Recent neolithic trade in New Guinea : the ecological basis of traffic in goods among stone-age subsistence farmers

Abstract

The project was first conceived as a study in the geography of primitive trade, using ecology as a conceptual and methodological framework. Other studies of trade in technologically simple societies, of which the most relevant is Harding's monograph on a New Guinea coastal trading system, explained trade as the result of environmentally caused specialization and cultural diversity (e.g. Harding, 1967, 241). This view was taken as a basic assumption in formulating the present project. Trade goods, the routes over which they travelled, and the rates at which they were exchanged, were all viewed as the product of varied culturally controlled responses to different natural environments.