Reconsidering the ‘Neolithic’ at Manim rock shelter, Wurup Valley, Papua New Guinea

Abstract

What needs to be pointed out at this stage is that there was no point at which a homogenous Neolithic 'package' of economic practice and material culture ever existed. (Thomas 1999:14) … in practice the evidence which is available to us relates to a more complex, messy and fragmented series of developments, and that any attempt to define a particular set of attributes as constituting the Neolithic will be arbitrary in the extreme. (Thomas 1999:13) This text is taken from Archaeologies of Island Melanesia: Current approaches to landscapes, exchange and practice, edited by Mathieu Leclerc and James Flexner, published 2019 by ANU Press,

Small game hunting in montane rainforests: Specialised capture and broad spectrum foraging in the Late Pleistocene to Holocene New Guinea Highlands

“…However, even during this time, a broad-spectrum of small to mid-sized forest game including bandicoots, quolls, cuscus, tree kangaroos, ringtail and striped possums, rodents, echidnas, fruit bats, and lizards formed a substantial part of the hunting focus (Mountain, 1991a(Mountain, , 1991b) As climates warmed following the LGM (in MIS-1), hunters were confronted with a major change to the available fauna with all large species over about 18 kg becoming extinct (Flannery et al, 1983), leaving exclusively small and mid-sized volant, arboreal, and terrestrial game, many of which were hard to catch. Despite this, forest hunting activities at sites such as Yuku, Manim, and Nombe increased (Christensen, 1975;Denham, 2019;Mountain, 1991b), while a number of other foraging camps such as Kiowa, Kafiavana, and Batari were occupied for the first time in the terminal Pleistocene and Early Holocene (White, 1972). This period of increased hunting activity corresponds to genetic analyses that suggest Highland populations began to dramatically expand in the terminal Pleistocene and Early Holocene (Pedro et al, 2020).…”

“…We show that early Highlanders shifted flexibly between broad spectrum foraging, hunting a wide range of locally available game, and specialised hunting, intensively targeting species that occupied 'sweet spots' and provided reliable protein in a terrain otherwise unpredictable with regards to prey availability. This interplay allowed mobile rainforest hunter-gatherers to maintain a viable protein supplement to what was likely a plant-rich diet, as attested to at a handful of key archaeological sites (Denham, 2019;Summerhayes et al, 2010).…”