The Perplexing Complexity of Some New Guinea Communities

Summary

At contact, a number of New Guinea communities boasted considerable ‘horizontal’ complexity – very large populations (up to 2,500 people) and ceremonial arenas that engaged even more. Many also constructed monumental architectures of organic material and staggering size. These communities included complex fisher-foragers and Big-man horticulturalists, organizations that are commonly identified as only minimally hierarchical. Certainly, their hierarchical institutions were insufficiently developed to account for the scale of their ‘horizontal’ complexity. After briefly surveying this complexity, this paper analyzes why these communities became so complex and the mechanisms that allowed them to manage their complexity.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 82nd Annual Meeting, Vancouver, BC (2017)   •
• Power from Below: Collectivity and Heterarchy in Global Perspective

Keywords

Spatial Coverage

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 14541