Building and Remembering: An Archaeology of Place-Making on Papua New Guinea’s South Coast 9780824893422

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Building and Remembering

Pac i f i c I s l a n d s A r c h a eo lo gy

Series Editor: Patrick Vinton Kirch

Building and Remembering An Archaeology of Place-Making on Papua New Guinea’s South Coast Chris Urwin

University of Hawai‘i Press | Honolulu

Published with support from the Australian Academy of the Humanities © 2022 University of Hawai‘i Press All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America First printing, 2022 Library of Congress Cataloging-­in-­Publication Data Names: Urwin, Chris, author. Title: Building and remembering : an archaeology of place-making on Papua   New Guinea’s south coast / Chris Urwin. Description: Honolulu : University of Hawai‘i Press, [2022] | Series:   Pacific islands archaeology | Includes bibliographical references and  index. Identifiers: LCCN 2022038390 | ISBN 9780824891886 (hardback) | ISBN   9780824893422 (pdf) | ISBN 9780824893439 (epub) | ISBN 9780824893446   (kindle edition) Subjects: LCSH: Antiquities, Prehistoric—Papua New Guinea—Orokolo Bay   Region. | Community archaeology—Papua New Guinea—Orokolo Bay Region. |   Ethnoarchaeology—Papua New Guinea—Orokolo Bay Region. | Collective   memory—Papua New Guinea—Orokolo Bay Region. | Orokolo Bay Region   (Papua New Guinea)—Antiquities. Classification: LCC DU740.3 .U79 2022 | DDC 995.4/701—dc23/eng/20220822 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022038390 The sections of chapter 10 that discuss the Bayesian chronology in detail have been significantly revised from “Combining Oral Traditions and Bayesian Chronological Modeling to Understand Village Development in the Gulf of Papua (Papua New Guinea),” originally published in Radiocarbon 63 (April 2021): 647–667. The first half of chapter 11 is a significantly revised version of “Excavating and Interpreting Ancestral Action: Stories from the Subsurface of Orokolo Bay, Papua New Guinea,” originally published in Journal of Social Archaeology 19 (October 2019): 279–306. Other parts of chapter 11, discussing the material culture of the eravo and the removal of eravo posts in the early colonial era, were significantly revised from “Remembering Removal: Indigenous Narratives of Colonial Collecting Practices in the Gulf of Papua (Papua New Guinea),” originally published in The Routledge Companion to Indigenous Global History, edited by A. McGrath and L. Russell, 481–499 (London: Routledge, 2022). Cover art: “Hoisting eravo post—Hohi Ravi—March 1932—Papua, Gulf, Orokolo.” Photograph by Francis Edgar Williams. Courtesy of the National Archives of Australia. A6510, 315. University of Hawai‘i Press books are printed on acid-­free paper and meet the guidelines for p ­ ermanence and durability of the Council on Library Resources.

For gracious hosts and patient teachers— the people of Orokolo Bay

Contents

Acknowledgments  ix Orthography and Conventions  xiii

1 Introduction  1 2 A Social History of Orokolo Bay  7 3 Archaeologies of the Gulf of Papua and Beyond  26 4 Building, Dwelling, and Remembering Place  47 5 An Ethnography of Ancestral Place in Orokolo Bay  62 6 Central Popo: The Popo Uku and Marea Ita Estates  90 7 “Surrounding Sites”: The Maivipi and Miruka Estates  118 8 Expanding Westward: The Aitae Hiru and Koavaipi Estates  149 9 Bookends of Popo: Mak’Aki and Mirimua Mapoe  160 10 Understanding Place-Making in Orokolo Bay through Archaeological Chronologies  172 11 Memory at Work in Orokolo Bay  192 12 Memory Transformed  210 Appendix: Description of Methods Used in This Study  217 References  223 Index  239

Ac k n ow l e d g m e n t s

In preparing this book I benefited from the generosity and hard work of many others. Not least are those who hosted me and other members of the research team in 2015: the Kaivakovu and Larihairu village communities in Orokolo Bay. Village elders gave their oversight and support to the project. The Wae’e, Vaipi, and Marupi households kindly allowed us to stay with them. Each of you became our family; we are grateful for your warm welcome and companionship. Avia Hae, Hape Hape, Harrison Hauhe, Kaiva Ipai, Paul Mahiro, councilor Max Marupi, Joe Wae’e, and “Stony” have been great friends to us and supporters of the project. Thank you to the Kaivakovu village members who took the time to teach me about Orokolo Bay’s ancestral places: Kaivavore Hae’e, Kaiva Ipai, Houhii Iaupa, Paul Mahiro, Pastor Ivahae Ori, and Maeaú Parua. And to the Larihairu village members who did the same: Avia Hae, Harrison Hauhe, Marepo Korela, Malcolm Marepo, and Joe Wae’e, along with Laura Oaharo from Marea village. Many of the ideas presented in this book emerged from the deep knowledge and memories of these people, and I hope my attributions and citations reflect this reality. Members of the excavation team from Orokolo Bay contributed immensely to the archaeological work in 2015, and to the day-to-day activity of interpreting sites, stratigraphy, and artifacts. Thanks to the team from the Kaivakovu Village Youth Association: Eka Akapu, Hevehevila “Whisky” Haukava, Lare “Junior” Lako, Maria “Adrian” Mavrakore, Kaiku “Joe” Muruha, Morea “Maurice” Paul, and Michael Vaipi. The team from the Larihairu Village Youth Association consisted of Joshua Heni, Ryan Hae, Nigel Haula, Vincent Heve, Iavi Kapai, Thomas Laea, Joe Lako, Hudson Malcolm, Mattex Melare, and Los Vila. The National Museum and Art Gallery of Papua New Guinea played a key role in facilitating the fieldwork. I thank the director, Andrew Moutu, for arranging for me to be affiliated with the museum during my doctoral research. Alois Kuaso, then acting chief curator for prehistory, afforded us crucial logistical assistance. Museum staff arranged the excavation permit and loaned the excavated cultural materials to Monash University for laboratory analysis. I am indebted to Henry Arifeae (cultural coordinator at the museum) for his unwavering support and friendship throughout the project. Henry was an invaluable member of the archaeological team, and his family kindly hosted me when I was in Port Moresby. Alu Guise of the museum also lent us his expertise in the field for a week in 2015. The Archaeology Laboratory of the University of Papua New Guinea also shared resources and expertise with me. Thanks to Matthew Leavesley for allowing us to use the university’s fieldwork equipment, and to undergraduate student Victor Asigau for his assistance in the field for a week. There is another host of people to thank from the institutions that have hosted and supported my doctoral and postdoctoral research. This book is based on my doctoral research of 2015–2019 (Urwin 2019a) based at Monash Indigenous Studies Centre (Monash University). Bruno David and ix

Ian McNiven were truly first-rate supervisors of my research and constant sources of support, ideas, and helpful critique. Bruno worked tirelessly to ensure the research was a success, and we shared many stimulating conversations about ancestral places, memory, and archaeology. I thank Ian for pushing me to think about the varied ways in which Indigenous people engage with archaeology and the material past. Lynette Russell was highly supportive of the project, and in her oversight of the department provided an excellent environment in which to work. I thank the Anthropology Department of the National Museum of Natural History (Smithsonian Institution) for affording me time to finalize this book during a postdoctoral fellowship in 2021–2022. I thank Joshua A. Bell for his encouragement of this project, and for the many invigorating conversations we have shared about all things Papuan Gulf. A large cast of friends and unofficial mentors helped this project come to fruition. I am especially grateful to Robert Skelly. Rob introduced me to the Papuan Gulf in February 2015, instructed me in pottery analysis, and gave feedback on my ideas whenever it was requested. Jeremy Ash, John J. Bradley, Martin Fowler, Daniel James, Jerome Mialanes, Ursula Pietrzak-Aniszewska, and Jim Rhoads made key contributions in the form of discussions, advice, and friendship. Chris Ballard and Julian Thomas examined my doctoral thesis and helped shape the book in its final form through their observations and feedback. Jeremy Ash, Brit Asmussen, Joshua A. Bell, Liam Brady, John J. Bradley, Quan Hua, Lara Lamb, Jerome Mialanes, and Robert Skelly read earlier forms of specific chapters and provided helpful feedback. Jim Rhoads selflessly shared his field notes with me, along with an unpublished report of his research in Orokolo Bay for the Australian Museum. Chris Ballard allowed me to read his work in press. Lara Lamb pointed me in the direction of several invaluable ethnographic sources. I am very grateful for the encouragement provided by my immediate and extended family (the Urwins, Bairds, Sylvesters, Washingtons, Crawfords, and Smyths). I discussed more or less every idea in this book with Naomi Urwin, who responded with genuine interest, many questions, and often incisive (but always kind) critique. I am thankful for this world-class support network, and I am very fortunate. A heartfelt thank you to Masako Ikeda, Grace Wen, and Ivo Fravashi at the University of Hawai‘i Press and to Patrick Kirch at the University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa for supporting and improving the book with their editorial expertise. Many people helped me with information and image requests for the book. Brit Asmussen, Barry Craig, and Robin Torrence all provided information on museum collections from Orokolo Bay. The Australian Museum, the British Museum, the Field Museum, the National Archives of Australia, and the Royal Anthropological Institute provided images for the book. Thanks to Martin Fowler for allowing me to use his sketch of the village layout of Orokolo Bay in the 1920s and 1930s, and to Jim Allen, Bryce Barker, Bruno David, and Rob Skelly for permission to use various photographs. Steve Morton took the terrific artifact photographs that appear in this book. Several researchers contributed to the analyses presented in this thesis: each contributed timely, quality data and was a joy to work with. Quan Hua conducted the radiocarbon dating at the Australian National Science and Technology Organisation (ANSTO) and helped develop the Bayesian models. Quan trained me in sample pre-treatment at ANSTO’s Lucas Heights facility in 2017. Tiina Manne conducted the vertebrate faunal analyses, and Adriana Basiaco assessed the worked bones and teeth. Anna Garamszegi made shell identifications; the stone artifacts were analyzed by Jerome Mialanes. Thanks also to Rachael Benbow, Vanda Fletcher, Madeleine Kelly,

x  •   Acknowledgments

Jack Norris, Emma Pegg, and Rebecca Ziedan for their assistance with sorting the excavation material at Monash University. My doctoral research was supported by an Australian Government Research Training Program scholarship. Monash University also contributed travel grants and research funds. The Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence for Australian Biodiversity and Heritage supported the production of this book and provided me with research training. The Australian Academy of the Humanities also provided support for this publication. An Australian Institute of Nuclear Science and Engineering Research Award (ALNGRA 16006) funded six radiocarbon dates. A further 24 dates were funded by an ANSTO User Access grant (proposal number 10726), and the Australian Archaeological Association funded three dates through the Student Research Grant Scheme. The radiocarbon study received financial support from the Australian Government’s National Collaborative Research Infrastructure Strategy for the Centre for Accelerator Science at ANSTO. The project met the requirements of the National Statement on Ethical Conduct in Human Research and was approved by the Monash University Human Research Ethics Committee (project number CF15/1133—2015000541).

Acknowledgments  •  xi

Orthogr aphy and Conventions

Italicised non-English words other than scientific (Linnaean) names given in the text are in the Orokolo language, unless otherwise specified. In Orokolo orthography and speech, “l” and “r” are often interchangeable, as are “m” and “v.” For instance, some community members call longhouses elavo, and others eravo. Likewise, the “Pakemara clan” can also be rendered as “Pakevara clan.” In each instance, I have used a single spelling, but this aspect of local orthography should be noted when comparing the Orokolo language words in this book to other published examples. I cite my field diary (FD) in the text, along with the date of the note and (if applicable) the name of the local community member whose knowledge I had transcribed. For example: Houhii Iaupa FD 21 Oct 2015. A series of nine formal oral tradition interviews conducted in 2015 in Orokolo Bay for this study have been fully transcribed (Urwin 2019a, appendix A). However, space prohibited these entire interviews from being reproduced in this book, so they are cited using the following convention: Laura Oaharo, interviewed 30 Oct 2015. When referring to archival sources, the National Archives of Papua New Guinea is abbreviated to NAPNG. I have used italics to specify radiocarbon age ranges calibrated using Bayesian modeling. I have followed the conventions for reporting modeled ages suggested by Hamilton and Krus (2018, 195; see appendix for further details).

xiii

1 Introduction

The precise workings of memory are an enduring mystery. Despite significant advances in the fields of psychology and neurology (e.g., see Boyer 2009; Payne et al. 2004), we are yet to fully disentangle how people remember the past as individuals or in social groups. The term “memory” has two common meanings. It can refer either to a faculty (in the sense that we might ask the question, how does human memory work?) or to individual memories (we might speak of a person’s memory of an encounter). We tend to think of individual memory in terms of recall (Casey 1987, 129; Lambek and Antze 1996, xi–xii), in which past experiences are retrieved or relived. According to an ancient metaphor (first recounted by Plato), the human mind is “an aviary in which individual memories wait like captive birds to be plucked from the cage of recollection in order to aid in the identification of present perceptions” (Casey 1979, 407; see also Ricoeur 2004, 7–21). However, the workings of memory are not confined to the mind. As archaeologists have pointed out, people encounter and know the world through their whole bodies. Rather than simply thinking our way through the world, our experiences are inescapably corporeal, and we come to the world through the senses (e.g., Hamilakis 2002, 2010; Tilley 1994; papers in Day 2013). In other words, just as people experience the world through their whole being, so too do they remember. Remembering is key to how we understand the world around us through dwelling. Yet as Edward Casey (1987, 20) reminds us, “It is just because remembering is so pervasive in our lives—so pervasively present there—that we must make a special effort to excavate it from its deeply embedded position in human experience.” As we dwell in culturally known places, we contribute to their ongoing construction and imbue them with what archaeologist Christopher Tilley (1994, 27) has called “sedimented layers of meaning.” The disciplines of archaeology and anthropology have long aimed to tease out aspects of how people remember these meaning-laden places that were built or inhabited by the ancestors (ancestral places). A few seminal works have dealt with the articulation of material traces of the past and memory in detail (see chapter 4). One of the most important treatments is Laurent Olivier’s (2011) book The Dark Abyss of Time: Archaeology and Memory. Olivier (2011, 187) makes the case that archaeological artifacts “are not witnesses to past history, but rather symptoms indicative of the living memory of the past.” The effect of recently unearthed things or places “of the past” on contemporary populations are in some senses like the symptoms of a disease. Like symptoms, they affect people differently and are understood according to each person’s biography and cultural perspectives (see also Byrne 2007). In other words, people engage with artifacts in the present, and the ways in which they make sense of the past are framed by their memories. 1

Some archaeologists have drawn on theories of “social memory” and communal “remembering” to understand patterns of human activity through time (e.g., see Bradley 2002; Mills and Walker 2008a). Others, including archaeologists working in the Pacific, have sought to explore the similarities, differences, and articulations between archaeological and Indigenous oral traditional knowledges (e.g., see Garanger 1982; Kirch 2018; Martindale 2006; Sheppard et al. 2004; Stump 2013). Studies such as these explore how stories relating to the recent past can be used to add depth to archaeological narratives, inform models of sites and landscapes, or provide baseline ethnographic information that can then be tracked back in time (historicized). Other analysts have explicitly sought to test the veracity and age depth of oral traditions (e.g., see Edinborough et al. 2017; Pendergast and Meighan 1959). Yet few case studies explore how contemporary Indigenous populations remember the past in direct relation to material remains (but see Lane 2006; Schmidt 2006; for non-Indigenous contexts, see Jones 2012; Moshenska 2007, 2009). In an African context, Peter Schmidt (2006, 2010) has shown that key local heritage places play a role in the always-­political process of historical meaning-making in the present. Thinking more broadly of ancestral landscapes, Julie Cruikshank (1981, 2005) used detailed ethnographic research to explore how the Indigenous peoples of northwestern Canada and Alaska construct notions of historicity in relation to changing glacial landscapes and colonial encounters. This study contributes a crucial multidisciplinary case study of remembering to the small existing corpus. I combine archaeological and ethnographic analyses to explore how people indigenous to Orokolo Bay in Papua New Guinea built and dwelled in places, and how they remember those places today by uncovering and engaging with (sub)surface artifacts and geomorphological features in the course of daily life. Along the way I unpack and explore notions of emplaced dwelling, place-making (building), and memory, each of which offer nuanced ways of studying cultural “place-worlds” (Casey 1993) and their associated histories. My case study centers on a famed ancestral place called Popo, which is known regionally as the very first village site. Popo is in some ways an archetypal ancestral place. Locals assert that the world and everything in it originated there, but also that it is a genealogically known place that people moved into, through, and out of. As such, it is a place that can be investigated through archaeological techniques such as systematic excavation, radiocarbon dating, and artifact analyses. An Archaeology of Place-Making This study also emerged from (and seeks to answer) regional archaeological questions. Chief among these is the need to better investigate and characterize the recent emergence of village sites in the Papuan Gulf (aka Gulf of Papua) region of Papua New Guinea. Ever since the arrival of Australian and British colonists in the region in the late nineteenth century (the Gulf of Papua became part of the protectorate of British New Guinea in 1884; today, the area is encompassed by the Independent State of Papua New Guinea), outsiders have been struck by the vast villages located along this tropical coastline (e.g., figure 1.1). One such outsider, the young adventurer and photographer Frank Hurley, plucked words from the lexicon of European city life to describe these large villages: “The great Ravis [longhouses] stood out boldly . . . the structures seemed to rise out of the water, and the various ‘suburbs’ or isolated parts were connected together by bridgeways” (Frank Hurley, Diary 1, 6 October 1922, in Specht and Fields 1984). Photographs taken in the early 1900s give us a contemporary insight into what it was like to encounter these sprawling, prepossessing places for 2  •   ch a p t er 1

Figure 1.1. “Aerial—looking down on to Kaimari, 1500 ft,” October 1922. Photograph by Frank Hurley. Courtesy of the Australian Museum Archives. AMS320/V04867.

the first time (figure 1.1). The coastal villages supported far larger populations than those found inland, a situation that remains to this day (see McAlpine 1969b, 138, figure 3; G. H. Murray 1920, 25). Although the region is linguistically diverse (supporting the Eleman, Purari, Kiwaian, and Bamu language families), many Papuan Gulf villages shared a striking set of characteristics during the early colonial period (see chapter 2), including immense longhouse structures (figure 1.1), elaborate masked ceremonies, large-scale sago palm (Metroxylon sagu) starch production, and highly formalized exchange relations with distant communities. The best known of these long-distance exchanges is the hiri: an annual exchange in which ceramicist Motu villagers inhabiting today’s Port Moresby region would transport large quantities of pottery and imported shell valuables on trading ships in exchange for sago palm starch and canoe hulls from the Gulf of Papua (see Mennis 2014; Skelly and David 2017). Early documenters were captivated by the rhythm and scale of coastal village life in Orokolo Bay, the location and subject of this book. In January 1892, the Scottish missionary Rev. James Chalmers (1887, 235; see also J. H. P. Murray 1912, 175) noted the size of these villages, which were supported by a “large and varied supply of food.” The anthropologist Charles Gabriel Seligman (1940, viii) later stated that Orokolo Bay’s residents were “a people living their life with a certain stateliness and spaciousness of ceremony . . . with time for the organized pleasures of social life.” In 1937, Orokolo Bay supported some 4,500 people who lived in five main village groups (see chapters 2 and 5) (Williams 1940, 27). Sir Albert Maori Kiki, former deputy prime minister of Papua New Guinea, moved there as a small boy in the mid-1930s. He vividly recalled his first encounters with the place: “My first impression of Orokolo was that it was full of people. Coming from the tiny Parevaro community that wandered through the thick forest with their scanty belongings, Orokolo Introduction  •  3

seemed like a modern metropolis. There, people lived in solid houses, close together, and the place was buzzing with noise and activity. . . . To me, the most frightening thing was the sight of the sea, the unbelievable, roaring expanse of water” (Kiki 1968, 22). To date, cultural research in Orokolo Bay has focused on social life, ceremonial practice (Williams 1932, 1940, 1976a, 1976c), and the antiquity of long-distance exchange (Oram 1982; Rhoads 1994). Indeed, the anthropological writings of Francis Edgar Williams, along with the photos and ethnographic collections of various colonial anthropologists, have made Orokolo Bay internationally famous for ritual performance. However, besides some initial guesswork by Williams (1940, 44), little is known about the development or antiquity of large socially and ceremonially complex villages at Orokolo Bay. In the Gulf of Papua more broadly, previous archaeological studies have aimed either to characterize and investigate the chronology of long-distance exchange (see e.g., David et al. 2009; Frankel et al. 1994; Rhoads 1994) or to identify patterns of past settlement and land use (see e.g., Barker et al. 2015; David 2008; Rhoads 1980). In recent years Robert Skelly and Bruno David (2017), have developed a well-defined chronology and local ceramic sequence for the Kouri Lowlands region located c. 25 km east of Orokolo Bay (figure 1.2). They demonstrated that people inhabited the recently aggraded Holocene sandy coast near the Vailala River from c. 2700 cal. BP until c. 1178 cal. BP, followed by a 500-year-long hiatus in cultural material and radiocarbon hiatus until c. 678 cal. BP (Skelly and David 2017). At this time “villages are established and ceramics appear” (Skelly and David 2017, 447) and gradually intensified—along with long-distance trading activity—in the period leading up to the early colonial period. However, individual Papuan Gulf village sites dating

Figure 1.2. Key settlements (indicated by circles) and colonial stations (squares) in the Gulf of Papua. The key settlements are named in the text and are not necessarily the same as the modern place names for these locations. 4  •   ch a p t er 1

to the past c. 700 years are not well understood. Most excavations of past villages—most of which are known in local oral traditions and bear cultural material remains (e.g., pottery sherds, shell middens) on the surface—have been conducted as single-zone excavations (Skelly and David 2017; see also Barker et al. 2015; David 2008). Far larger excavations carried out by James Rhoads (1980) in the Kikori River region lack the chronological resolution to identify how villages were built through time. According to local and regional oral traditions, the site of Popo typifies the relatively recent development of large socially and ceremonially complex villages of the south coast of Papua New Guinea. It is thus an ideal archaeological case study of how villages developed through time. The archaeological component of this study (chapters 6–10) consists of eight excavations: six within different social zones of Popo (tribal “estates” known in local stories about the site) and excavations at two sites that pre- and postdate Popo in the oral traditions. Analyses of Popo’s spatial history, and the comparative study of cultural materials from the excavations, are framed using 38 radiocarbon dates, of which 35 were incorporated into a Bayesian chronological model for the sites of Popo and Mirimua Mapoe (chapter 12). These archaeological investigations are also crucial to investigating how memory works and how remembering is performed. Only by understanding how Popo was built can we properly understand how people have (re)constructed and maintained social memories of this key ancestral place. Orokolo Bay Today I first encountered Orokolo Bay in early 2015. Approaching from the east by sea as Motu traders would once have done, clusters of houses appear fleetingly among the bushland. To the east the bay is bounded by the great Vailala River, which distributes brown, brackish water hundreds of meters offshore. Orokolo Bay’s western limit is the Aivei River, the easternmost tributary of the Purari Delta. From the Aivei River the vast network of Purari waterways and alluvial mud continue to the west. Orokolo’s gray-black beach gradually curves for 24 km, densely forested with oro (Hibiscus fruticans) and coconut trees (Cocos nucifera) just offset from the shoreline. On 17 February, Robert Skelly and I from Monash University, with Henry Arifeae from the Papua New Guinea National Museum and Art Gallery, arrived, having spent the previous week with village communities in the Kouri Lowlands some 25 km to the east. On arrival we were introduced to elders from Larihairu and Kaivakovu villages, which comprise Ward 3 of the local-level government in the Gulf Province’s Ihu District (figure 1.3). The following day, village meetings took place to propose an archaeology project between myself and the two village communities, with the aim of finding out more about the ancestors of Orokolo Bay: their past lives and practices. The project was conceived at these meetings, and at the request of local community representatives initial site surveys and a pilot excavation were carried out. In September 2015, I returned to Orokolo Bay with Henry Arifeae, and further community meetings were held to decide on an archaeological and oral traditional research program of mutual interest to the communities and the researchers. Over the course of the following nine weeks, we conducted surveys of local ancestral sites, seven one-by-one-metre excavations and recorded oral traditions in formal interviews and in informal settings. This study of how people in Orokolo Bay built places through time and how these locations are remembered, known, and engaged with today (e.g., memorialized and commemorated through Introduction  •  5

Figure 1.3. Clockwise from left: Meeting with elders from the Larihairu village community in September 2015; beach scene in Orokolo Bay; Kaivakovu and Larihairu villagers carry a recently cut canoe to the coast.

oral histories) emerged through cross-cultural collaboration. Throughout our fieldwork in 2015, the direction of the fieldwork and of the research questions was negotiated between Henry and me and Orokolo Bay locals (especially members of the Kaivakovu and Larihairu Youth Associations) (chapter 5). I believe this is the main reason why the present study has so much to do with memory. Our team was constantly engaged in a dialogic practice of remembering and unearthing together. Locals saw the potential of Western academic archaeology for further exploring their understandings and previous encounters with the surface, subsurface, and oral traditions. The methods, results, and ideas that emerged from these dialogues are the subject of this book.

6  •   ch a p t er 1

2 A Social History of Orokolo Bay

The coastal landscape of Orokolo Bay has been—and continues to be—intimately engaged by culturally diverse peoples. Speakers of non-Austronesian languages who migrated to and inhabited the coast, their Motu trading partners, headhunting raiders and tribal enemies from varying distances afield, government patrol officers and administrators, missionaries, colonial settlers, and researchers have all experienced this landscape in a variety of ways. Here I seek to draw together various strands of historical detail to construct a social history for Orokolo Bay based on the existing literature. Each strand enriches our understanding of culture, time, landscape, material behavior, performance, and social practice, all primary considerations of my archaeological investigations. Climate, Land Use, and Physical Geography Seasonality in the Gulf of Papua involves variable wind and rainfall patterns. From December to April, northwest winds predominate, and from June to December southeast “trade” winds blow (McAlpine 1969a, 50). The seasonal winds are separated by brief periods of doldrums. The local wet season (Orokolo: huruhuru) occurs from May to September, and the dry (kakarara) from October to April. During the height of the wet season the sea is almost impassable by boat. Measurements taken at Ihu, c. 12 km east of the Kaivakovu and Larihairu villages, show a greater than 4 mm drop in average monthly rainfall between September and October (McAlpine 1969a, table 1). Orokolo Bay’s yearly rainfall barely fluctuates: the range over 12 years of records is 2,675 to 3,273 mm / year. Local geology and land systems—mapped by the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO) in 1695–1966 as part of the Kerema–Vailala region (see Ruxton 1969a; figure 2.1)—are dominated by a contrast between mountain and plain. The coastal sediments of Orokolo Bay are anchored by the denudational graywacke and mudstone foothills of the Kukukuku Lobe, a protrusion of Papua New Guinea’s sandstone and mudstone cordillera that meets the sea at Kerema, the capital of the Gulf Province (McAlpine 1969a, figure 2). The Aro Hills (40–150 m above sea level), located 3 km inland of the shoreline, descend steeply into low branching ridges and moderate slopes. At the foot of these hills lie Orokolo Bay’s aggradational swamplands and basins. At the far eastern end of Orokolo Bay these swamps and basins give way to alluvial plains with rich organic soils and tall forests. West of the basins and swamps, tidal flats surround the east and west banks of the Aivei River, continuing west toward the Purari River delta. 7

Figure 2.1. Map showing land systems of Orokolo Bay, labeled by letter according to table 2.1. Map drawn by Robert Skelly from Ruxton et al. (1969a) and updated by the author using recent US Geological Survey satellite imagery.

Villages are located “almost exclusively on the coast” (Williams 1940, 3; see also McAlpine 1969b, 138). Today, most people live on the land system termed “Araimiri” by CSIRO researchers (see table 2.1), which covers c. 24 km east-west across the span of Orokolo Bay in a c. 1 km-wide spit. The Araimiri land system commences only a few meters north of the intertidal zone; it is well drained and sandy, with a rich organic topsoil. Behind the Araimiri land system, ancient beach ridges (the Malalaua land system) run northwest from the west bank of the Vailala River for around 19 km in a c. 1.5 km wide band. These degraded ridges are parallel to the Aro Hills and alluvial plains. Orokolo Bay is thus a geomorphic boundary, situated at the confluence of ancient foothills, fertile and stable beach plains, and the unstable muddy reaches of the Purari River delta. Most of Orokolo Bay’s alluvial and littoral sediments originated in the volcanic mountains of Papua New Guinea’s central cordillera some 150 km to the north. From here, black mineral sands, silts, and clays are washed down into the Coral Sea by the Vailala and Purari Rivers (Bird 2010; Thom and Wright 1983; Walsh and Nittrouer 2004). Riverine sediments are suspended in brackish plumes and transported into the Gulf of Papua’s bays by flooding tides (Löffler 1977, 113). Sand fractions are deposited as bars seaward of river mouths (Pickup 1984). These deposited sediments are then distributed and molded in an east-west drift along the Kerema–Vailala region’s shoreline. 8  •   ch a p t er 2

TABLE 2.1. Land systems of Orokolo Bay (after Ruxton 1969b; Ruxton et al. 1969a).

Littoral plains (aggradational)

Alluvial plains (aggradational)

Moderate to low relief hills (denudational)

Land Map system ref.

Land system

Environment Hill ridges

Diagnostic features

A­

Aro

Low branching parallel ridges with very steep slopes and acid soils. Alluvial flats with acid soils and basin forest lie in-between the ridges

B

Maipora

C

Hauta

Undulating hills

Concavo-convex moderate slopes with weathered acid soils and small to medium hill forest

D

Hepea

Alluvial plains / ​ flood plains

Stable plain with nongleyed fine- and medium-­ textured alluvial soils and tall large-crowned forest with moderate to well closed canopy

E

Tauri

F

Vailala

Basin

Alluvial plain with strongly gleyed to nongleyed alluvial soils and basin forest

G

Karama

Freshwater nontidal swamps

Strongly gleyed fine-textured “soft” alluvial swamp soil, organic soils, and sago palm

H

Movori

I

Malalaua

J

Araimiri

K

Murva

L

Purari

Freshwater; organic soils and midheight mixed swamp forest

M

Nipa

Alluvial swamp soil and nipa palm

N

Alele

“Soft” alluvial swamp soil and mangrove forest

Low branching ridges with very steep slopes and uniform textured soils, minor colluvial soils and midheight hill forest

Unstable plain with nongleyed to strongly gleyed alluvial soil and tall open canopy forest

Strongly gleyed fine-textured “soft” alluvial swamp soil, organic soils, and swamp woodland Beach ridges

Plains and degraded ridges with mainly sandy soils. Tall large-crown forest replaced by coconuts and gardens Ridges and swales with gleyed sandy soils and neutral dark topsoils. Littoral woodland replaced with sago palm, coconut, and gardens

Tidal flats

Freshwater; organic soils and freshwater swamp woodland

Patterns in coastal progradation and erosion vary greatly across the Gulf of Papua (see discussion in Urwin et al. 2021b). Some 30 km east of Orokolo Bay near the mouth of the Vailala River, Robert Skelly and Bruno David (2017, 474–475) have shown that the coast emerged at a rate of 2.0±0.4 m to 1.8±0.4 m per year in the period c. 2,700–700 cal. BP, and at a rate of 3.3±0.8 to 4.5±0.9 m per year from 700 cal. BP onward. Prograded land systems were found up to 4.8 km inland of the A Social History of Orokolo Bay  •  9

modern Kouri Lowlands coastline. In Orokolo Bay, mudflats that were emerging to the west of the Vailala River mouth in 1965 have since spread a further 3 km westward in the past c. 60 years (compare figure 2.1 with Ruxton et al. 1969a). Orokolo Bay in Context Just as “Orokolo Bay residents” or the like serves as my generalization for the various villages and clans living between the Vailala and Aivei Rivers, “Elema” is the name Motu traders, and later anthropologists, used for people occupying c. 120 km of coastline. Having spent a cumulative 16 ½ months at Orokolo Bay and a further four and one half months working along the breadth of the “Elema” coast, Francis Edgar Williams (1940, 26) describes “in broad outlines, one culture” (see also Brown 1973, 281; A. B. Lewis quoted in Welsch 1998a, 469). He identified similar local environments and subsistence practices, and one language and shared social practice. Williams (1940, 26) considered there to be remarkable similarities across the region’s ceremonial life and social organization. The “Elema” region has three main cultural boundaries (figure 2.2). Beyond the Aivei River to the west are the Purari (Bell 2006a, 8–9; Williams 1924). The Anga—known in the colonial era

Figure 2.2. Map showing rough locations of Eleman languages and dialects. (E) indicates Eleman languages. Map does not indicate land ownership or modern political boundaries. Language locations are from Rueck et al. (2010, map 1.3). 10  •   ch a p t er 2

as the “Kukukuku”—inhabit the mountainous region north of the “Elema” coast (Bonnemère and Lemonnier 2009, figure 10.1; Kiki 1968, 5; J. H. P. Murray 1912, 171; Williams 1940, 3). While coastal populations feared being raided by the Anga, trade or exchange also took place. J. F. Keelan (1921) records that, in January 1919, some Anga people visited Kerema to “trade bows and arrows and bird of paradise plumes with the coastal natives.” The Austronesian-language-speaking Kevori and Maiva live immediately east of Cape Possession (Williams 1940, 25). Outsiders have made various attempts to subdivide and understand “Elema” peoples. The missionary Rev. John Henry Holmes (1903, 125) thought that the district could be divided into tribes and villages. Williams (1940, 37) recognized that the villages were somewhat artificial groupings used for “the convenience of the white man.” Locals preferred to identify by membership of a longhouse community (karigara), clan (bira-ipi), or totem (aualare) group. Williams (1940, 26) did suggest the presence of 12 “tribes” inhabiting the “Elema” coastline, which he named after the main colonial village in each area. From west to east these are Orokolo, Muru, Pareamamu, Berepa, Ahiave, Keuru, Opau, Uaripi, Karama, Toaripi, Moveavi, and Biaru (Williams 1940, 26). Williams (1940, 27) explained that these groupings were used by outsiders (often other social groups from the “Elema” region) and were made according to dialect and geographical subdivisions. Today, the inhabitants of the Kaivakovu and Larihairu villages identify variously by tribe, village, clan, subclan, and totem group (longhouses no longer exist) (see chapter 5). I follow Skelly (2014, 13) in rejecting the term “Elema” as a general anthropological term, which can gloss cultural and linguistic differences among the village and clan communities inhabiting c. 125 km of coastline (contra Knauft 1993). However, discarding the term is equally problematic. Seafaring Motu and F.  E.  Williams both engaged in long-term relationships with individual clans across the entire area, and both identified a particular social group inhabiting the coast between Cape Possession and the Aivei River. Therefore, it is worth investigating on what basis “the Elema” should be grouped. Cultural similarity and difference across the “Elema” region will have implications for the regional applicability of my archaeological study of Williams’ most westerly “tribe.”

The Eleman Languages The people previously referred to as “the Elema” are at least part of the same language group. I hereafter refer to this language group as “Eleman” (e.g., Orokolo is an Eleman language), and the cultural and geographic region covered by this language group region as the “Eleman region.” Elema is a subphylum of the much-debated Trans New Guinea (TNG) phylum, as diagnosed primarily through pronoun form (Ross 2005). It has been proposed that TNG developed over the course of 50,000 years along the central cordillera of Papua New Guinea, before splitting into various “daughter” languages c. 7,000–5,000 years ago (Pawley 2005; Wurm 1983, 30). Eleman is a “small, very closely related language family” that can be divided into five languages with further dialect divisions (Brown 1972, 1973, 1986; Rueck et al. 2010). The Eleman region can be subdivided into Eastern and Western Eleman regions by geographic boundary: “the Bluff” is the bedrock of the Lobe where it meets the sea just west of Kerema. West of the Bluff live some 14,000 people who speak three different Eleman languages, which are (west to east) Orokolo, Keoru–Ahia (also known as Keuru), and Opao (see figure 2.2). East of Kerema approximately 23,000 people speak Tairuma (also known as Kerema and Uaripi) and Toaripi. Toaripi has dialects called Sepoe and Kaipi that are situated toward Kerema. A Social History of Orokolo Bay  •  11

In linguistics, cultural similarity and interaction are primarily measured using cognate words (which have shared etymological heritage). Comparative linguistics reveals that Eleman “languages” occupy the border between dialect and language (if two languages share more than 70 percent cognate words, they are regarded as at least being dialects of one another). As such, Orokolo speakers share 67 percent cognate words with Toaripi, 69 percent with the Kaipi dialect, and 60 percent with Tairuma (Rueck et al. 2010, table 4.5; see also Brown 1973, table 6; 1986). The pattern of Eleman linguistic similarity runs contrary to assumption, that geographically closer groups would share more of their lexicon. Indeed, Orokolo speakers understand Toaripi but not Keuru (Williams 1940, 26). Conversely, Keuru speakers can understand Orokolo language. The linguistic situation of the Eleman region reflects a complex and recently active migration history for the coastal region. Oral traditions also reflect close relationships between Eleman-language-speaking clans and villages: these are discussed in detail in chapter 5.

Art and Architecture The art and architecture of the Gulf of Papua point to a vast sphere of interaction (van Baal 1963; Bell 2013; Seligman 1909, 259–261). The entire region from Goaribari Island to Cape Possession shares longhouses, carved boards depicting ancestor figures, and shark-mouthed drums (D.  Newton 1961; Welsch 2006a, 8–16). The Eleman region shares aspects of material culture such as bull-­roarers (hevehe), ceremonial masks, carved dwarf coconuts (marupai), decorated shields, woven sago palm (e.g., basketry), and carved hohao boards (Welsch 2006a, 23; Williams 1940, 26; 1976a). The construction and meaning of ceremonial masks exemplify the simultaneous “broad similarity” and interregional and -clan differentiation in Eleman art (Lewis-Harris 1996, 9; Mamiya and Sumnik 1982; Welsch 2006a, 23). One of the most important forms of mask was that of hevehe (west of the Bluff), called semese east of the Bluff. Hevehe / semese are tall and ovular masks, made from a cane frame covered in bark cloth and painted with totemic emblems. Totem affiliation can be ascertained by the shape of the eyes and clan totems depicted on the masks (figure 2.3; Beier and Kiki 1970). Kerema region and Orokolo masks are similar in construction, but more elaborate painted clan designs were favored west of the Vailala River (Welsch 2006a, 26). Toaripi semese masks

Figure 2.3. Hevehe masks of Orokolo Bay showing differentiation in totemic designs. Left to right: Kaia, Ahea, Baiu, and Hurava totem designs. From Williams 1940, plate 28. 12  •   ch a p t er 2

have similar ceremonial functions to their westerly counterparts but protrude into a mouth shape. Kovave, harisu, and eharo masks (all Orokolo language words) are also shared by Eleman speakers but are regionally distinct in construction (Chalmers 1887, 37–38; D. Newton 1961, 36; Williams 1940, 147–148). Between the Aivei River and Cape Possession “every aspect of . . . art of these communities emphasizes the distinctiveness of each clan by associating it with a unique set of designs and motifs” (Welsch 2006a, 29; see also Kiki 1968, 47). The Social and Ceremonial Life of Orokolo Bay Broad cultural similarity with interclan and language group differentiation is evident in the linguistics, art, architecture, and oral histories of the Eleman region. As such, Orokolo Bay is likely to share some socioritual practices and structures with the region but differ in terms of how clan and totem identity is performed and constructed. As Williams (1940, 27) put it, “In the midst of general homogeneity the differences are such that to write upon them would be a very big book, if not a thoroughly confusing one.” I now turn to the specific social and ceremonial practices of Orokolo Bay from the early colonial period and more recently. In doing so I rely primarily on Williams’ (1940) detailed anthropological work, conducted in field seasons at the Orokolo village group in 1923 and 1937 (when a time frame is not otherwise specified, the described aspects date to this period). I also use my own ethnographic work conducted in 2015 (see chapter 5).

Village, Clan, Totem, and Eravo Community In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the Eleman region was divided into village groups (of which the most famous was called “Orokolo”) for ease of administration (see also chapter 5). These groups were often based on preexisting allegiances, but precolonial social life was primarily framed by eravo (longhouse, or men’s house) membership (Holmes 1924, 99). Williams (1940, 29–31) observed that eravo communities (called karigara) enabled the social cohesion required for loading trading ships or conducting ceremonies. Each eravo was identified with a principal clan, but within any given men’s house social divisions were complex (see chapter 5). Each eravo hosted various bira’ipi (clans) and aualare (ancestor hero / totem groups), the building blocks of social organization in Orokolo Bay and along the Elema coast. Williams (1940) reifies totem groups as aualari, but I have updated the orthography to aualare in line with 2015 usage. Clan groups were patrilineal and exogenous (Williams 1940, 35–40), linguistically derived from bira (“male,” “husband,” “man”) and ipi (“base” or “origin” [see Brown 1973, 301 for discussion]). The aualare groups were also patrilineal. Today, Aualare (now with a capital A) is the word used for the Christian god. Aualare was decided (presumably by missionaries and locals) to be the most natural lexical importation to the Christian faith as expressed in Orokolo language. Indeed, Holmes (1902, 1905) referred to the totemic aualare as the local “gods.” The word first appears in Christian literature in the 1914 Toaripi-language publication “Ualare Kofa ve O Testament Are” by Rev. E. Pryce Jones (1914), who was stationed at London Missionary Society (LMS) stations of Iokea, Orokolo, and Moro in the early 1900s (see Brown 1972, 463–466). For this reason, I use the word “totem” from hereon, as this word is currently in use in Orokolo Bay. In the 1920s and 1930s Orokolo Bay locals viewed totemic origins as at least equally important to clan membership (Williams 1940, 37), identifying by either totem or by clan when asked, “De haera?” (To which people do you belong?). As Joshua Bell (2008, 126) has suggested for the Purari A Social History of Orokolo Bay  •  13

Delta region, the complexity of multilayered descent groups is due to ancestral migration and local social dynamics: “The composition of these descent groups is the result of ancestral migration and more recent histories of fissions and fusions such that groups have connections both within a particular longhouse community and between them.” The totem of an Orokolo Bay resident was more “fixed” than identification by clan. Clan affiliation could change through marriage, adoption, migration, or by association with the predominant clan of the eravo. There are ten totem groups, with names connected to the physical and spiritual landscape: Kaia, Ahea, Hurava, Purari, Miri, Baiu, Auma, Vailala, Nabo, and Kauri (Williams 1940, 39). Each are at once associated with places in the landscape, the mythical ancestors of each totem (as featured in oral traditions), and totemic animals and plants (Brown 1973, 302; Holmes 1924, 135; Kiki 1968, 27; Williams 1940, 41–43). These totem groups are dispersed across the entire Eleman region and across Orokolo Bay (see chapters 5 and 11). Leadership was by community consensus, guided by clan elders and eravo chiefs called amua (see Williams 1940, 84–92). Older community members occupied the most important or privileged positions of Orokolo Bay society. Men were known according to at least eight broad age and social categories, each of which affected their social importance. Age and social categories for women are unknown: it is likely that pioneering anthropological work conducted exclusively by men in Orokolo Bay has obscured the social and ceremonial agency of women (but see Moraes-Gorecki 1983; Ryan 1969). Male and female spheres of activity were well-defined, albeit with some overlap. Albert Maori Kiki (1968, 24) observed that gardening, hunting, and masked ceremonial performances were known to be male domains. Certain types of ceremonial knowledge were withheld from women or used in secrecy to instill fear and respect (Williams 1940, 25, 323). Ethnobotanical research by Vanda Moraes-Gorecki (1983) has highlighted the importance of ritual knowledge among older Toaripi women, who developed and guarded the secrets of sago starch extraction. In the ceremonial sphere, women’s ritual knowledge was central to the effective performance of the dramatic masked ceremonies (Schwimmer 1976, 26; Williams 1976a, 104–106). Women also sustained the production of food for reciprocal exchange between members of different eravo.

The Social Dimensions of Subsistence and Land Use Large villages were situated on the stable coastal and near-coastal beach ridges of Orokolo Bay (Williams 1940, 16–18). From these places, men fished in the Coral Sea in dugout canoes while women trawled the intertidal zone for small fish and shellfish. Pigs and chickens roamed beach villages—occasional protein sources for ceremonial and other social occasions. North of the main residential dune, the region’s littoral ridges and plains have mostly been stripped of native woodland and beach plain forest. These areas host anthropogenic coconuts, grasslands, and fenced-off gardens. The hills immediately north of Orokolo Bay were primarily used as hunting grounds. Wild pigs and cassowary were hunted with dogs, for communal ceremonial reasons rather than domestic subsistence needs (Williams 1940, 15). Orokolo Bay’s gardens are hospitable environments for crops such as sweet potato (Ipomoea batatas), yams (Dioscoreaceae sp.), breadfruit (Artocarpus altilis), taro (Colocasia sp.), and banana plants (Musa spp.). Gardening is a seasonal process that begins in the dry months. When established, garden areas are burned back, trees felled, fences erected, boundaries laid, and, finally, crops planted (see chapter 11; Williams 1940, 13–14). Drainage channels could be cut to turn waterlogged

14  •   ch a p t er 2

land into fertile planting areas. An invisible network of social meaning was embedded in the visible practices of clans in the physical environment. Alluvial plains and depressions in littoral plains support the subsistence staple of Orokolo Bay, sago palm (Metroxylon sagu; Orokolo: poi). Sago palms were not simply grown in great numbers but were planted, and in turn played a role in anchoring and forming swampland (Holmes 1924, 250; Moraes-Gorecki 1983, 237; Kari 1978; Rhoads 1981; Urwin et al. 2021b). Each sago palm stand referenced clan or family ownership through the ancestors who propagated them (Brown 1988, 178; Dewdney 1993; Moreas-Gorecki 1983, 234–235, 238). Likewise, garden areas were often grouped together by clan to sustain the immense amount of food required for each karigara’s involvement in ceremonial feasting and exchange (Williams 1940, 13).

Ceremonial Structures and Performances Eravo were powerful presences in Orokolo Bay’s landscape (figure 2.4). Longhouse buildings were elevated 1.5 meters from the ground on heavy wooden posts (Williams 1940, 33). Five parallel pairs of pillars called ive divided the interior into four spaces—larava—with two clan hearths in each space (hurae). Eravo had two entrances, front and rear. The dehe door (front) was opened only after the final stage of the famed hevehe ceremony (Williams 1940, 32). Each end of the building had a trapdoor built into the side of the eravo called a harihu-ura (spirit hole) through which people could leave if the doors came under spiritual taboo. The construction of the eravo building took place according to lengthy ceremonial cycles (hevehe) lasting 16 to 22 years (see chapter 11; Williams 1940, 187). Williams structured his entire discussion of Orokolo Bay anthropology around this spectacular cycle of dances, feasts, and ritual performance. Once the ceremony was over, eravo were considered “empty,” lifeless and meaningless without the dense web of meaning imbued them by spiritual interaction (Williams 1940, 390). The purpose and meaning of hevehe is complex. The word refers to the ceremony but also to the masks used in the ceremony (apa-hevehe), sea-monster spirits (ma-hevehe), and bull-roarers (Williams 1976a, 79–83; 1940). A key aspect of the ceremony was to imitate and interact with clan ancestors and with the sea-monster spirits occupying the waters of Orokolo Bay (Williams 1940, 169; 202). Kovave, a smaller group of ceremonies that precede the main ceremony, similarly existed for the “entertainment and placation of the spirits of the bush” (Kiki 1968, 43–45; Williams 1940, 150). The lengthy hevehe ceremonial cycle featured various dances, processions, and initiation ceremonies featuring large masks (see figure 2.3). These elaborate representations of ma-hevehe were then ritually slayed and burned in the bush behind the eravo. During the cycle, groups of young boys (miro akore) were initiated, emerging from the eravo and from ritual seclusion to take part in their first ceremony (Williams 1940, 77). Through hevehe sea-monster spirits were drawn out of the water onto the beach through ritual performance, before being ritually disposed of in the bush. Eravo orientation and the construction of twin doors reflected and contributed to the integration of local primary spiritscapes: sea (hevehe) and bush (kovave). In a sense, these coastal residential and ceremonial sites were socially constructed to mediate the local spirit world (see chapter 11). Ceremony played a central role in the social life of Orokolo Bay in the early colonial era. Hevehe begins with a call to united action and had to be agreed upon by every community member (Williams 1940, 194). Communal gardens were constructed, pigs provided, and an “almost unlimited” quantity of sago produced to supply the immense feasts of the ceremony (Holmes 1902, 427; 1905,

A Social History of Orokolo Bay  •  15

Figure 2.4. “Papua—Orokolo (Avavu)—Entry of dancers and Eharo—Hihi Kairu in front of eravo in background,” February 1932. Photograph by Francis Edgar Williams. Courtesy of the National Archives of Australia. A6003, 148.2.

18; Williams 1940, 420). Williams (1940, 419) thought that “hevehe has exerted a powerful influence in drawing together the various social units of Orokolo Bay and its neighbourhood.”

The Spiritual World A discussion of formalized ceremony alone would suggest some sort of post-enlightenment separation of ritual spheres and everyday life. Of course, this was (and is) not the case at Orokolo Bay. Gardening, hunting, building, ceremony, sickness, warfare, and interfamily or clan disputes all had their own forms of magic (maho) or sorcery that partly involved the impersonation (or reembodiment) of totemic ancestors (Williams 1940, 92–117; see also Evoa 1974, 40). Williams (1932, 166; 1940, 136) couched much of the Eleman region magic as “impersonation.” Eravo were “ritual centers” in which, and from which, magical knowledge was transmitted (Beier and Kiki 1970). Eravo had hereditary magical curators, kwara-haera (handy men), who were responsible for clan hunting magic, ceremonial purification of the eravo, maintaining the carved ancestor boards (hohao), and eravo building magic (Williams 1940, 93). Through dream-communication, the kwara-haera could interact with the hohao spirits of the bush and give hunters advice based on their spiritual knowledge. After death, people traveled as spirits (ove harihu) toward the setting sun (Ryan 1969, 104; Williams 1940, 19, 118–119). Sorcerers (harihu haera) were also known to travel magically across the landscape using marupai, which are dwarf coconut charms (Kiki 1968, 28; McIntosh 1983, 229; Williams 1940, 105). Old men were believed to be the most potent sorcerers, a belief that presumably 16  •   ch a p t er 2

acted to sustain gerontocracy in Orokolo Bay (Holmes 1905, 19). As Alastair McIntosh (1983) and my own experiences have highlighted, many aspects of magic and sorcery as described here have continued to 2015.

Continuity and Change in Orokolo Bay The Gulf of Papua has undergone cataclysmic change since colonization. These changes framed my research in 2015 as they did the ethnographic work of Williams in the 1920s and 1930s. The ways in which people remember the past (see chapters 4, 5, 11, and 12) have been affected by many decades of colonial and mission history. In 1884, Orokolo Bay became part of a British protectorate called the Territory of Papua. The Australians took over the colonial administration from 1902 and governed until 1975, when the region became part of the Independent State of Papua New Guinea.1 Austronesian-language-speaking Lapita people, Indonesian traders, and the Dutch all visited the region before the Anglophone governors, but sustained contact with British and Australian missionaries, civil servants, traders, and soldiers brought about dramatic social, ritual, and economic changes to “Papua.” Missionaries were the first pioneers of British colonialism in the Gulf of Papua. Attracted by the allure of exploration and potential for the rapid advancement of Christendom in “savage” lands, the LMS set up its first mission in Port Moresby in 1872 (Moresby 1875, 159). By 1883, Rev. James Chalmers—known as “Tamate” to Rarotongan missionary colleagues—had visited the coastal villages of the Eleman region coastline on board a Motu trading vessel. Tamate left Samoan teachers and Papuan evangelists in charge of the mission work in Orokolo Bay (Chalmers 1895, 26; Holmes 1924, 19). Rev. John Henry Holmes (1924) followed Chalmers to the Papuan Gulf, setting up a mission at Muro in 1894 (around seven kilometers inland of the Kaivakovu and Larihairu villages) before moving to the station Chalmers had established at Orokolo, where Holmes lived between 1897 and 1907. Williams (1940) records that the LMS had a policy of noninterference with local ceremonies. Indeed, Chalmers (1886, 1887, 1895, 1898; Chalmers and Gill 1885) and Holmes (1902, 1903, 1905, 1924) were both amateur ethnographers. The two preachers recorded the continuation of elaborate ceremonies, parallel with Christian teaching and religious practice. It was in the 1920s and 1930s that local missionaries, trained by the LMS, began to actively confront the old order, preaching against “deceiving” ceremonies (Williams 1940, 435). Economic pioneers followed missionaries closely. Between 1910 and 1911, S. G. MacDonell and C. F. Talbot settled in Orokolo Bay (Welsch 1998b). Talbot was a plantation manager and employer of the British New Guinea Development Company in the Gulf. MacDonell bought coconuts from nearby eravo communities and sold local art to dealers based in Sydney. Government stations were set up at Kerema and Kikori, from which regional magistrates conducted exploratory trips with Australian patrols (Hope 1979, 43). One of these trips from Kerema hosted the anthropologist and collector A. B. Lewis of the Field Museum, Chicago. In his diaries Lewis recalls, “Ceremonies are special performances in the bush, which no white man has seen, nor is allowed to see” (quoted in Welsch 1998a, 483). At the Arihava village group in 1912, the anthropologist found it very 1. Northeast New Guinea was colonized by Germany in 1885, before being ceded to Australian war veterans and subsequently Australia from 1914 (at the start of the First World War). Papua New Guinea incorporates what was once German New Guinea and the former British / Australian Territory of Papua, which together were called the Territory of Papua and New Guinea from 1949 to 1972. A Social History of Orokolo Bay  •  17

difficult to buy “good planks and carved figures” (Welsch 1998a, 475; see also Chalmers 1887, 61). Likewise, Chalmers (1895, 116) recorded that “neither love nor tomahawks” could help him acquire a hevehe mask in Orokolo Bay; he was told that “they all had to be burned.” Attachment to hohao, hevehe masks, and other spirit representations suggests that the local ceremonial landscape was changing slowly (see Urwin 2022).

Iki Haveve—Vailala Madness In 1919, a social and spiritual movement emerged in Orokolo Bay called iki haveve—translated as “belly-don’t-know” by Williams (1976c, 332)—after the strange feeling in their stomachs that cult participants reported. By 1922, the movement had spread along the Eleman coastline from Keuru and Vailala. Like many other such movements, some of which have been called “cargo cults” (see Cochrane 1970; Burridge 1969), iki haveve featured a complex blend of Christian and local cultural beliefs about eschatology, spirits, exchange, and social relations (see Kekeao 1973; G. H. Murray 1923, 66; Williams 1976c). Adherents expected the return of ancestors on a steamer laden with European cargo. Cult leaders would receive “wireless” spirit communications from the ancestors through flagpoles. Great feasts were made in preparation for the steamship’s crew, who in some cases were said to be incarnated as white people (Williams 1976c, 341). In expectation of the coming ancestors, hevehe ceremonies were often stopped, ceremonial secrets revealed, and eravo and masks burned. Williams (1976c, 332) blamed the “Vailala Madness” for “wholesale destruction of native practice and tradition.” However, it could just as well be seen as a different expression of ceremony (see Ryan 1969). Today, iki haveve is regarded as an important period of spiritual change (see Urwin 2022). Paul Mahiro (FD 27 Oct 2015; see also Kekeao 1973, 4) told me that during iki haveve people saw physical “signs” of coming aspects of modernity, such as vehicle tire marks, and they received messages through the poles like “telephone communication.” Kaiva Ipai (FD 31 Oct 2015) said of iki haveve: “Civilisation was trying to come . . . it’s like God’s divine intervention to give a message.” Kiki (1968, 51) suggests that older community members in Orokolo Bay understood the cult in terms of revenge sorcery among villages (for a contrary view, see Kekeao 1973). The Orokolo village group did not take up iki haveve, thus retaining ceremonies and eravo up to the Second World War. The final men’s house was burned in 1939 at the Orokolo village group.

Disruptive Peace and Settlement Patterns One of the most radical effects of colonization was imposed peace. The early peacemaking attempts of the missionaries were enforced in the following decades by colonial patrols (Chalmers 1887, 52; Maher 1961, 114). Maori Kiki (1968) records that there was ongoing warfare between Kukukuku people and Orokolo Bay residents in the mid to late 1930s (see also Chalmers 1895, 26; Holmes 1924, 21). However, this situation did not last. Martin Fowler (2004) has documented the social and spatial effects of peace on the Eleman region coastline. Clan groups no longer required the eravo community as a nuclear, mutually protective group, and so could spread all along the coast in small “hamlets” (Williams 1940, 27, 429). Williams (1940, 439) claims that changing settlement patterns caused the Meouri Ravi eravo to be abandoned in the late 1930s. Interestingly, Kiki (1968, 48) saw taxation as the prime mover of settlement and ritual in the Gulf. In the postwar period Orokolo Bay’s population demographics changed radically. Many young men traveled to Port Moresby in search of work that would enable them to pay newly imposed local taxes (Fowler 2004, 273–274). McIntosh (1983, 226) suggests that sorcery had a compounding effect 18  •   ch a p t er 2

on this demographic shift. Young people growing up in the Gulf feared that if they achieved success (e.g., economic) within the village they would be targeted by sorcerers, and opted instead to head for the capital. By 1975, as Michael Somare and Gough Whitlam signed off on the Independent State of Papua New Guinea, Orokolo Bay’s social situation looked dramatically different from the early ethnographic period.

Orokolo Bay Today The Kaivakovu and Larihairu village elders lament the ongoing process of modernization. In 2015, each clan had only two or three members who were initiated into the world of masked ceremonies and eravo. Young people, it is said, do not listen to oral histories. Locals no longer live in the same ceremonial landscape that was revealed to initiates prior to colonization (see Bell 2008, 126). However, although Orokolo Bay’s ceremonial landscape has changed since early colonial times, it has not ceased to be (sensu Ryan 1969). Indeed, Holmes (1924, 21–22) recorded how simultaneously conservative and flexible Orokolo Bay’s ceremonial worldview was in the early 1900s. While conservative about preserving ancestral customs, locals quickly incorporated a day of Sabbath rest into existing ceremonial cycles. Today, members of the Kaivakovu and Larihairu village communities identify with five different Christian churches, each with subtly different worldviews. Local art has been partially revived for the cash market, and to reference and relive ancestral practices (Beier and Kiki 1970, 32; Haraha 2006). Unseen aspects of the ritual landscape remain. Belief in sorcery is widely held alongside Christian beliefs, and the ma-hevehe are still spoken of. Often these beings are spoken of as being “like gods of the sea” and are incorporated into local expressions of Christian spirituality (Kaiva Ipai FD 31 Oct 2015). Shared Social Histories: The Motu and Purari As I explore in chapter 3, far-flung ceramicist populations probably visited the Gulf of Papua as early as c. 2700 cal. BP, and the ethnographic hiri exchange has been interpreted as commencing c. 500 cal. BP near Orokolo Bay (Skelly and David 2017). But there were also extensive local networks of exchange and interaction. Here I consider how these outsiders (speakers of non-Eleman languages) interacted with, and themselves formed part of, Orokolo Bay’s environment in the early colonial period.

Pots for Sago: The Motu in the Gulf of Papua The Motu, Austronesian-language-speakers from the Port Moresby region, are known as seafaring traders and specialized ceramicists (Chalmers 1887, 1). Motu groups inhabit c. 100 km of coastline between the villages of Manumanu and Gabagaba (Gill 1874, 23). Except for the villages of Boera, Vabukori, and Tatana, Motu communities divide themselves into eastern and western groups (Groves 2011, 13). Eastern Motu villages (Tupuselei, Barakau, Gairi, and Gabagaba) inhabit a liminal zone between land and sea, jutting out over the Coral Sea in stilted villages. Their western counterparts live on the beachfront from Taurama Head westward (see Oram 1982, map 1). Only the Western Motu villages (Pari, Hanuabada, Tanobada, Elavala, Porebada, Lea Lea, and Manumanu) and three independent villages are known to have participated in hiri exchange during the ethnographic period. Each Motu village was divided into patrilineal iduhu descent groups (Groves 2011, 23–26). These villages were closely connected with local Papuan-language-speaking groups: the Koita and Koiari. A Social History of Orokolo Bay  •  19

The Port Moresby region’s environment is mostly dry subhumid savannah, a far cry from the tropical rainforests of the Papuan Gulf. It has been suggested that Motu subsistence needs were met through a web of local exchange (Allen 1977a, 422; 1984; Groves 1960, 5; 2011, 124). Koita hunted wallabies and had productive gardens; Koiari hunted kangaroo and pig, gardened, and produced lime from shells (for betel nut use); and the Motu were expert fishers and producers of ceramics (Chalmers 1887, 13; Lawes 1879, 375; Turner 1878). Ceremonies and exchange were conducted with these and other local groups, sustaining the social, ritual, and economic lives of the Motu. Koita have coexisted and intermarried with Motu groups for some time, and as such “Motu-Koita” is often referred to as a social group in modern anthropology. Local social organization was stratified: “head men” attained power by prowess in fighting, fishing, sponsoring dances, or funding hiri trading voyages (Oram 1982, 3). Hiri exchange took place annually between Motu and Gulf of Papua villages.2 Between mid-­ September and early November, the Motu set sail westward in fleets of up to 20 lagatoi: ships made of lashed-together canoes with crab-claw-shaped sails (figure 2.5; Oram 1982, 15; Stone 1880, 64). In the early colonial period various observers put the quantity of exchanged goods at around 20,000 to 25,000 Motu pots for 150 to 450 tons of Gulf sago (Barton 1910, 114; Bevan 1890, 138; Chalmers 1887, 70; Fort 1887, 150). The quantities of sago were so great that lagatoi returning from the Gulf of Papua often added extra hulls (Chalmers and Gill 1885, 187). These vessels could arrive at destinations in the Gulf of Papua within two or three days (Groves 1973, 102). The Motu seafarers might not return home for some two to four months, lingering in the Gulf of Papua until December or January (Oram 1982, 15).3 The Western Motu divided their hiri trading partners into three main regions: Konekone (the Eleman region east of the Bluff), Marea (the Eleman region west of the Bluff), and Namau (the Purari River region). The Western Motu had names for seven different trading groups within Orokolo Bay, suggesting close links with various communities in the area (Chalmers 1887, 10; Oram 1982, map 2). Some of the recorded areas appear to be cognate with local names (i.e., Kaeva may equal Kaivakovu, Nuku may imitate Iuku, and Marea is a village name today). Stone (1880, 188) suggested that most lagatoi did not progress beyond the Aivei River, but this idea is not borne out by other ethnographic sources. Nigel Oram (1982, 15) has shown that, between the 1880s and 1940s, 15 lagatoi departed for Konekone, 11 for Marea, and six for Namau. While people living on Goaribari Island were probably not directly interacting with the Motu, A. B. Lewis (quoted in Welsch 1998a, 464) recorded seeing Motu pots this far west in the Gulf of Papua. Motu ceramics were made and owned by women, whose male family members would accompany the pots and exchange them for Papuan Gulf sago. Ceramics were formed using a “paddle and anvil” technique: a flat piece of wood was used to beat clay against a stone anvil on the inner surface (Arifin 1990, 58; Chester 1878, 10; May and Tuckson 1982, 27–32). Pottery vessels were then dried, slipped, and fired (Arifin 1990, 57–60). In the ethnographic period at least eight different Motu pottery vessel types were being made. The three most prevalent vessel types were hodu, nau, and uro (figure 2.6; table 2.2; see Skelly and David 2017, table 1 for a detailed summary). Hiri c­ eramics

2. For the purposes of this book, I do not attempt to differentiate between “trade” and “exchange” (i.e., they are used interchangeably). The word “exchange” is perhaps a better fit for the ethnographic hiri, as it has connotations of reciprocity and suggests the existence of other, complementary exchanges (e.g., of knowledge, language, and stories). 3. For a more detailed description of the hiri in the ethnographic period, see Stone (1880, 62–67) and Chalmers (1887, 13–82), and see David et al. (2016c) and Mennis (2014) for discussions of hiri ethnography. 20  •   ch a p t er 2

Figure 2.5. “Lakatoi at her moorings” in Hanuabada village c. 1899–1908. Elevara village can be seen in the background. Photograph by Francis Rickman Barton. © Royal Anthropological Institute. 400_020272.

Figure 2.6. “Native pottery ready for shipment” in Hanuabada village c. 1881–1891, with common vessel types labeled (see table 2.2). Photograph by Rev. W. G. Lawes. © Trustees of the British Museum.

Table 2.2. The three most commonly made (and traded) Motu pottery vessel types of the early colonial period. Orokolo language names were provided by Laura Oaharo (interviewed 30 Oct 2015) and Avia Hae (FD 31 Oct 2015). Motuan Orokolo language language

Description

hodu

hohu

Large vessel for storing water. In Orokolo Bay, women carried these vessels on their backs (Laura Oaharo, interviewed 30 Oct 2015).

nau

haita

Shallow vessel used for serving food. Also used as lids for uro during / after cooking in Orokolo Bay (e.g., Williams 1940, plate 14).

uro

ela’a

Large globular pot used for cooking. Laura Oaharo recalls that these larger uro had a wide mouth.

uro

haro iharo

Small globular pot used for cooking. These pots and the larger uro were placed directly in hearths during cooking (Laura Oaharo, interviewed 30 Oct 2015).

continue to be socially important west of Kerema. Remaining heirloom pots reference family and clan trading relations with Motu villages. Upon arrival in the Gulf of Papua, Motu men would unload the pottery and arrange it on the beach (Chalmers 1887, 29). From here, locals and the Motu would use wooden tokens to tally the pots, which would then be taken away (Barton 1910, 109; Kiki 1968, 22). When the trade winds reversed in December or January, sago processing would commence in the Gulf of Papua villages. Sago bundles of approximately 25 to 35 kilograms each were matched with stick tallies (Chalmers 1887, 29; McFarlane 1888, 120). These tallies (Motuan: kae) standardized the exchange rate of sago bundles and pots. Williams (1940, 12) estimated that an Orokolo Bay family could produce 20 kg of sago per day. Hiri was not only the exchange of pots and sago. Motu would return from the Gulf of Papua with new canoe hulls made with tropical hardwoods, along with sticks, leaves, and stones blessed with fertility magic (see Gwilliam 1982, 36). Their trading partners would also receive arm-shells, boar’s tusks, knives, and axes—many of which had in turn been exchanged between the neighboring Motu, Koiari, and Koita (Allen 2017, figure 16.2; Oram 1982, 15; Turner 1878, 479; Williams 1924, 126).

The Nature of Hiri Interaction The rationale for and nature of hiri interaction has long been described and analyzed from a primarily Motu perspective (e.g., Allen 1977a, 1977b, 1984, 1985, 2010; Groves 1960; 2011; Gwilliam 1982; Mennis 2014; Oram 1982, 1991). Mirroring the geographical pattern of colonization and missionization in Papua New Guinea, academic engagement with hiri tends to begin in the Port Moresby region and travel west from there. Even Williams (1940), genuinely interested in the social and ceremonial life of Orokolo Bay, conducted his ethnography through the lens of Motuan language. Early ethnographers of the hiri were captivated by the “specialized” ceramic industry of industrious seafarers, which offered some (perceived) parallels to their own oceanic journeys and industrialized cultures (see Barton 1910, 114; Chalmers 1887, 122; Moresby 1875, 238). Such ethnography has followed the local political pattern of (perhaps unconsciously) ignoring the agency and attitudes of “recipient” Papuan Gulf social groups (see Fowler 2004, 221–223; Rhoads 1982, 131). 22  •   ch a p t er 2

Linguistic research reveals trading dynamics that early ethnography does not. Two hiri trading languages (HTLs) developed to facilitate communication between the Motuan and trading villages in the Gulf of Papua (Chalmers 1887, 36; Dutton 1978, 1982; Dutton and Kakare 1977). HTL(E), a more structurally developed language, was spoken in the Eleman region, and HTL(K) was known to Purari language speakers (Dutton 1982, 69). Both are predominantly composed of Gulf of Papua languages; only around 14 percent of HTL(E) is composed of Austronesian words. The composition of the two trading languages reflects the agency of Gulf of Papua communities in the hiri. As Dutton (1978, 350) observes, “The present composition of the language reflects . . . the weak or inferior position they were in vis-à-vis their hosts, as strangers in a foreign port, heavily outnumbered, and with no way of forcing their hosts to accept their cargoes.” Cultural exchange is also evident: Motu is the primary source of linguistic borrowings in Toaripi and Orokolo languages (Dutton 1982). In the wider region Toaripi is the principal distributor of borrowed Motuan words such as “arm-shell,” “water pot,” and “axe” (Dutton 1982, 79). Orokolo seems to have received linguistic borrowings from Toaripi and passed them on to Purari speakers to the west (see Dutton 1982, 73–95). According to hiri participants, the relationship reflected friendship and even kinship. Families and clans in the Gulf would continue trading relationships with Motu iduhu and families over generations (Gwilliam 1982, 55; Kiki 1968, 22). The Motu described the hiri as “not trade” (dia hoihoi) (Oram 1982, 17). Indeed, the response to, and demand for, trade items in each location is comparative: Gulf of Papua and Motu women played key roles in governing social demand for ceramics and sago, respectively (see Chalmers 1895, 83; Oram 1982, 25–27; Moresby 1875, 167). Maori Kiki (1968, 22) records that his father had a long-standing exchange partner in Porebada called Heni. The two men named their younger sons after one another. Kiki (1968, 23), records, “The trade was not conducted like common barter, it was carried out with a certain ceremony; and the declarations of friendship that went with it were as important as the exchange of goods itself. . . . Motu people did not carry their pots to the market, but each went straight to the house of his trade relation, which whom his family had been trading for years and perhaps generations.” Likewise, Laura Oaharo (interviewed 30 Oct 2015) from Marea village, Orokolo Bay, recounted to me that he had been adopted by his father’s Motu trading partner as a small boy in 1945 or 1946. His adoption by a family from Boera was aimed at securing future exchange between his family and their pavora haera (trading partner) through kinship. Rev. Siaka Heni (born in 1915) describes the social relationship from a Motu perspective: “Because the Motu and Namau people loved each other, just like we were from the same mother and father . . . sometimes if they came to Moresby they would sleep in our houses at Hanuabada” (in Gwilliam 1982, 55). To some extent the land-, sea-, and spiritscape of the Motu and of Orokolo Bay was continuous. Motu seafarers saw continuity among lagatoi, land and sea, family, and trading partners (see Gwilliam 1982). The Motu would have been immersed in the social and ceremonial life of Orokolo Bay for up to four months of each year, and Chalmers (1898, 330) notes that the Motu believed that (upon death) their spirits would travel to the west to chew betel nut and dance. For the archaeologist, then, ceramics found in the Gulf of Papua are more than markers of material exchanges. Hiri ceramics embody long-term social relations between Orokolo Bay communities and “family,” and the ability of eravo communities and families to organize sago production, protect the Motu from headhunters, and share magic and ceremony. Pottery is meaningful when asking questions about social practice and social change in Orokolo Bay. A Social History of Orokolo Bay  •  23

Headhunting and Excess Pots: Encounters with the Purari Orokolo Bay’s closest westerly neighbors are the Purari, who live between the Aivei River passage and the Era River (see figure 2.2). The Purari constitute six self-described “tribes”: Baroi, I’ai, Kaimari, Koriki, Maipua, and Baimuru. Today there are 22 Purari villages, which were once divided into ravi (men’s house) communities (Williams 1924, 5; see also Bell 2006b, 223). The groups speak various dialects belonging to the Purari language group (Dutton 1982, map 5). The Purari are expert sago cultivators, and supplement this diet with riverine crabs, fish, and shellfish (Williams 1924, 10–15). Apparently, each Purari tribe except for the Baroi engaged in hiri exchange with the Motu (A. B. Lewis quoted in Welsch 1998a, 464; Williams 1924, 126). Among the six tribes, crabs, coconuts, sago, and betel nut were circulated (Williams 1924, 124). Famously, the Purari partook in ritual cannibalism, which continued to be practiced into the early twentieth century (see Chalmers 1887, 58; Williams 1924, 107). In the early colonial period Orokolo Bay and the Purari were linked by warfare and exchange. As well as occasionally claiming Orokolo Bay residents in warfare, Chalmers (1887, 113) recorded that people from Maipua (the most easterly village of the Purari) would visit Eleman groups to acquire Motu pottery. Linguistics and shared material culture suggest long-term interaction between the Purari and Orokolo Bay. In terms of linguistic cognates, there is enough shared vocabulary between the Purari and Orokolo languages to be beyond chance correlation (see Brown 1986, xviii). Some shared words—such as heveke (Purari), rendered hevehe in Orokolo—relate to ritual practice, of which some aspects appear to have been common. As A. B. Lewis (quoted in Welsch 1998a, 483) explained, “[The Purari] use somewhat similar masks to Orokolo people, but the meaning seems to be quite different.” Regarding the men’s house, eravo (Orokolo) and ravi (Purari) are cognate words and were similar structures. Fowler (2004, figure 15) has explored the similarities and differences between Orokolo Bay and Purari architecture. Unlike further west in the Gulf of Papua, Orokolo Bay and the Purari shared tapering longhouse designs with twin doors. Eravo and ravi both contained important pieces of material culture: hohao (Orokolo) or gope (Purari) boards hung there as well as ceremonial masks (Bell 2013; Welsch 2006a). However, social and ceremonial practice played out in the Purari men’s house quite differently. Physical divisions of hearths in the ravi reflected and reinforced social division and stratification (Welsch 2006a, 29–32). The longhouses of Orokolo Bay did not have the “shrine” area of the Purari, where wicker spirit-representations (kaiaimunu) and skulls resided (see Chalmers 1895, 103; Williams 1924). It seems that “superficial” interaction (conflict and exchange) occurred between the Purari and Orokolo Bay communities in the early colonial period. The Purari and people of the Eleman region (including Orokolo Bay) did not develop familial understandings of one another and retained distinctive social and ceremonial practices. Interactions Farther Afield Orokolo Bay’s sphere of human interaction surely stretched beyond the Purari to the west and Motu to the east. Pamela Swadling (1996) has used linguistics, material culture, historical research, and oral tradition to suggest that Indonesian (Seramese) traders visited the Gulf of Papua between 1645 and 1790. Possibly, they brought sweet potato and tobacco with them. Cognate words for “tobacco” (sukuba in Seram Laut) are shared across the western Gulf of Papua: suku is used in 24  •   ch a p t er 2

Kiwai and Purari languages, and kuku in Orokolo Bay (Swadling 1996, table 10). The Kikori River region may have been part of an Indonesian trade route into the highlands (Swadling 1996, 156; see also Rhoads 1982, 144). The Indonesian trade in pearl shell linked the Torres Strait, Fly River, and Kikori River regions. Recently, sixteenth- and nineteenth-century Asian ceramics have been found in Torres Strait (Grave and McNiven 2013). Similarly, Liam Brady (2005, figure 15.16; see also McNiven et al. 2004, 2006) has drawn stylistic links between Eleman region eharo masks, Fly River wood carvings, and Torres Strait rock art. It would be immensely surprising if, over the last several hundred years, Orokolo Bay has not been connected (whether directly or indirectly) with Indonesian traders, ancient West Papuan groups, Torres Strait Islanders, and other seafaring inhabitants of the Gulf of Papua. Social and ceremonial practices have changed over the past c. 150 years in Orokolo Bay, leaving echoes and continuing strands of ancestral actions and interactions. We should expect this to be the case prior to 1870; interaction with colonists was not the first cultural upheaval of the region. The ethnography of the early colonial period suggests that eravo and other areas of past village sites, along with deposited ceramics and traces of past land use, are potentially valuable lenses through which to investigate how Orokolo Bay residents shaped and engaged with their past places through time. The elaborately structured and spatially differentiated landscapes of Orokolo Bay demand a multidisciplinary study combining archaeological and anthropological approaches.

A Social History of Orokolo Bay  •  25

3 Archaeologies of the Gulf of Papua and Beyond

Archaeology is usually thought about as the study of the past through its material remains, but it can also be thought about in another way: it is part of the process of making places ancestral (especially those that have been forgotten). In a sense, archaeology constructs its own “genealogies,” such as radiocarbon chronologies, through which places are made sense of and can then be situated in regional, national, and even international narratives. In this chapter, I explore the varied ways archaeologists have made sense of, and in doing so built, histories for places along the south coast of Papua New Guinea (figure 3.1) through varied lines of evidence such as ceramic typologies, radiocarbon dates, and oral histories. My chronological focus is the past c. 800 years. This era follows a period c. 1200–800 years ago which Geoff Irwin (1991, 507) termed the “Ceramic Hiccup” (see also Rhoads 1982, 46, for the “Papuan Hiccup”). The Ceramic Hiccup has been described as a period of disruption. In regions with ceramic traditions (e.g., Yule Island–Hall Sound, Port Moresby, Amazon Bay–Mailu), pottery styles with interregional similarities of vessel form and decoration often called “Early Papuan Pottery” were replaced by regionalized ceramic traditions sometime in this period (Allen 2010, 10; Allen et al. 2011; David et al. 2016b, 17–18; Irwin 1991; Summerhayes and Allen 2007; Vilgalys and Summerhayes 2016); in the Gulf of Papua, where local ceramic traditions are entirely unknown, this era is marked by a conspicuous absence of pottery and by a shift away from coastal lowland occupation possibly to defensive inland or hilltop locations (David 2008; Rhoads and Mackenzie 1991; Skelly and David 2017, 488–489; Frankel et al. 1994). Transforming Connections: The Archaeology of Mailu and Agila Amazon Bay and the island of Mailu are far removed from Orokolo Bay, being located some 550 kilometers to the east along the coast (see figure 3.1). Geoff Irwin’s (1985) PhD research in the Amazon Bay–Mailu region is of interest to this discussion because for some 2,000 years, and possibly more, the Amazon Bay–Mailu region was an essential cog in a complex network of trade or exchange relationships that crisscrossed the south coast. Irwin’s (1985, 1991) 1970s research outlined a 2,000-year history of occupation and pottery production for Amazon Bay–Mailu. He summarized his findings with four “contiguous local prehistories” that also tied into archaeological patterns observed elsewhere along the south coast (Irwin 1991, 503–509): 26

Figure 3.1. Locations on Papua New Guinea’s south coast where archaeological research has taken place.

Colonization (c. AD 0–400): People making a form of pottery “probably . . . derived ultimately from Lapita” arrived in the region. That pottery style Irwin called “Early Papuan Ware.” Deepening regional isolation (c. AD 400–1000): In this period, the previously interconnected pottery-producing communities of the south coast fractured into “local style provinces” (e.g., Amazon Bay–Mailu, Yule Island). Pottery style transformation (c. AD 800–1200): A “hiccup” occurred in archaeological sequences along the south coast of Papua New Guinea in which pottery styles transformed (see above). Interaction, specialization, and exchange (c. AD 1200–1800): “Local stylistic regions” became more differentiated from each other, and individual locations became “centres of specialised manufacture and trade.” Around AD 1200, the Amazon Bay–Mailu region became an important center of specialized pottery production, at roughly the same time as the island of Motupore near Port Moresby also developed into a manufacturing center and the Urourina site on Yule Island became occupied. Such “specialised place[s]” (Irwin 1991, 509) emerged immediately following a period when pottery styles dramatically, and probably rapidly, transformed. This period of pottery style transformation was seen by Irwin (1991, 508) as signaling a period of regional social and economic “discontinuity.” From c. 350 cal. BP (i.e., c. AD 1600) into the ethnographic period, people inhabiting the island of Mailu controlled local pottery production and exchange. In 2016, Monash University and University of Papua New Guinea researchers conducted preliminary excavations at the site of Agila (site code: ABQL) in Hood Bay (see figure 3.1). These investigations aimed to explore the history of specialized production and exchange relations between Hood Bay and the specialized manufacturing Motu and Mailu villages of the early colonial period. Robert Skelly et al. (2018) demonstrated that there had been “reticulated and fluctuating patterns of social interaction” between Motu and Mailu villages over the past c. 600 years (see also Irwin 1991, 508). Pottery arriving at Agila sometime in the period AD 1480–1660 has ridged appliqué decoration resembling that of contemporaneous Amazon Bay–Mailu assemblages. Deeper deposits dating to AD 1410–1500 have pottery sherds with grooved and shell margin-impressed designs (Skelly et al. 2018). Such designs suggest a Motupore origin for the older pottery deposits. The authors suggest that a period of warfare between the Eastern Motu and Western Motu may have caused a reduction in the spatial reach of Motu trading voyages in the more recent period, leading Hood Bay villagers to look eastward for long-distance social networking and the acquisition of goods such as pottery. Ecology and Settlement Patterns in the Port Moresby Region Susan Bulmer’s (1978, 7; see also Bulmer 1975, 1979, 1982) PhD research was the first detailed study of “cultural change,” human ecology, and settlement patterns in the Port Moresby region. Her study area was vast, stretching from Galley Reach in the west to Bootless Inlet in the east, the Port Moresby coastline in the south inland to the Laloki River (Bulmer 1978, figures 1.1 and 2.1). 28  •   ch a p t er 3

Between 1968 and 1972, Bulmer excavated at the hilltop site of Nebira 2 (site code: ACJ), the rock shelter site of Eriama 1 (site code: ACV), and two sites at Taurama Beach (site codes: AJA and AGN) (see figure 3.1). Surface collections of pottery and stone artifacts were made at 67 sites, and a total of 13 radiocarbon dates were used to date the stratified sites. The radiocarbon dates were generated by the Gakushuin radiocarbon dating laboratory in Japan, subsequently known to have produced erroneous or unreliable results during those years of research (see Spriggs 1989, 604). Bulmer (1978; table 3.1) developed a regional ceramic style sequence for the period spanning the past c. 2000 years in the broader Port Moresby region. Her ceramic sequence relied on surface sherds collected from numerous sites to construct a seriated style sequence (Styles I–VI; see discussions in Allen 1977b, 2016; David et al. 2016b; Skelly and David 2017, 46–51; Swadling and Kaiku 1980). The chronology Bulmer attached to the undated sherds depended “on chronologies from other excavations, stratigraphic clues from her own excavations . . . oral history and intuition” (Allen 2016, 34). The latest published version of her chronology placed five pottery styles in four time periods, of which Styles IV and V are the most recent (see tables 3.1 and 3.2; Bulmer 1982). For Bulmer (1982, 125–126), the Port Moresby excavations provided “little archaeological evidence directly related to the hiri” and no evidence of specialized production of pottery. However, the Taurama excavations had rich deposits of recent pottery probably dating to the past c. 800 years (see Allen 2017, 13–21; Sutton et al. 2016, 43). In Western Motu oral traditions, Taurama is known as an ancestral village site that was occupied c. 1575–1725 AD, prior to its destruction by the Eastern Table 3.1. The two ceramic styles for the Port Moresby region in the time period covered in this study, according to Bulmer’s (1982) chronology (see table 3.2). Pottery descriptions are after Bulmer (1978, table 5.5).

Style

Pottery characteristics

IV Taurama shell Shell and comb impressing, and comb combing decorated V

Taurama incised-­ punctate

Vessel forms

Probable Characteristic associated pot rim or lip form decoration

Composite bowl Square

Incising (including Simple bowl heavy line incising), finger impressing, shell impressing

Thickened round or square

Shell and comb impressing, painting Incising

Table 3.2. Bulmer’s (1982, 123) Port Moresby ceramic chronology (from Allen 2016, table 2). Period

Ceramic style

50 BC–1000 AD

I: The Red Slip tradition

1000–1200 AD

II, III: The Eriama styles

1200–1650 AD

IV: Taurama shell and comb decorated

1650–1870 AD

V: Taurama incised-punctate Archaeologies of the Gulf of Papua and Beyond  •  29

Motu. Warfare caused the Western Motu to vacate the Bootless Bay area and to inhabit sites further to the west toward what is now Port Moresby harbor (Oram 1981). Reanalysis of the Taurama pottery and radiocarbon chronology by Jim Allen (2017, 15–21; 2016) suggested possible contemporaneity of occupation with the site of Motupore (see below). Pending re-excavation, Taurama is probably an important site for understanding the post–Ceramic Hiccup era in the Port Moresby region.

Investigations near Boera Village Pamela Swadling (1980, 1977; Swadling and Kaiku 1980) excavated the site of Ava Garau (site code: AMH) near Boera village in 1975. Comprehensive excavation reports were not published, but the upper excavation levels bore a radiocarbon date of 1220±95 BP (Swadling 1980; Swadling and Kaiku 1980). Ava Garau is in the vicinity of the Western Motu ancestral village of Davage that features in the prominent hiri origin story of Edai Siabo (Goddard 2011; Oram 1991). From her excavations at Ava Garau and the nearby site of Papa Salt Pan (site code: AWL), along with Bulmer’s prior analyses, Swadling (1980, 101) proposed the following chronology for the Port Moresby region: Early Period (Red Slip ceramic phase): c. 2000–1200 years ago Middle Period (Boera-Taurama-Motupore ceramic phase): c. 1200–300 years ago Late Period (Traditional Motu ceramic phase): c. 300 years ago to the ethnographic period The Ava Garau radiocarbon date and pottery sequence suggested to Swadling (1980, 120) that c. 1200 years ago there had been a dramatic change in pottery styles and settlement patterns across the Port Moresby region. Pottery often decorated with linear incisions replaced the previous and long-lived “Red Slip” tradition. Swadling (1981, 245) posited that c. 1200–800 years ago, settlement in the Port Moresby region shifted focus to the Boera area (e.g., Ava Garau). Swadling (1980; following Bulmer 1971) suggested that the rapid change in pottery style might reflect intrusive stylistic influences from the Massim region. Following Bulmer and Swadling (and Irwin’s [1991] influential chronology), archaeologists have continued to identify a major period of “disruption” (Allen et al. 2011, 69; 1984, 445–446; Summerhayes and Allen 2007, 101) in settlement patterns and ceramic styles in the Port Moresby region dating to c. 1200–800 years ago. The explanations offered for this period—the Port Moresby region’s Ceramic Hiccup—include environmental change (Allen 2010; Sutton et al. 2015, 2016), fluctuating settlement patterns (Swadling 1981), and local warfare and “increasing social tensions” (e.g., Skelly and David 2017, 489; Rhoads 1982, 146–147). Specialized Economies and Growing Populations at Motupore and Bootless Bay Despite the very recent publication of Jim Allen’s (2017) main site report, Motupore has long featured in discussions of Port Moresby’s human history (e.g., Allen 1977a, 1985, 2017; Allen et al. 1997; Bulmer 1971, 60–61; David et al. 2016b; Frankel et al. 1994; Rhoads 1994; Vanderwal 1973, 203). Motupore is a small islet (c. 800 m long and c. 275 m wide) located c. 600 m offshore in Bootless Bay (see figure 3.1). Most of Motupore’s landmass is an ancient, submerged hilltop against which a “series of low beach ridges and swales” have aggraded, indicating “former shoreline positions” (Allen 2017, 91, figure 2.8). 30  •   ch a p t er 3

In some Western Motu oral traditions, Motupore was the location of a settlement called Motu Hanua ancestral to iduhu living in the villages of Hanuabada and Pari (Allen 2017, 3–4; Oram 1981). Allen (2017, 23) saw excavation on the island as an opportunity to “test . . . that the Western Motu had not retreated to locations in and around Port Moresby harbour and been forced to trade for subsistence, but rather that they moved there as specialised traders who could take advantage of that location and its resources . . . [and] that the economic strategy of subsistence trading had been developed by Western Motu groups prior to its florescence in the ethnographic hiri.” The archaeological examination of these propositions took place over nine main field seasons between 1970 and 1976, directed by Allen (2017, 2–3; 1977a), Sandra Bowdler, and Mary-Jane Mountain. Further excavations were conducted in the 1980s and in 2016. In all, 190 m2 of Motupore have been excavated from shell midden deposits located near the base of the hill and the prograded beach ridges. My discussion of Motupore, and of Allen’s (2017) interpretations of its archaeology, concentrates on the chronology and pottery analyses. Motupore’s ceramic record contains a great deal of evidence from which to understand chronological and social linkages between Orokolo Bay and the Port Moresby region. One excavation square is especially important for the archaeology of Motupore: M23/IV. This 2 m x 2 m square revealed complex and well-defined stratigraphy to a depth of c. 5.0 m and has provided most of the analyzed Motupore artifacts (Allen 2017, 92, figure 4.4).

Analytical Units and Radiocarbon Dating Allen’s (2016, 37; 2017) analysis of the Motupore pottery was conducted in six stratigraphic and chronological groups called pottery analytical units (PAUs). These units are simplifications of 15 integrated site levels (ISLs) (Allen 2017, tables 4.8 and 5.4). Allen’s (2017, 129, table 4.8) ISLs express common stratigraphy across excavation “squares where satisfactory control of stratigraphic relationships could be established” using the M23/IV strata as a baseline. Somewhat separate to the construction of ISLs, a stratigraphic chronology was constructed from 15 radiocarbon dates, again using the M23/IV strata for stratigraphic comparisons between excavation squares (Allen 2017, 121, figure 4.5). From a total of 39 radiocarbon dates acquired across various field seasons, these 15 dates, plus three dates that were acquired for M23/IV (Allen 2017, table 4.3), are presumably the most stratigraphically secure. However, the chronostratigraphy included dates originating from excavation squares that were found to be incompatible with ISL designation (table 3.3). Table 3.3 shows the relationship between the PAUs, ISLs, and the most reliable radiocarbon dates from Motupore according to Allen’s (2017, tables 4.3–4.5, 4.8, 5.4, and 5.7) analyses.1 I have included the three M23/IV dates, 13 of the 15 dates for which Allen (2017, 48, tables 4.3, 4.4, and 4.5) attempted to make stratigraphic correlations with M23/IV, and two dates from basal beach rock deposits at Motupore. The two excluded dates (ANU-1177 and ANU-1508) were from burials, which have no bearing on the PAUs (Allen 2017, table 4.5). Four of the 15 dates that relate to the PAUs (ANU1163, ANU-1211, ANU-1509, and ANU-1512) appear to be in poor chronostratigraphic agreement (see table 3.3). Allen (2017, 121) explained that the ANU-1512 date was taken from a posthole in the J21/ III square and thus probably originated from shallower (and thus younger) levels. The only explanation offered for the inverted ANU-1509 and ANU-1163 dates was that the two samples may have 1. Where new age calibrations are presented in this book (i.e., where I am not citing the calibrations or age estimates reported by others) I have used the IntCal20 dataset (Reimer et al. 2020) in the OxCal 4.4 program (Bronk Ramsey 2009a). I report these new calibrations at 95.4 percent probability. Archaeologies of the Gulf of Papua and Beyond  •  31

Table 3.3. Age calibrations were performed using the IntCal20 data set (Reimer et al. 2020) and OxCal 4.4 (Bronk Ramsey 2009a). *Radiocarbon dates derived from the M23 / IV midden excavation. **Radiocarbon dates from squares that Allen (2017, 129) argues have well-established interexcavation stratigraphic associations.

Stratigraphic unit

Laboratory number

Conventional 14C age (BP)

Calibrated age in cal. BP (range, median) at 95.4% probability

PAU

ISL

-

1

Gritty red / black

-

-

-

1

2

Topsoil / midden

-

-

-

1–2

3

Heavy black midden

ANU-1218 ANU-1217

310±60 370±80

503–152, 382 540–156, 407

3–4

4

Sandy midden

ANU-1212

390±70

529–305, 428

5

Loose midden

ANU-1163**

740±80

897–548, 681

6

Buried soil

-

-

-

I-5901* ANU-1512 ANU-1511 ANU-1178** ANU-1210**

380±90 280±40 550±70 580±50 590±70

623–151, 412 470–152, 371 662–494, 570 653–522, 596 668–514, 595

-

-

-

ANU-1211**

830±80

917–658, 755

5

6

n / a n / a

7

Post-RG A midden

8

Disturbed RG A

9

Red grit A

10

Pre-RG A midden

-

-

-

11

Consolidated red soil

-

-

-

12

Red grit B

I-5902*

715±90

897–529, 662

13

Midden lens

ANU-1209**

600±70

670–517, 597

14

Red grit C

I-5903*

740±105

906–539, 686

15

Gray sand / black grit

ANU-1510** ANU-1509**

810±150 480±60

1054–527, 759 641–327, 516

n / a

Black grit / clean sand

ANU-1219

1010±80

1173–731, 910

n / a

Beach rock

ANU-1647** ANU-1648**

2940±80 2530±80

3339–2876, 3097 2757–2365, 2587

been mislabeled by the radiocarbon dating laboratory (Allen 2017, 123). From limited radiocarbon evidence and a rich oral tradition record, Allen (2017, 129) considered that “chronologically, the rise and fall of Motupore is encompassed in 400 to 500 years” between c. AD 1200 and 1700. Allen (2017, 86) is keenly aware of the problems with Motupore’s radiocarbon chronology: excavations in 2016 were aimed at rectifying the problem. 32  •   ch a p t er 3

Table 3.4. PAU groups, after Allen (2017, table 5.4). PAU

Sherds

Sample pots

Sample bowls

Total

1

22130

161

150

311

2

22789

145

  84

229

3

33001

199

181

380

4

25343

192

150

342

5

32442

231

147

378

6

15687

215

  77

292

In constructing six PAUs, Motupore’s chronostratigraphic problems were compounded. While PAU 1–4 derive solely from M23/IV, which has a consistent (but limited) sequence of three dates, PAU 5 and PAU 6 incorporate pottery from the M23/IV, K21/II, and K22/III excavation squares (table 3.4). The ISL correlations made between the M23/IV and K21/II excavation squares are theoretically unproblematic (K21/II has not been directly dated), but the K22/III excavation is the source of the inverted ANU-1509 and ANU-1163 dates discussed above. For this reason, the contemporaneity of pottery from M23/IV and K22/III deposits is difficult to sustain. Allen (2017, 151) estimated that PAU 1–4, PAU 5, and PAU 6 each spanned approximately 150 years and that “escalating numbers of broken pottery sherds were being discarded through time” (Allen 2017, 151; table 3.4).

The Motupore Pottery Allen’s Motupore pottery analysis addressed pot shapes and decoration. Three types of “globular pot” (Pot Types 1a, 1b and 2) and three types of bowl (Bowl Types 1, 2, and 3) were identified (Allen 2017, 205; table 3.5). Allen (2017, 213) explained that the types were constructed (like the PAUs) to produce groups that “include significant sherd numbers.” Pot types were based on morphological features such as rim widths and vessel diameters (Allen 2017, 152–160; see table 3.5). The three identified pot types occurred in relatively stable proportions across the PAUs, with one exception. Pot Type 2, likened to the ethnographic Motu uro, became dominant after PAU 6 (Allen 2017, figure 10.4). The growing dominance of Pot Type 2 through time was taken to indicate that from PAU 5 onward, this form “became the central trade ware moving off the island” (Allen 2017, 377). Pots were mostly undecorated except in PAU 6. In these earliest levels, painted, shell-impressed, and undecorated pots were approximately equally common (Allen 2017, figures 10.1–10.3). Decorative techniques change from PAU 6 to PAU 1. In general, incised lip decorations increased and shell-impressed lips decreased through time (Allen 2017, figures 10.1, 10.2, 10.3, and 10.8). Trademarks—“isolated areas of decoration on the rims of globular pots”—occur in all PAUs and are most common on Type 2 pots (Allen 2017, 603). The three bowl types were defined by the presence or absence of modified (thickened) rims, or of carinations (note that for Allen [2017, 380] carination is a change in the external and internal vessel wall angle). Decorative techniques were found to correlate with certain bowl types: Type 1 bowls were primarily decorated with incised designs (see table 3.5); Type 2 and Type 3 bowls commonly had shell-impressed decorations. The relative frequency of bowl types changed dramatically from PAU 6 to PAU 5 to PAU 4–1: Types 2 and 3 were the most common in PAU 6; Types 1 and 2 were Archaeologies of the Gulf of Papua and Beyond  •  33

Table 3.5. Simplified description of pot types and bowl types. After Allen (2017, tables 10.1 and 10.2). Globular Pot Type 1a (n = 228)

Defining attributes: Lip diameter 30 mm Motu ethnographic correlate: uro

Bowl Type 1 (n = 507)

Defining attributes: Modified rims, not carinated Main motif associations: Sloping incised bands, incised chevrons, finger arcades, punctation

Bowl Type 2 (n = 197)

Defining attributes: Unmodified rims, not carinated Main motif associations: Sloping incised bands, chevrons, combing, punctation, horizontal herringbone

Bowl Type 3 (n = 72)

Defining attributes: Unmodified rims, carinated Main motif associations: Vertical and horizontal herringbone, chevron herringbone

the best represented in the PAU 5 assemblage; Type 1 was overwhelmingly dominant in PAU 1–PAU 4 (i.e., thickened rims increased through time, and carinations became less common) (Allen 2017, figure 10.5). For all bowl types, shell-impressed designs were found to decrease in frequency through PAU 6–PAU 1, while incised designs increased. Within these broad observations, temporal trends were identified for several specific motifs, including: Herringbone motifs: vertical columns, horizontal rows, or chevron shapes formed using small impressions made with the wavy margin of a shell valve (Allen 2017, 276; Allen 2016). The motifs occur from PAU 6 to PAU 3, gradually becoming rarer and simpler. Later in Allen’s (2017, 276) sequence, herringbone motifs became restricted to the “upper external zone” of bowls. Chevron arrangements occur only in PAU 6 and PAU 5. Sloping incised band motifs: common from PAU 4 to PAU 1. Allen (2017, 291) showed that this design type may have evolved from shell-impressed vertical herringbone motifs.

Understanding Motupore The stratigraphic, ceramic, and radiocarbon sequence of Motupore, along with many other analyzed finds, such as postholes, burials, and artifacts made from shell, bone, and stone, are the struts of Allen’s (2017) main Motupore report. From these, Allen (1985, 54; 2017, 395–396; Allen and Rye 1982, 103–107) reinforced ideas he has been developing over the past 40 years. Allen (2017, 620) suggests that a population of “specialised maritime traders” arrived at Motupore c. 1200 AD already equipped to exploit the local marine environment and to conduct long-distance trade. Over the course of c. 500–400 years, pottery production intensified, standardized, and was simplified through time, and a shell bead production industry emerged. Toward the end of the Motupore settlement c. 34  •   ch a p t er 3

AD 1400–1700, the Bootless Bay region saw a dramatic settlement and population increase coincident with a peak in the rate of pottery production (Allen 1984, 431–432; 2017, 606–608, figure 16.1). To some degree influenced by Marxist economic and structural anthropological theories, Allen (2017, 602–603) argued that the hiri was embedded in Motu life and that the settlement of Motupore Island was not a case of economic desperation (contra Oram 1977) but a strategic social and economic choice. Allen (2017, 330, 620; Allen and Rye 1982) tentatively proposed—primarily based on clay sourcing analyses—that Motupore was established by a population from the Boera area after the Ceramic Hiccup in the Port Moresby region, who also built a “sister” settlement at Taurama. Further, he considered that “the links between Urourina, Motupore and Boera reflect a general re-organisation of settlement in Central Papua c. AD 1200 that might be directly tied to the development of the hiri” (Allen 2017, 604–605). Investigations at the recipient villages of Orokolo Bay have the potential to elucidate how settlement reorganizations in the Port Moresby region might relate to the development of social arrangements and large villages in the Gulf of Papua to the west. New Sequences, Origins, and Transformations at Caution Bay From 2008 to 2010 archaeological surveys and excavations were conducted at Caution Bay—20 kilometers northwest of Port Moresby—by cultural heritage consultancy teams led by Monash University researchers. The main survey measured 3.1 km east-west by 2.8 km north-south, in which 591 surface archaeological sites were recorded. Excavations were carried out at 122 sites (David et al. 2016a). More than 700 radiocarbon dates have been acquired so far, demonstrating archaeological evidence of human presence in Caution Bay from at least 5000 cal. BP up to the early colonial era (Bruno David, pers. comm. 2018). The published results to date provided evidence of a “locally-viable Lapita community [on mainland Papua New Guinea] and not simply Lapita transients” (McNiven et al. 2011, 5) in the period c. 2900–2550 cal. BP (see David et al. 2011; McNiven et al. 2011, 2012). Importantly, the Caution Bay radiocarbon and ceramic sequence shows that Lapita pottery developed gradually into traditions previously grouped together under the label “Early Papuan Pottery” that was previously thought to be the oldest ceramics on the south coast (David et al. 2012b; see Allen et al. 2011; Summerhayes and Allen 2007; McNiven et al. 2006 for discussions of Early Papuan Pottery). Yule Island: Intrusive Pots and People In 1969, Ron Vanderwal (1973, 1978) undertook PhD research in the Yule Island–Hall Sound region (see figure 3.1), hoping to investigate the timing of Austronesian arrival in Papua New Guinea. The region is today inhabited by the Austronesian-language-speaking ceramicist Roro people, though oral traditions suggest that Motu people may have occupied the region prior to their arrival (see Vanderwal 1973, 9–11, figure III-1). Vanderwal (1973, 26–27) recorded 13 “prehistoric sites” and excavated at Oposisi, Urourina, and Sirirou on Yule Island, and at Abe and Kukuba Cave in Hall Sound (Vanderwal 1973, figure IV-1). The culturally rich Oposisi site featured predominantly in Vanderwal’s (1973, 27–33) analyses. Vanderwal (1973, 195–198) characterized Yule Island–Hall Sound’s archaeology in terms of “technological complexes” and “cultural groups” within four cultural “phases”: Archaeologies of the Gulf of Papua and Beyond  •  35

Preceramic (c. 4000 BP): Sporadic rock shelter occupation as evidenced by one radiocarbon date and a collection of chert artifacts from Kukuba Cave. Initial Ceramic (c. 2000 BP): “Pottery was introduced by an intrusive group” of “pig breeding horticulturalists.” Obsidian and trochus shell bracelets were present during this phase. Developmental (