Ten thousand years of cultivation at Kuk Swamp in the highlands of Papua New Guinea,

Abstract

Terra Australis reports the results of archaeological and related research within the south and east of Asia, though mainly Australia, New Guinea and Island Melanesia -lands that remained terra australis incognita to generations of prehistorians. Its subject is the settlement of the diverse environments in this isolated quarter of the globe by peoples who have maintained their discrete and traditional ways of life into the recent recorded or remembered past and at times into the observable present.

Sedimentary unknowns constrain the current use of frequency analysis of radiocarbon data sets in forming regional models of demographic change

“…The conclusion is clear—too often cultural inferences are made from SPD analyses without due consideration of natural processes that may explain the data, or otherwise constrain the use of SPD. With a few notable exceptions, studies have used SPD in a “plug and play” mode (Terrell, 2019a, 2019b), meaning that they produced a weakly or even untested explanation of data rather than a means to generate testable hypotheses regarding causation. The combination of SPD and "plug and play" is particularly problematic because such aggregated data do not and cannot relate to the processes that create and preserve or disturb and/or destroy evidence of past cultural activities.…”