A team of Australian and New Zealand archaeologists has unearthed the oldest known pottery from Papua New Guinea at the remote highlands site of Wañelek in the Bismarck Range, in Papua New Guinea’s Madang Province.
Examples of Wañelek pottery: W52 – paddle and anvil made body sherd with red slip and incised decoration; W50 – body sherd with fingernail incision; W45 – plain body sherd with red burnish or slip; W14 – plain body sherd; W54 – possible broken coil or weathered rim sherd. Image credit: Gaffney D et al.
Nearly 20 sherds of red-slipped pottery were collected from the site, some with incised decoration. The sherds are small and very fragmented (average maximum dimension – 3.3 cm).
The fragments, which resemble the Lapita plain-ware pottery style associated with Austronesian colonization of neighboring Western Pacific islands, were analyzed and found to be both produced on-site and brought in from elsewhere.
One of the fragments is at least 3,000 years old, several hundred years older than the previous oldest known pottery in New Guinea, according to the team, led by Dylan Gaffney from the University of Otago, New Zealand. The finding is newly published in the open-access journal PLoS ONE.
“The study overturns the existing consensus that Austronesian peoples, who are associated with the Lapita culture, simply skirted the coastal areas of New Guinea and did not interact with inland populations,” Gaffney said.
“It was thought that they bypassed this large landmass, opting instead to settle on islands in the Bismarck Archipelago before continuing an epic migration that ended with the colonization of remote Pacific Islands such as those of Vanuatu, New Caledonia, Fiji and Samoa.”
“Crucially, the pottery comes from the interior rather than a coastal area, suggesting the movements of people and technological practices, as well as objects at this time,” he added.
“It’s an example of how technology spread among cultures. Some pottery must have soon found its way into the highlands, which inspired the highlanders to try making it themselves,” said co-author Dr Tim Denham of the Australian National University in Canberra.
“The find will help archaeologists reconstruct how pottery techniques spread from southeast Asia through the Pacific, and gives broader insights into the way technology spread throughout early civilizations.”
Dr Denham added: “it’s interesting to have pushed back antiquity by several hundred years, and in a place where you least expect it.”
“And it shows human history is not always a smooth progression – later on pottery making was abandoned across most of the highlands of New Guinea. No one knows when or why.”
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Gaffney D et al. 2015. Earliest Pottery on New Guinea Mainland Reveals Austronesian Influences in Highland Environments 3,000 Years Ago. PLoS ONE 10 (9): e0134497; doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0134497
