Lagatoi sailing ships

This paper is produced as part of the Climate Change and Biodiversity in Melanesia Project, funded by the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation. The aim of this project is to assess the vulnerability of Melanesian marine and terrestrial ecosystems to projected climate changes. The CCBM Paper Series, listed below, are published as part of the larger Bishop Museum Technical Report Series. Paper No.

A loss of place-names, and of the knowledge of history those named places hold, is effectively a significant cultural loss, and for this reason it was deemed important to record named places at Caution Bay before those localities were permanently altered. Therefore, named, culturally meaningful places within and near the Caution Bay study area were recorded in conjunction with local Koita and Motu community members in 2008-2010. This mapping was undertaken in two steps, the first consisting of opportunistic recording of place names during early, preliminary stages of fieldwork in 2008 and 2009; and the second a focused study undertaken in early 2010 explicitly aimed at recording place names and their cultural significance in the face of imminent developments that would forever transform the landscape. This chapter presents the results of these studies.

In 2008 we began intensive archaeological surveys at Caution Bay, located 20km to the northwest of Port Moresby, Papua New Guinea. We followed this with the excavation of 122 stratified sites in 2009-2010, and detailed analysis of the well preserved and abundant faunal, ceramic and lithic finds has been continuing ever since.

The Caution Bay Archaeology Project is providing new and exciting contributions to western Pacific prehistory. It has radically expanded the known geographic distribution of the Lapita Cultural Complex to include, for the first time, the southern coast of Papua New Guinea; it has established the relationship of Lapita to later cultural expressions in this area; it has pinpointed the time of arrival of domesticated animals along the southern coast of Papua New Guinea and, by inference, on the larger island of New Guinea; it has provided new insights into the impact of resident populations on local terrestrial and marine environments over a 5000 year time period; and perhaps of greatest significance, it has provided a unique opportunity to document, using multiple strands of archaeological evidence, interactions between resident and colonizing populations at a time of cultural transformation c. 2900 years ago.

Over seven hundred indigenous archaeological sites were identified in survey areas comprising coastal and inland landscapes drained by the Vaihua River and Ruisasi Creek. The archaeological excavation of 122 stratified sites within the core study area, measuring 3.1km east-west by 2.8km north-south, comprises the largest excavation program ever undertaken in the western Pacific. Detailed analyses by experts of the finds from the excavations is fully supported by a dating program consisting of more than 1300 radiocarbon dates, a number unprecedented for any single archaeology project in the southern hemisphere.

The Caution Bay Archaeology Project was only possible on such an unprecedented scale because it formed part of cultural heritage impact studies in advance of construction of a liquefied natural gas plant near Port Moresby. The client, along with the main proponent, maintained control of the cultural heritage management aspects of the development from the outset, with our responsibility largely focused on research-oriented salvage excavations.