The Flight From the Fen: The Prehistoric Migrations of the Boiken of the East Sepik Province, Papua New Guinea

Abstract

This paper has two goals. Its specific aim is to establish the prehistoric migrations of the Boiken people of the East Sepik Province, Papua New Guinea, using a large corpus of Boiken settlement histories supplemented by linguistic, genetic, and ecological data. In the course of the analysis, a method of applying cluster techniques to detect underlying directional patterns in settlement histories is demonstrated. The migration history thus revealed fits well with the picture of Middle Sepik prehistory emerging from recent geoarchaeological research. At a more general level, the paper seeks to verify that the spatial aspects of Boiken settlement traditions are indeed historically accurate. This finding is of intrinsic importance for anyone attempting to understand the construction of ethno‐historical knowledge, and particularly for regional analysts and historical ethnographers, who are often faced with reconstructing the diachronic dimensions of ethnography in regions of New Guinea where archaeological research is little developed. In the case of the Boiken, the migrations that emerge from ethnohistory help resolve the puzzle of why the symbolic culture of the Ndu‐speaking Yangoru Boiken exhibits much closer affinities to that of the Torricelli‐speaking Mountain Arapesh than that of any Ndu‐speaking group, including some of the Boiken dialect groups to the southeast.

Reconstructing the origin of the Lapita Cultural Complex: mtDNA analyses of East Sepik Province, PNG

“…These data suggest a genetic continuity among the Boiken-speaking villages, even across great distances and ecological barriers (mountains and ocean). This pattern is consistent with archeological and linguistic data describing an expansion of the Boiken speakers (Roscoe 1989) from the inland plain out to the offshore islands. It is also consistent with an oral account of the settlement of the island of Walis.…”

“…The resulting combination of haplogroups (B, P, and Q) were then dispersed with the Lapita Cultural Complex, resulting in high frequencies of B lineages with traces of Q and P lineages throughout Polynesia and Micronesia (Sykes et al 1995;Lum et al , 2000. In the past 3,000 years, the Boiken expansion (Roscoe 1989) created a zone of genetic and linguistic homogeneity from the Sepik Plain to the offshore islands. Localized gene flow, inferred from both shared derived/tip lineages and nonsignificant F ST genetic distances (P [ 0.05), followed the expansion within two of the four ecological zones (coast and mountain).…”

“…Boiken speakers from the Sepik plain are thought to have expanded northward, displacing some previous occupants of the Prince Alexander Mountains and the coastal regions in today's East Sepik Province, Papua New Guinea (PNG) (Roscoe 1989). Evidence supporting this expansion also comes from linguistic and archeological data (Swadling and Hide 2005).…”

Austronesian origin of the 27-bp deletion of the erythrocyte band 3 gene in East Sepik, Papua New Guinea inferred from mtDNA analysis

“…The relatively low frequencies of 9-bp deletion we observed suggest that the populations we studied have received relatively large amounts of cumulative gene flow from inland, Papuanspeaking populations. The result is consistent with the historical and linguistic data on the expansion of Boiken speakers (Roscoe 1989). Interestingly, the oral tradition of Walis, the Papuan-speaking island population with the second highest frequency of the B3D27 allele (0.06) and a high frequency of the 9-bp deletion (0.13) recalls an intrusive movement of Boiken-speaking males (Anurim and Kabaru 1980).…”

Chapter 4: History of Investigations

“…The infilling of the Sepik-Ramu basin, as she also argues, must have caused dramatic changes in how people lived their lives and may partially account for the complex patterns of migration and resettlement mentioned in local oral traditions (e.g., Tuzin, 1976;Roscoe, 1989).…”