: 145; Mazzullo and Ingold 2008; Pooley 2017) Many of these connections are materialised by supply lines, linking producers with distributors and consumers. This is especially the case as archaeologists increasingly try to tap into the emergent globalising material networks that characterised different geographic areas of the world at different times (Hodos 2017) One such area was the northeast coast of New Guinea in the recent pre-colonial past (Lilley 2017), which is here presented as a case study to examine how coastal mobility and a community’s place within regional trade networks intersected with technological organisation. This region was host to complex interconnections between traders, horticulturalists, fishing peoples, pottery makers and other craftspeople, bound together by the movement of material goods such as stone artefacts

Methods

Results

Discussion

Conclusion