John Edward Terrell

Domesticated Landscapes: The Subsistence Ecology of Plant and Animal Domestication

Harvesting different species as foods or raw materials calls for differing skills depending on the species being harvested and the circumstances under which they are being taken. In some situations and for some species, the tactics used are mainly behavioral—that is, people adjust, or adapt, their own actions to fit the behavior and circumstances of the species they are taking. Under other circumstances and for other species, the skills and tactics used may call for greater environmental preparation or manipulation. Therefore, instead of trying to distinguish people today and in the past as either “foragers” or “farmers,” it makes sense to define human subsistence behavior as an interactive matrix of species and harvesting tactics, that is, as a provisions spreadsheet.

Human Diversity and the Myth of the Primitive Isolate

The Pacific has been thought of as a region in which isolated societies are related to one another more by descent from the same ancestral traditions than by continuing social, political, and economic interaction. The apparent marginality of island societies has led scholars to assume that language, biology, and culture have coevolved in this part of the world in such an orderly fashion that language can be used to circumscribe populations and reconstruct their ancient migrations and culture history. Cultural evolution has often been conceptualized as a process of radiating differentiation from a common source or (borrowing thought from zoology and paleontology) a process of adaptive radiation. During the pioneering phase of anthropological field research in the Pacific after World War II, the simplifying assumption that people who live on islands live isolated lives played a useful role. Now scholars are working to improve the historical realism of their claims and reconstructions. This shift in orientation promises to unify the study of history and synchronic analysis in the Pacific as, in Alexander Lessers words, “parts of one universe of discourse, of one order or level of the human social process”.

Lapita and the temporal geography of prehistory

Ambrose (this issue, above) and Sand (this issue, above) reported on Lapita in the specific, without being parochial in their concerns. This paper looks at the largest Lapita picture, but is itself in turn based on new reports in the specific, here from the coast of Papua New Guinea which is key for the relations in space, in time and in cultural affinity of whatever human it is that Lapita is.

Foregone Conclusions?: In Search of Papuans and Austronesians

During much of the 20th century, human diversity and prehistory in the Pacific Islands were often framed in simple terms. Many agreed that there were two kinds of native peoples on the Pacific Islands, sometimes labeled as Polynesians (including Micronesians) and Melanesians and now more often as Austronesians and Papuans. Furthermore, it was said that these two peoples had arrived in the Pacific during two separate periods of settlement. Some questioned the simplicity of this story, but it continued to dominate how many thought about the islanders and their past. The simplicity of this chronicle masks its deficiencies as a framework for understanding human diversity and prehistory in the Pacific. It is not just simple, it is too simple. It is also based on unrealistic assumptions about the character and differentiation of human populations.

Oceanic Tooth-Size Variation as a Reflection of Biological and Cultural Mixing [and Comments and Reply]

Tooth size in Oceania varies from a minimum equivalent to the figure for the pre-Chinese inhabitants of Taiwan to a maximum equivalent to the figure for large-toothed Australian Aborigines. The minimum figure is found among the easternmost and weternmost inhabitants, and the maximum figure occurs in the highlands of New Guinea. Elsewhere, intermediate figures are evident, and it is apparent that the populations in which they can be observed display phenotypes that are intermediate in pigmentation and hair form between those on the Asian mainland and those whose identification with an equatorial habitat can be traced back into the Pleistocene. In addition, it is evident that the small-toothed populations speak languages that are most closely related to hypothetical Proto-Austronesian While the largest-toothed populations speak languages that are not related to Austronesian at all. To the extent that tooth size rises above the level of that found in the most typical Autronesian-speakers, the language deviates from hypothetical Proto-Austronesian. This suggests that the original population of New Guinea and some adjacent islands continued in situ from well back into the Pleistocene. Within the last 4,000 years, populations which had been shaped by long-term residence on the Asian mainland moved out into the Pacific via Taiwan and the Philippines. Superior navigation and resource utilization capabilities allowed them to colonize previously uninhabited islands maintaining much of their original phenotype, but where they encountered the earlier inhabitants on the larger Melanesian landmasses they display the effects of cultural and phenotypic mixing in proportion to the contribution of the two main parent populations.

Language and Material Culture on the Sepik Coast of Papua New Guinea: Using Social Network Analysis to Simulate, Graph, Identify, and Analyze Social and Cultural Boundaries Between Communities

ABSTRACT A basic premise underlying much of archaeology is the working assumption that similarities in material culture may be used as proxies for mapping social interactions between communities across time and space. What about the reverse? Do clear differences in material culture mark major social and cultural boundaries? The partitioning of people by language is perhaps more extreme on the Sepik Coast of Papua New Guinea than anywhere else on earth. Shortly before the First World War, the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago acquired ethnographic material culture collections from a number of village communities there. Computer-aided social network analysis of these collections suggests that isolation by distance, rather than by language, has patterned their cultural relationships. Furthermore, it would be difficult for archaeologists to successfully “reverse engineer” existing language boundaries along this coastline given only observed differences in material culture.

The 'sleeping giant' hypothesis and New Guinea's place in the prehistory of Greater Near Oceania

Linguists studying the Austronesian languages claim to demonstrate a human migration out of southern China, Taiwan or the northern Philippines that transformed the peoples and cultures of the Pacific. However, while local conditions favored divergence in customs, ways of speech and physical appearance during the Pleistocene, by 6,000 years ago New Guineans and their neighbors east and west were in the throes of major environmental changes. These changes may have profoundly affected how intimately people were in touch with one another near and far in the ancient voyaging corridor between Asia and the Pacific that flows just off New Guineas northern coastline.

The paradox of human population genetics at the end of the twentieth century

Cavalli‐Sforza, L. Luca, Paolo Menozzi, and Alberto Piazza. The History and Geography of Human Genes. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994. xi + 1032 pp. including appendices, literature cited, index, 8 color illustrations, 233 line drawings, and 522 maps.

Social Network Analysis of the Genetic Structure of Pacific Islanders

150.00 cloth. Gamble, Clive. Timewalkers: The Prehistory of Global Colonization. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993. X + 309 pp. including notes, bibliography, and index.

Geographic systems and human diversity in the North Solomons

24.95 cloth.