Rewriting prehistory –
New Guinea did import its Neolithic culture from Southeast Asia after all.
The details of daily life were uniquely New Guinea. But the big picture — more people, settled village life, new types of stone tools, and a sudden flourishing of symbolic art — might have been familiar to people from other early agricultural societies around the world. Together, those things are a bundle of cultural trends that archaeologists call Neolithic. Until recently, archaeologists didn’t think New Guinea had developed its own Neolithic culture. Instead, many researchers thought all the trappings of Neolithic village life had arrived around 3, years ago with the Lapita, a group of seafaring farmers who came to the island from Southeast Asia. That’s because the few Neolithic artifacts that could be properly dated all seemed to come from after the Lapita arrived. But the people of the small highland village of Waim recently rewrote that narrative, with a chance discovery during a local construction project.
Microscopic traces of food — starches from yams, bananas, palm tree nuts, and sugar cane — still clung to the surfaces of stone pestles. Ocher still filled the groove worn into a stone where ancient crafters had once pulled string through the ocher to dye it; modern people living near Waim recognized the tool at once, because they still use something quite similar to dye the string for colorful woven bags called bilums. The filled-in remains of five postholes marked where a house or other building once stood. A flat rock nearby, cutting horizontally into the clay slope of the hillside, may once have been a step. The site even recorded the ancient residents ’housekeeping techniques; bits of stone debris from tool-making had piled up downslope, as if someone tossed or swept them away from the house to clear away the mess after finishing a tool.
But one chunk of stone debris stood out from the rest: an obsidian core, with a chemical composition that traced it to the island of New Britain in the Bismarck Archipelago, about 980 km away from New Guinea. It’s the oldest evidence of inter-island trade in raw materials discovered in the region. A slice of prehistoric life
Similar ax-adzes and stone pestles had turned up at archaeological sites in the New Guinea highlands before, but they were usually scattered on the surface, with no way to tell how old they were. At Waim, University of New South Wales archaeologist Ben Shaw and his colleagues radiocarbon dated fragments of wood and charcoal from the same layer as the artifacts. The carvings, tools, pestles, and postholes turned out to be between 5, 350 and 4, years old. The stone carvings from Waim are now the oldest symbolic stone carvings from anywhere in Oceania, but very similar carvings of birds have turned up sticking out of the ground all over the highlands and northern lowlands of New Guinea. Shaw and his colleagues say the imagery was probably a part of shared culture that linked groups of people scattered around the region, even as groups began to grow more isolated and developed the to 1, 0 separate languages spoken in modern Papua New Guinea.
[The carvings] May have been the formative stages of a clan system which we see in New Guinea today , ”Shaw told Ars. “This would have transcended language and cultural boundaries.”
Like the carvings, the stone pestles at Waim are also the oldest examples ever found in Oceania. At earlier sites, archaeologists tend to find heavy, round stones that had been used to pound roots or nuts. Once people started taking time to shape and grind a proper pestle for that sort of work, it suggests that food processing had become a much more important, and probably more complicated, process.
And the starchy residues left behind on those pestles reveal a lot about what people ate and where it came from . The starches reveal a mixed diet of wild food, like palm tree nuts and domestic crops like bananas and yams. Yams tend to grow at low altitudes, so people probably grew and harvested them in the surrounding Jimi Valley lowlands, then carried them up to Waim, 1, (above sea level.) A Neolithic Revolution like no other
But one chunk of stone debris stood out from the rest: an obsidian core, with a chemical composition that traced it to the island of New Britain in the Bismarck Archipelago, about 980 km away from New Guinea. It’s the oldest evidence of inter-island trade in raw materials discovered in the region. A slice of prehistoric life
Similar ax-adzes and stone pestles had turned up at archaeological sites in the New Guinea highlands before, but they were usually scattered on the surface, with no way to tell how old they were. At Waim, University of New South Wales archaeologist Ben Shaw and his colleagues radiocarbon dated fragments of wood and charcoal from the same layer as the artifacts. The carvings, tools, pestles, and postholes turned out to be between 5, 350 and 4, years old. The stone carvings from Waim are now the oldest symbolic stone carvings from anywhere in Oceania, but very similar carvings of birds have turned up sticking out of the ground all over the highlands and northern lowlands of New Guinea. Shaw and his colleagues say the imagery was probably a part of shared culture that linked groups of people scattered around the region, even as groups began to grow more isolated and developed the to 1, 0 separate languages spoken in modern Papua New Guinea.
[The carvings] May have been the formative stages of a clan system which we see in New Guinea today , ”Shaw told Ars. “This would have transcended language and cultural boundaries.”
Like the carvings, the stone pestles at Waim are also the oldest examples ever found in Oceania. At earlier sites, archaeologists tend to find heavy, round stones that had been used to pound roots or nuts. Once people started taking time to shape and grind a proper pestle for that sort of work, it suggests that food processing had become a much more important, and probably more complicated, process.
And the starchy residues left behind on those pestles reveal a lot about what people ate and where it came from . The starches reveal a mixed diet of wild food, like palm tree nuts and domestic crops like bananas and yams. Yams tend to grow at low altitudes, so people probably grew and harvested them in the surrounding Jimi Valley lowlands, then carried them up to Waim, 1, (above sea level.) A Neolithic Revolution like no other
Like the carvings, the stone pestles at Waim are also the oldest examples ever found in Oceania. At earlier sites, archaeologists tend to find heavy, round stones that had been used to pound roots or nuts. Once people started taking time to shape and grind a proper pestle for that sort of work, it suggests that food processing had become a much more important, and probably more complicated, process.
And the starchy residues left behind on those pestles reveal a lot about what people ate and where it came from . The starches reveal a mixed diet of wild food, like palm tree nuts and domestic crops like bananas and yams. Yams tend to grow at low altitudes, so people probably grew and harvested them in the surrounding Jimi Valley lowlands, then carried them up to Waim, 1, (above sea level.) A Neolithic Revolution like no other
The finds at Waim means that the Lapita can’t claim credit for introducing technologies like ax-adzes, symbolic artwork, and defined domestic space to New Guinea. People on the island had been using them for at least 1, 0 years when the Lapita arrived. But the Lapita still wrought drastic changes.
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