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Trade and Culture History Across the Vitiaz Strait, Papua New Guinea: the Emerging Post-Lapita Coastal Sequence

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Trade and Culture History Across the Vitiaz Strait, Papua New Guinea: the Emerging Post-Lapita Coastal Sequence © Copyright Australian Museum, 2004 Records of the Australian Museum, Supplement 29 (2004): 89–96 ISBN 0-9750476-3-9 Trade and Culture History across the Vitiaz Strait, Papua New Guinea: The Emerging Post-Lapita Coastal Sequence IAN LILLEY Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies Unit, University of Queensland, Brisbane QLD 4072, Australia [email protected] ABSTRACT. This paper, focusing principally on post-Lapita times, outlines the course and outcomes of work undertaken over the last two decades in the West New Britain–Vitiaz Strait–north New Guinea coastal region. It presents two principal arguments. The first is that major periods of movement and abandonment documented in the archaeological sequences of this region from about 3,500 years ago coincide with the record of volcanism in the Talasea-Cape Hoskins area. The second is that the post- Lapita sequences of this region differ significantly from the post-Lapita sequences emerging in the island arc reaching from Manus via New Ireland to southern and eastern island Melanesia, which show continuous occupation and pottery production. LILLEY, IAN, 2004. Trade and culture history across the Vitiaz Strait, Papua New Guinea: the emerging post-Lapita coastal sequence. In A Pacific Odyssey: Archaeology and Anthropology in the Western Pacific. Papers in Honour of Jim Specht, ed. Val Attenbrow and Richard Fullagar, pp. 89–96. Records of the Australian Museum, Supplement 29. Sydney: Australian Museum. Focusing principally on the post-Lapita period, this paper Cape Hoskins area of north-central coastal New Britain. considers the results and culture-historical implications of Linguistically this latter area is the proximal source of North research that Gosden, Summerhayes, Torrence and I have New Guinea and Papuan Tip Austronesian languages (Ross, undertaken over the last 20 years in the West New Britain– 1988). It is also well-known as the geological source of Vitiaz Strait–north New Guinea coastal region (Fig. 1)—a much of the archaeological obsidian found in island region that Jim Specht (1967) began opening up some 35 Melanesia. The broad correlation between archaeological years ago. Specht taught me how to do archaeology in New and vulcanological sequences may help account for the ways Guinea. I worked with him in West New Britain in 1980 in which the central social, linguistic and biological and 1981 and literally and figuratively followed in his characteristics of the coastal and island peoples in the region footsteps for many years afterwards. This places me in a developed during the late Holocene. The second aim is to good position to draw together aspects of the work show that this emerging post-Lapita sequence in the West undertaken on some archaeological issues close to his heart. New Britain–Vitiaz Strait–north New Guinea coast region The aims of this paper are two-fold. The first is to differs significantly from the post-Lapita sequences demonstrate that major changes in the archaeological emerging in the island arc stretching from Manus down sequences in West New Britain and areas to the west across through New Ireland into southern and eastern island the Vitiaz Strait and along the north New Guinea coast from Melanesia where, in general, there is no break in pottery about 3,500 years ago align reasonably well with episodes manufacture and the deposition of cultural materials is of catastrophic volcanism in the Vitiaz Strait and the Talasea- evident following the Lapita period. www.amonline.net.au/pdf/publications/1405_complete.pdf 90 Records of the Australian Museum, Supplement 29 (2004) Fig. 1. Map showing places mentioned in the text. Siassi and Sio long-distance exchange in the Vitiaz region dates to the Lapita period, in this case a Lapita occupation some 3,150 Specht (1973) completed an extensive survey of the Huon to 2,750 years ago at the KLK site on Tuam in Siassi (Lilley, Peninsula in 1972 during the first field season of his long- 1986–87: 57–61). Petrological analyses pointed to general running Trade and Culture History across the Vitiaz Strait compositional similarities between the Lapita and more Project (TACHAVS). He found 68 sites but only two, both recent pottery from the coastal Madang area (both contain in the Sio area, were considered worthy of further study: coral-sand temper), but there is no evidence for cross-strait the large and highly disturbed shell middens of the KBP movement of commodities of any sort at this time, including site on Sigawa (Sio Island), and the series of mounds pottery. Simply put, this means that the two-way cross-strait forming the KBQ site on the adjacent mainland coast. I exchange which formed such a fundamental part of the excavated these sites in 1984 immediately after finishing historical trading system described by Harding cannot be the first archaeological exploration of the nearby Siassi derived from patterns of exchange during Lapita times. Islands and excavation of sites KLK on Tuam and KLJ on Moreover, in addition to being configured differently, the Malai (Lilley, 1986, 1986–1987, 1988a,b, 2002). My results posited Lapita exchange system disappeared approximately are summarized at some length here, as they are pivotal to 1,000 years before the emergence during what I call the Sau- the arguments developed later in this paper. Age estimates Tambali Phase of an exchange system which can be considered (as elsewhere in this paper) are based on calibrated ancestral to the ethnographic pottery-trading network. radiocarbon dates unless otherwise specified and are The emergence of the “proto-system” of long-distance rounded up or down to the nearest 50 years. They differ exchange some 1,700 years ago is signalled by the sudden slightly from the dates for these sites that I have published appearance in the archaeological record of three, and elsewhere owing to continual changes in calibration somewhat later a fourth, distinct and distinctive styles of procedures.1 Details of the dates in question, including pottery, as well as the first evidence for cross-strait transfer laboratory numbers and standard deviations can be found of pottery, obsidian and probably chert. That the ethno- in the site reports referred to above. graphic trading network evolved from this proto-system is Although neither is continuous, the sequences in the indicated by underlying continuities in most aspects of Siassi Islands and Sio area can be amalgamated to suggest material culture and in the nature of local subsistence a culture-historical model of the development of regional strategies. However, there are several noteworthy differences exchange networks from about 3,150 years ago to the between the proto-system and the historical trade network. historical period (Fig. 2). As Harding (1967) anticipated in The most important here is that the configuration of pottery his Voyagers of the Vitiaz Strait, the earliest evidence for manufacture and movement differed markedly. Lilley: Trade and Culture across the Vitiaz Strait 91 Fig. 2. Diagrammatic sequence of cultural change in Siassi and Sio. more recent deposits at KBP clearly shows that the Sio pottery industry of the Omadama Phase (650–300 B.P.) attained levels of intensity and specialization similar to those witnessed historically, at the same time that increasing amounts of Talasea obsidian began reaching the site (Lilley, 1986: 355–57). However, it should be stressed that despite these important developments on the north New Guinea coast, and patchy evidence for a human presence in Siassi from around 550 B.P., there is no indication of more than fleeting occupation of Siassi or of a resumption of cross- strait exchange until approximately 300 B.P. (Bizor Phase), when deposition accelerated at the KLJ site on the island of Malai, which is adjacent to Tuam in Siassi (Lilley, 1986– 87: 67–68). In other words, a general intensification of activity, possibly accompanied by other major changes, began in the Sio area during the Omadama phase, almost four centuries before the emergence of an exchange system exhibiting a Only one of the pottery industries that operated at the very pattern of linkages like that recorded ethnographically. beginning of the proto-system, Sio, survived into the There is no excavated evidence from the KBQ site on the ethnographic present. Another ware associated with the proto- mainland to cover the last 300 years, and the focus of local system, Madang, also survives today, but it is present in the occupation seems to have shifted to the irretrievably disturbed Sio area (and perhaps nearby Arop or Long Island)2 only from KBP site on Sio Island during this period (Lilley, 1986–87: about 1,300–1,000 years ago and may not have been made or 68). However, there is a dramatic increase in the deposition of at least traded very far before then. Of the two other early Sio pottery at the KLJ site on Malai at this time (Lilley, 1986: wares, I have already described Type X (Lilley, 1988a). I have 297–301). This clearly indicates that there was a significant little further information about the other, formally undescribed increase in the quantity of coastal New Guinea pottery ware which I call Type Y (Lilley, 2000, 2002). It is very transferred across the strait, which in turn suggests the distinctive visually and petrologically, and on the latter basis possibility of further intensification of production in the Sio may originate in West New Britain. Its dating remains uncertain. area. The Malai data also indicate that the bulk of the excavated It may be associated with a radiocarbon determination of about Madang pottery was transported across the Vitiaz Strait during 2,300 cal. B.P. (ANU 4619) from Siassi and thus may link with historical times. These developments are associated with what might be late Lapita-early post-Lapita pottery from increased deposition of a much expanded range of utilitarian undated contexts in the nearby Arawe Islands (see below).
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