A dentate-stamped Lapita dish from the central south coast of Papua

Abstract

The chance recovery of a large pottery sherd from a flat-bottomed dish with dentate-stamped decoration in Galley Reach, about 50 km northwest of Port Moresby, raises interesting questions concerning interactions between Lapita arrivals and the established Melanesian communities of mainland Papua New Guinea. While the geographical proximity of the find to the Caution Bay Lapita sites would suggest some connection, an analysis of the sherd indicates that it may be older than Lapita at Caution Bay. Comparisons with Island Melanesian Lapita sites indicate that the sherd is mid- to late Lapita in age, both in its form and decoration. As such, it joins the corpus of chance PNG mainland and near mainland Lapita finds of similar age. This developing pattern may have a different genesis to the Lapita dispersal into Remote Oceania and instead reflect trade-based connections between island and mainland communities in the first millennium BC. The data remain ambiguous on this point.