Coastal mobility and lithic supply lines in northeast New Guinea
- PDF / 3,310,854 Bytes
- 30 Pages / 595.276 x 790.866 pts Page_size
- 40 Downloads / 208 Views
ORIGINAL PAPER
Coastal mobility and lithic supply lines in northeast New Guinea Dylan Gaffney 1,2
&
Glenn R. Summerhayes 3,4
Received: 1 August 2018 / Accepted: 17 September 2018 # The Author(s) 2018
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. Keywords Mobility . Exchange . Lithic technology . Obsidian . pXRF . New Guinea
Introduction Mobility and movement in the human past have recently been described as key theoretical concerns in archaeology (Close 2000; Kahn 2013; van Dommelen 2014), and in the social sciences more generally (Cresswell 2011, 2012, 2014; Electronic supplementary material The online version of this article (https://doi.org/10.1007/s12520-018-0713-8) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users. * Dylan Gaffney [email protected] 1
Department of Archaeology, University of Cambridge, Cambridge CB2 3DZ, UK
2
Magdalene College, University of Cambridge, Cambridge CB3 0AG, UK
3
Department of Anthropology and Archaeology, University of Otago, Dunedin 9054, New Zealand
4
School of Social Science, University of Queensland, St Lucia 4072, Australia
Greenblatt 2009; Sheller 2014). Instead of conceiving ‘sedentary’ communities as static and coherent, we are being encouraged to think about the dynamic lines of movement and flow that bind and sever people, places and objects (Greenblatt 2009: 2; Ingold 2011: 145; Mazzullo and Ingold 2008; Pooley 2017). Many of these connections are materialised by supply lines, linking producers with distributors and consumer
Data Loading...
