From Field to Museum Studies from Melanesia in Honour of Robin Torrence edited by Jim Specht, Val Attenbrow, and Jim Allen Specht, Jim, Val Attenbrow, and Jim Allen. 2021. Preface ..................................................................... 1 Neall, Vincent, Lucy McGee, Michael Turner, Tanya O’Neill, Anke Zernack, and J. Stephen Athens. 2021. Geochemical fingerprinting of Holocene tephras in the Willaumez Isthmus District of West New Britain, Papua New Guinea ...................................................................... 5 Pengilley, Alana. 2021. Geochemistry and sources of stone tools in south-west New Britain, Papua New Guinea .................................................................................................................... 25 Shaw, Ben, and Simon Coxe. 2021. Cannibalism and developments to socio-political systems from 540 BP in the Massim Islands of south-east Papua New Guinea ....................... 47 Ford, Anne, Vincent Kewibu, and Kenneth Miamba. 2021. Avanata: a possible Late Lapita site on Fergusson Island, Milne Bay Province, Papua New Guinea .............................. 61 Hogg, Nicholas W. S., Glenn R. Summerhayes, and Yi-lin Elaine Chen. 2021. Moving on or settling down? Studying the nature of mobility through Lapita pottery from the Anir Islands, Papua New Guinea .............................................................................................. 71 Lentfer, Carol J., Alison Crowther, and Roger C. Green. 2021. The question of Early Lapita settlements in Remote Oceania and reliance on horticulture revisited: new evidence from plant microfossil studies at Reef/Santa Cruz, south-east Solomon Islands ...................... 87 Rath, Pip, and Nina Kononenko. 2021. Negotiating social identity through material practices with stone ................................................................................................................. 107 Dickinson, Paul. 2021. Narrow margins: standardised manufacturing of obsidian stemmed tools as evidence for craft specialisation and social networks in mid-Holocene New Britain ............................................................................................................................. 119 Reepmeyer, Christian. 2021. Modelling prehistoric social interaction in the south-western Pacific: a view from the obsidian sources in northern Vanuatu .............................................. 137 Barton, Huw. 2021. The cylindrical stone adzes of Borneo ............................................................... 149 Davies, Susan M., and Michael Quinnell. 2021. Up close and personal: James Edge- Partington in Australia in 1897 ................................................................................................ 169 Lilje, Erna, and Jude Philp. 2021. The dancing trees: objects, facts and ideas in museums .............. 183 Rhoads, James W. 2021. Papuan Gulf spirit boards and detecting social boundaries: a preliminary investigation ...................................................................................................... 195 Bonshek, Elizabeth. 2021. The Longgu community time capsule: contemporary collecting in Solomon Islands for the Australian Museum ..................................................... 219 Sheppard, Peter J. 2021. Tomoko: raiding canoes of the western Solomon Islands ............................ 231 Richards, Rhys, and Peter J. Matthews. 2021. Barkcloth from the Solomon Islands in the George Brown Collection .............................................................................................. 245 Technical Reports of the Australian Museum Online, no. 34, pp. 1–258 12 May 2021 Tech. Rep. Aust. Mus. Online Technical Reports of the Australian Museum Online Number 34, pp. 137–148, 2021 a peer-reviewed open-access journal https://doi.org/10.3853/j.1835-4211.34.2021.1748 published by the Australian Museum, Sydney communicating knowledge derived from our collections ISSN 1835-4211 (online) Modelling Prehistoric Social Interaction in the South-western Pacific: a View from the Obsidian Sources in Northern Vanuatu Christian Reepmeyer Centre of Excellence for Australian Biodiversity and Heritage, College of Arts, Society and Education, James Cook University, Cairns Queensland 4811, Australia Abstract. This paper investigates the history of social interaction within communities in the Vanuatu Archipelago and between Vanuatu and other regions in the Western Pacific as reflected by variations in lithic raw material sources and technology of stone artefacts. Past research determined an apparent contradiction between long-distance transportation of obsidian, indicating high value, and the under-utilisation of the raw material at the place of discard, indicating low value. The paper concludes that because previous hypotheses depend too much on the notion of the scarcity of resources in their evaluation of the concept of value, they are insufficient to explain the pattern of spatial and temporal distribution of lithic artefacts. Rather than focusing on the intrinsic value of obsidian raw material for individuals or communities, it is more useful to view it as a marker of group identity in a complex system connecting discrete populations in mitigating risk in unpredictable new environments. These new environments included pre-established populations, which might be hostile to new arrivals. The necessity for this complex system quickly disappeared once the colonisers arrived in regions uninhabited by prior populations. Introduction 1997; Spriggs, 1997). These groups have been described as potentially small and highly mobile initially leaving Obsidian has been a focus of archaeological research only a small footprint of human occupation; primarily, but in the Pacific for its unique geochemical attributes that not exclusively, on small off-shore islands (Bedford and allow identification of distance and directionality in raw Sprigg, 2008). The small size and low number of initial material transport, which enables interpretations about groups have been hypothesised to be prime cause explaining its importance as an item embodying cultural meaning subtle difference in the archaeological record of Lapita sites (Sheppard, 1993; Torrence, 2005). During the period when (Bedford, 2019), and this differentiation has been associated Lapita pottery was made some 3000 years ago, obsidian with the emergence of ‘localised ethnic identities’ (Green travelled long distances from source locations in West New and Kirch, 1997: 30). The detailed process of this population Britain, Papua New Guinea, as far East as Fiji and West to movement is unclear (Sheppard, 2011), as are likely Sabah in Malaysia (Sheppard, 2011). This long-distance reasons for it. Different explanations have been proposed, transportation of obsidian over several thousand kilometres summarised as push and pull factors (Lilley, 2000), such as has raised questions why people selected obsidian from demographic pressures (Bellwood, 2011), environmental particular sources, and how this transport might have been disasters (Grattan and Torrence, 2007), and the search for organised. pristine environments with abundant food resources (Lilley, The appearance of Lapita pottery in Remote Oceania (the 2019). Each of these reasons might have played a part at islands to the south and east of the main Solomon Islands some stage in the process, but the archaeological record is chain) has been associated with a migration of groups out of unlikely to preserve clear evidence for them (Kirch, 1997: the Bismarck Archipelago Papua New Guinea region (Kirch, 253; see also Anthony, 1990). Keywords: Pacific prehistory; Remote Oceania; obsidian exchange; social interaction; distance decay models; risk minimisation Corresponding author: Christian Reepmeyer [email protected] Received: 19 November 2020 Accepted: 30 November 2020 Published: 12 May 2021 (online only) Publisher: The Australian Museum, Sydney, Australia (a statutory authority of, and principally funded by, the NSW State Government) Citation: Reepmeyer, Christian. 2021. Modelling prehistoric social interaction in the south-western Pacific: a view from the obsidian sources in northern Vanuatu. In From Field to Museum—Studies from Melanesia in Honour of Robin Torrence, ed. Jim Specht, Val Attenbrow, and Jim Allen. Technical Reports of the Australian Museum Online 34: 137–148. https://doi.org/10.3853/j.1835-4211.34.2021.1748 Copyright: © 2021 Reepmeyer. This is an open access article licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC BY 4.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. 138 Technical Reports of the Australian Museum Online no. 34 (2021) Before the appearance of Lapita pottery in the Bismarck discard occur mainly in domestic contexts (Torrence, 2005). Archipelago, the main obsidian technology on New Britain Low value of obsidian has also been suggested because of the comprised the production of complex stemmed obsidian small amount of energy required for expedient reduction and tools, some of which have associated with high social curation of the raw material (Fredericksen, 1994; Hanslip, value connected with prestige and status (Araho et al., 2001). Unfortunately, functional approaches alone do not 2002; Torrence, 2005). In contrast, Lapita pottery sites explain long-distance transportation of obsidian or the choice mark a substantial shift to a simple technology of small