Keveoki 1: Exploring the hiri ceramics trade at a short-lived village site near the Vailala River, Papua New Guinea
01st June 2009
Bruno David, Nick Araho, Bryce Barker, Alois Kuaso and Ian Moffat
Investigations at the newly discovered, once-coastal but now inland archaeological village site of Keveoki 1 allows us to characterise the nature and antiquity of ancestral hiri trade ceramics around 450–500 cal. BP in the recipient Vailala River-Kea Kea villages of the Gulf Province of the southern coast of Papua New Guinea. This paper reports on the decorated ceramics from Keveoki 1, where a drainage channel cut in 2004 revealed a short-lived village site with a rich, stratified ceramic assemblage. It represents a rare account of the ceramic assemblage from a short duration village on a relic beach ridge in southern Papua New Guinea, and contributes to ongoing attempts to refine ceramic sequences in the recipient (western) end of the hiri system of long-distance maritime trade. Because of the presence of a single occupational period of a few decades at most, short duration sites such as Keveoki 1 allow for chronological refinement of ceramic conventions in a way that multilevel sites usually cannot, owing to the lack of stratigraphic mixing between chronologically separate ceramic assemblages in the former.
Image caption: Keveoki 1, showing drainage channel after heavy rains, with magnetometer survey in progress (published in Australian Archaeology 68:12). Bruno David, Nick Araho, Bryce Barker, Alois Kuaso and Ian MoffatKeveoki 1: Exploring the hiri ceramics trade at a short-lived village site near the Vailala River, Papua New Guinea
June 2009
68
11-22
Article
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