Rephrasing Sue Bulmer's six‐style Port Moresby pottery sequence

Abstract

AbstractIn her 1978 PhD thesis, Sue Bulmer delineated a sequence of six pottery styles for the past 2000 years of Port Moresby prehistory. This aspect of her thesis became the standard reference for Port Moresby pottery for all Papuan researchers over the past 38 years. This paper considers the way in which Bulmer constructed this sequence from limited available data. A more recent analysis of another pottery sequence from the Bootless Bay site of Motupore now allows a rephrasing of the latter part of the Bulmer sequence (Styles III, IV, V and VI). These new data revise two accepted views: (1) that these styles were chronologically sequential; and (2) that these different styles reflected different Port Moresby manufacturing centres.