Re: Do Eskimos count like New Guineans?

On 8 Jan, 13:42, "benli...@xxxxxxxxxx" <benli...@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
On Jan 8, 12:15 pm, richard01 <richardparke...@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:

[...]

The archaeology

hardly gets a mention, though it fails to support either his claim
that Vanuatu and New Caledonia were settled a lot earlier than
Polynesia, nor that Maori left central Polynesia before Rapanui.

It fails to support my claim because no-one has yet found a
definitive
'first settlement date' almost anywhere east of Buka, in the Solomon
Islands.

Not true. Dates for the whole Lapita area have been stable for quite a
while now, even though new sites continue to be discovered. They range
from about 3500 BP in the far west to, I think about 2800 in Samoa.
Check recent surveys by Kirch for the figures. In other words, the
interval between first settlement of Vanuatu/New Caledonia and that of
Fiji/Western Polynesia is probably no more than 2-300 years.


The Lapita phenomenon did indeed happen very fast, but it's been
vastly overblown by archaeologists, who don't have much more than pots
and bits of chipped stone to go by.
See: Contradictions in Lapita pottery, a composite clone. (Lapita
pottery culture of the Southwest Pacific).
W.R. Ambrose. Antiquity v71.n273 (Sept 1997): pp525(14).

Who argues that Lapita pottery wasn't in any way a technological
marvel of an introduction of cooking and water pots, etc, but only a
stylistic signal sent out by a relatively small group of voyagers. It
was so badly made that you couldn't cook in the stuff. That came
later, with Plainware, but it did look good. In other words, it was a
hula-hoop, or a Teenage Ninja Turtle phenomenon, that spread fast, and
petered out almost as fast. There is no definite connection between it
and any Austronesian expansion, or wave of settlement.

Pamela Swadling discovered much older, and more practical pottery, in
the Sepik/Ramu area of mainland New Guinea.

(My personal experience in this field, and a salutary lesson, was
sitting with some B'dou in a cave in Petra, in Jordan (Rose Red City -
think Indiana Jones) making ancient pots for tourist suckers. I made a
magnificent 'Nabataean pot', inscribed it: 'APIS POTIAM', then cooked
it, and broke it into pieces before sticking it back together for Abu
Zib's kids to sell. And they did, like hotcakes; I even had a mould
made up as a present for Abu Zib, so he could mass-produce 2000yr old
APIS POTIAM pots - (try repeating APIS POTIAM with different accents
and emphasis, and you'll soon see the basis of what fooled a
generation of tourist suckers). Harrison Ford contacted me recently
(via Abu Zib's email) to ask why his own very special ancient pot had
fallen apart so quickly.

regards

Richard
.

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