Conference Presentations by Tim Denham
During the late-Holocene, Papua New Guinea (PNG) was host to the arrival of new pottery making pe... more During the late-Holocene, Papua New Guinea (PNG) was host to the arrival of new pottery making peoples from the west. The interaction between these migrant Austronesian speakers and the indigenous Papuan speakers is poorly understood. In the New Guinea Highlands, new technologies such as pottery were introduced via ancient trade networks. The extent to which this introduction represents a diffusion of ideas, a movement of material culture, or a movement of peoples is important to understanding the nature of interaction during this early colonising phase. As a proxy for prehistoric trade and social interaction, the study undertook ceramic compositional analysis of fifteen sherds from two Highland sites using a Scanning Electron Microscope (SEM) to determine number of distinct production centres, and possible locations of production. This paper will present the results of our work and the implications following.
Papers by Tim Denham
The languages of Vanuatu are uniformly Austronesian, but have long been described as " aberrant. ... more The languages of Vanuatu are uniformly Austronesian, but have long been described as " aberrant. " Blust (2005) points out a number of morphosyntactic features of the Vanuatu languages that might provide evidence for a Papuan element in their history. We add to that argument, presenting phonological evidence that links the languages of Vanuatu and New Caledonia with the non-Austronesian languages of New Guinea. Accepting that the earliest archaeological sites in Va-nuatu are Lapita sites, we suggest that this implicates non-Austronesian speaking Melanesians in the earliest occupancy of the islands, calling into question assumptions that the Lapita expansion in the Pacific can be unproblematically associated with the expansion of Austronesian languages of the Oceanic subgroup.
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Conference Presentations by Tim Denham
Papers by Tim Denham