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Tracking ancient beach-lines inland: 2600-year-old dentate-stamped ceramics at Hopo, Vailala River region, Papua New Guinea

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  14 April 2015

Robert Skelly ,
Bruno David ,
Fiona Petchey  and
Matthew Leavesley
Robert Skelly
Affiliation:
Monash Indigenous Centre, Monash University, Clayton, VIC 3800, Australia (Email: [email protected]; [email protected])
Bruno David
Affiliation:
Monash Indigenous Centre, Monash University, Clayton, VIC 3800, Australia (Email: [email protected]; [email protected])
Fiona Petchey
Affiliation:
Radiocarbon Dating Laboratory, University of Waikato, Hamilton 3240, New Zealand (Email: [email protected])
Matthew Leavesley
Affiliation:
School of Arts and Social Sciences, James Cook University, Cairns, QLD 4870, Australia (Email: [email protected])
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Abstract

The Lapita expansion took Austronesian seafaring peoples with distinctive pottery eastward from the Bismarck Archipelago to western Polynesia during the late second millennium BC, marking the first stage in the settlement of Oceania. Here it is shown that a parallel process also carried Lapita pottery and people many hundreds of kilometres westward along the southern shore of Papua New Guinea. The key site is Hopo, now 4.5km inland owing to the progradation of coastal sand dunes, but originally on the sea edge. Pottery and radiocarbon dates indicate Lapita settlement in this location c. 600 BC, and suggest that the long-distance maritime networks linking the entire southern coast of Papua New Guinea in historical times may trace their origin to this period.

Keywords

Papua New GuineaVailala RiverHopoLapitaseafaringmaritime colonisationcoastal change
Type
Research
Information
Antiquity , Volume 88 , Issue 340 , 01 June 2014 , pp. 470 - 487
Copyright
Copyright © Antiquity Publications Ltd. 2014 

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