The Archaeology of Social Transformation in the New Guinea Highlands

Abstract

This article examines three key aspects of New Guinea Highlands prehistory, with important implications for regional and global archaeology, including evidence for (1) adaptive flexibility at high altitudes, particularly within montane rainforests and grasslands; (2) plant-food production and cultivation in the tropics; and (3) the emergence of incipient social stratification and how it was transformed by the production and redistribution of material culture, plants, and animals. After synthesizing the archaeological evidence, we propose that social transformations amongst highland groups were intraregionally variable and involved a sequential diversification of subsistence practices that overlapped and persisted through time. Because communities, and their sociotechnical practices, were differently interconnected across the mountains, and at times to the lowlands, coasts, and islands as well, each subregion transformed asymmetrically at different rates and scales through time. The high diversity of highland cultures observed in the early twentieth century by ethnographers is likely to have arisen from these asymmetric processes of growth.

Frontier Archaeology: Excavating Huli Colonization of the Lower Tagali Valley, Papua New Guinea

“…The transformations in many Highlands societies initiated following the widespread adoption of the sweet potato within the last few hundred years have been described collectively as the ‘Ipomoean Revolution’ (after Watson 1965; see Gaffney & Denham 2021). Among the consequences of this revolution are dramatic increases in human and domesticated pig populations, increased social inequality, the rise of ‘big men’ systems of leadership and the elaboration of extensive networks of ceremonial exchange (Modjeska 1982).…”

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

“…However, it is important to note that humans maintained their adaptive capacities for experimentation even as they specialised in the local environment. In this way, montane rainforest communities during the Late Pleistocene and much of the Holocene moved dynamically between practicing extremely broad-spectrum foraging as a subsistence base (Denham, 2016b;Gaffney and Denham, in press), as they increasingly attuned their adaptive strategies to their ecology and often specialised in hunting a handful of prey species in unreliable environments, which particularly drove people to revisit key areas known to provide reliable sources of protein.…”