Beyond Defense: The Political Implications of Defense in Contact-era New Guinea

Summary

At contact, New Guinea polities were uniformly at war, either episodically or permanently, with at least one of their neighbors. As a result, they all adopted significant defensive measures, commonly some mix of advanced warning systems, settlement nucleation, and natural or artificial fortifications. These measures were crucial to survival but they had numerous social and cultural implications. In this paper, I outline some of the more important of these consequences, before focusing on the political implications. In communities where people perforce interacted on foot through face-to-face communication, the distribution of population across a landscape had significant political consequences. I trace some of these outcomes drawing on data from about a hundred contact-era New Guinea polities.

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This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 80th Annual Meeting, San Francisco, CA (2015)   •
• The social lives of forts: Reconsidering the social construction of ancient fortified settlements and their diverse roles in political organization

Keywords

Spatial Coverage