In 1922, Bronislaw Malinowski described the kula, a maritime trading system concerned with the exchange of ceremonial armshells and necklaces that circulated through the islands of the Massim at the south-eastern end of Papua New Guinea. This time-consuming and expensive activity appeared to have no practical purpose other than to acquire renown, both for specific kula valuables and for the few men with sufficient social standing to be able to participate in these exchanges. The kula also provided the opportunity for much wider ‘commercial’ exchanges of foods, raw materials and manufactured goods. Both commercial and ceremonial exchanges helped unite otherwise discrete populations. The kula also linked to other coastal exchange systems, of which the hiri, centred on Port Moresby, was one.
In contrast to the kula, historical descriptions and explanations of the hiri identified it as a practical expedition to alleviate seasonal Port Moresby food shortages by trading pots for sago. Unexpectedly, it has been archaeology as much as anthropology that has demonstrated that the hiri had both subsistence and social dimensions. Both trading systems facilitated the development of cultural niches that allowed the imbalances of resources at different locations to be redressed through maritime exchange, itself driven by social systems that evolved through prestige acquisition and big-man competition.
This book approaches the archaeology of the hiri from the point of view of recipient Papuan Gulf villages in the Kouri Lowlands, a 27km-long coastal strip about 270km north-west of Port Moresby. While these data are important, the hiri was primarily driven by western Motu villages around Port Moresby. Understanding it requires a full appreciation of local and long-distance exchanges that underwrote Motu life all year. Few relevant archaeological conclusions about the hiri from the Motu region are critically assessed here, the authors instead relying on the rich ethnographic accounts of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries as a benchmark. This has partly to do with this book beginning as a 2014 doctoral thesis and partly to do with the accident of its timing, being unable to take advantage of two recent publications, a 2014 book by Mary Mennis comparing the hiri and the dadeng/waing (Madang) trading systems, and the 2017 excavation report on the ancestral hiri site of Motupore near Port Moresby.
The tension in this work is reflected in the title. While the hiri is an aspect of the archaeology of long-distance trade along the Papuan coast, the two are different entities. Distinguishing an ‘ethnographic hiri’, as is done here, does not alter this. One major emergent theme of the last decade of Papuan research by these authors and other archaeologists from Monash University has been to emphasise the continuity and evolution of human history on this coast, from a Lapita origin nearly 3000 years ago to the present. A generic inheritance in prehistoric material culture, especially pottery, was recognised as early as the 1970s, but to attribute the hiri to an ambiguous Lapita or post-Lapita presence at two locations on the Papuan coast denies both a detailed examination of the existing archaeological record and also the independent socio-historical achievements of these Melanesians over the last 2600 post-Lapita years.
The result is an uneasy linkage of different topics, beginning with an excellent account of the historical end-point of the hiri as described by various European observers, then moving to a comprehensive review of previous archaeological research in Papua. The bulk of the book—11 chapters and some 350 pages—is concerned with reporting the 13 excavations from the Kouri Lowlands. It is not readily apparent how most of these chapters/sites relate to either the hiri or maritime trade, especially as the authors specifically allow that prehistoric pottery may have been locally made. This is unlikely for several reasons and will be resolved by sourcing studies, yet to be undertaken. For many readers, the final three interpretive chapters will be of most interest, although the last of these moves away from the Papuan south coast to encompass most of the ethnographic maritime trading systems circling Papua New Guinea, and to argue again for a Lapita genesis.
The proposed historical sequence is mostly based on two interwoven datasets, radiometric dating and pottery analysis. Small-meshed sieves produced thousands of sherds from each site, but for most sites, sherds >30mm represent less than 1 per cent of these assemblages. Thus vessel shapes and decoration motifs could not be regularly employed and analysis rests mostly on decoration techniques and surface treatment, where present. The main techniques, comb punctations, fingernail impressions, shell impressions and tooled incisions, are assumed to reflect cultural connectivity between sites, but such connections may be uncertain because these common techniques occur at multiple times in various locations in Papua. These claimed associations are therefore bolstered by additional attribution to chronological period. The authors report their 66 radiocarbon dates as ranges at 95 per cent probability, but in expanded phases that group some sites that do not overlap radiometrically. Even so, the sequence (figs on pp. 179, 189) continues to show chronological gaps that question the authors’ continuity model for the early period and include a hiatus of 500 years immediately preceding the appearance of ancestral hiri sites near Port Moresby, when humans are claimed to be totally absent in the Kouri Lowlands (p. 490). The notion of ‘Lapita settlers’ on the Kouri coast (p. 481, but see alternate views on p. 495) rests on the presence of five sherds decorated with comb punctations (dubiously called comb dentate-stamping, presumably to associate it with Lapita dentate-stamping) at one site; again, this exemplifies the slender basis for a Lapita genesis.
Equally, the authors move to rephrase the period previously known as EPP (Early Papuan Pottery, c. 2000–1200 BP), separating its earlier shell-impressed phase from its later incised phase to link the former to >2000 BP sequences from Caution Bay and the Kouri Lowlands site, OJS. There appears to be only the decorative technique of shell-impression to link these >2000 BP occurrences with early EPP, as the intervening phase, the so-called Linear Shell Edge-Impressed Tradition (actually a decoration style, not a tradition), dates to c. 2150–2100 BP and appears to be chronologically separate from both earlier and later sequences, as well as visually different. Additionally, it rejects the stratigraphic evidence of sites from Yule Island to Amazon Bay, where both phases of EPP occur with no internal break and without the earlier traces of the >2000 BP ceramics documented at Caution Bay and the Kouri Lowlands.
Such arguments remain in play for the future. Consequently, this well-produced and -illustrated book remains a valuable addition to the growing corpus of Papuan archaeology texts.
