Materialising Ancestral Madang: Pottery Production and Subsistence Trading on the Northeast Coast of New Guinea by Dylan Gaffney

Abstract

Reviewed by: Materialising Ancestral Madang: Pottery Production and Subsistence Trading on the Northeast Coast of New Guinea by Dylan Gaffney Stuart Bedford Materialising Ancestral Madang: Pottery Production and Subsistence Trading on the Northeast Coast of New Guinea. Dylan Gaffney. Dunedin: Archaeology Programme University of Otago, 2020. University of Otago Studies in Archaeology No. 29. 662 pp., including 2 appendices. eBook free, ISSN 0110–3709. This publication from the University of Otago Studies in Archaeology series is an exemplary piece of work in terms of content, layout, and production. It is a version of Dylan Gaffney's M.A. dissertation completed at the University of Otago in 2016, which was based on fieldwork conducted in 2014 and many detailed analyses over some years. It comprises the main text (290 pages); Appendix A (119 pages), a catalogue of archaeological rim forms and decoration; and Appendix B (253 pages), SEM studies of clays and tempers of contemporary and archaeological pottery. The appendices complete a very finely detailed study and provide a substantial reference for comparison with previous and future research in this and neighboring regions. It is a substantial piece of work. The book comprises 11 chapters and the research encompasses the historic period back to ca. 600 years ago. The primary focus is pottery production and distribution and, like a number of other rare archaeological studies, it targets a region where pottery production is still in full swing. The advantage of this of course is witnessing and recording the contemporary process and working back through the archaeological record to provide a robust, data-rich final product. Most archaeology associated with pottery in the Pacific starts from the opposite chronological position, with sites that are thousands of years old; great leaps are often made to connect them to contemporary societies in a more speculative fashion. In this study, however, you have the contemporary record of pottery production and distribution, along with vessel form, decoration, and material mineralogy, details from the historic record, followed by a shift to the archaeological record. One aspect that did strike me was the generally small size of the sherds that had been recovered archaeologically. This is standard for the Pacific, but highlights potential uncertainty regarding vessel form. Without the contemporary data from the Madang area, the data generated from the archaeological collection would have been much poorer. Combining the contemporary with recent archaeological ceramics provides a solid profile for the pottery and associated social behavior and networks of the last 600 years. I highly recommend this publication, obviously as a guide to the archaeology of the Madang area and also as a demonstration as to how systematic targeted research and publication can be achieved at the Masters' degree level. Congratulations to Gaffney, his supervisors Glenn Summerhayes and Anne Ford, and the maestro behind layout, editing, and design at Otago for so many years, Les O'Neill. [End Page 373] Stuart Bedford Archaeology and Natural History, Australian National University and Max Planck Institute Copyright © 2022 University of Hawai'i Press