Coastal mobility and lithic supply lines in northeast New Guinea

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.

Obsidian and volcanic glass artifact evidence for long-distance voyaging to the Polynesian Outlier island of Tikopia

“…3-4 ka. Few studies have examined patterns of exchange and voyaging within the last 2 ka, an era when some sources became the center of specialized export (see Gaffney and Summerhayes, 2019).…”

Raided and traded: Sourcing Marind-anim exotic stone objects, south-east Papua (Indonesia)

“…Chemical fingerprinting and petrographic analysis of raw materials have been fundamental to archaeological understandings of past stone artefact movements and associated exchange networks in New Guinea for half a century (e.g. Gaffney and Summerhayes 2019;Key 1968;Mialanes et al 2016;Rhoads and MacKenzie 1991;Shaw et al 2021;Summerhayes 2009;Summerhayes et al 1998;Sutton et al 2015). For over 30 years, Glenn Summerhayes has had a critical role in innovative methodological and analytical developments in these sourcing studies, particularly in understanding obsidian exchange systems over the past 20,000 years, and especially over the past 3300 years in tandem with sourcing of Lapita and Post-Lapita ceramics (e.g.…”