Holocene transitions in highland Papua New Guinea: linking climate change to changes in subsistence and mobility with new models and data

Summary

Highland Papua New Guinea (PNG) is a region of independent invention of non-cereal-based agriculture. Consequently, the transition from a mobile lifestyle to a sedentary residential pattern, and the transition from a forager/gatherer subsistence practice to the adoption of agriculture by the past peoples of highland PNG have been a subject of considerable interest for archaeologists. Models of these transitions have changed through time with the arrival of new evidence such as palynological paleoecology reconstructions and improved radiometric dating techniques. The research presented here will add a statistical meta-analysis of site use changes through the archaeological record of the PNG highlands and the results of an ongoing reanalysis of the largely expedient lithic assemblages of multiple highland sites. Theory and methods for lithic analysis that have been developed since the original analysis of this collection provide new data to test models of residential pattern and subsistence change especially relative to global climate changes during the Holocene.

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This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 80th Annual Meeting, San Francisco, CA (2015)

Keywords

Spatial Coverage