GUNS, GERMS AND STEEL - Cloverport Independent Schools

SPEEDBOAT TO POLYNESIA • 3 4 7
All this suggests that descendants of Austronesian invaders and of original
New Guineans have been trading, intermarrying, and acquiring each
other's genes and languages for several thousand years on the North New
Guinea coast and its islands. That long contact transferred Austronesian
languages more effectively than Austronesian genes, with the result that
most Bismarck and Solomon islanders now speak Austronesian languages,
even though their appearance and most of their genes are still Papuan. But
neither the genes nor the languages of the Austronesians penetrated New
Guinea's interior. The outcome of their invasion of New Guinea was thus
very different from the outcome of their invasion of Borneo, Celebes, and
other big Indonesian islands, where their steamroller eliminated almost all
traces of the previous inhabitants' genes and languages. To understand
what happened in New Guinea, let us now turn to the evidence from
archaeology.
AROUND 1600 B.C., almost simultaneously with their appearance on
Halmahera, the familiar archaeological hallmarks of the Austronesian
expansion—pigs, chickens, dogs, red-slipped pottery, and adzes of ground
stone and of giant clamshells—appear in the New Guinea region. But two
features distinguish the Austronesians' arrival there from their earlier
arrival in the Philippines and Indonesia.
The first feature consists of pottery designs, which are aesthetic features
of no economic significance but which do let archaeologists immediately
recognize an early Austronesian site. Whereas most early Austronesian
pottery in the Philippines and Indonesia was undecorated, pottery in the
New Guinea region was finely decorated with geometric designs arranged
in horizontal bands. In other respects the pottery preserved the red slip and
the vessel forms characteristic of earlier Austronesian pottery in Indonesia.
Evidently, Austronesian settlers in the New Guinea region got the idea of
"tattooing" their pots, perhaps inspired by geometric designs that they
had already been using on their bark cloth and body tattoos. This style is
termed Lapita pottery, after an archaeological site named Lapita, where it
was described.
The much more significant distinguishing feature of early Austronesian
sites in the New Guinea region is their distribution. In contrast to those in
the Philippines and Indonesia, where even the earliest known Austronesian