Prehistoric exchange in the Vitiaz Strait, Papua New Guinea

Abstract

When Europeans began colonizing coastal western Melanesia in the mid to late nineteenth century, they found a number of trading systems which effectively ringed the island of New Guinea and linked i t with nearby island arcs. The f i r s t anthropologists to study these systems found them to be quite remarkable, in that in the absence of complex socio-political structures they facilitated the movement of large quantities of valuable and utilitarian commodities over often considerable distances and thus served to integrate and distribute resources among the otherwise atomised societies they encompassed. In this thesis I examine archaeological and other evidence bearing on the orig ins and evolution of the ethnographically famed Siassi trading system, which at the time of European contact spanned the Vitiaz Strait to link northeastern New Guinea with the Bismarck Archipelago. My archaeological investigations concentrate on two sites in the Siassi Islands in the middle of the Vitiaz Strait and one at Sio on the New Guinea mainland. Cultural material recovered from these sites is analysed in order to determine the nature and direction of the developments which led to the emergence of the ethnographically documented form of the Siassi system. Much of the analysis focusses on the nature o f, and changes in , the stylistic and petrological characteristics of excavated pottery. Attention is also paid to aspects of the stone artefact assemblages, particularly variations in the quantities and qualities of obsidian, as well as the shell and bone artefact assemblages and faunal recoveries.