GUNS, GERMS AND STEEL - Cloverport Independent Schools

SPEEDBOAT TO POLYNESIA • 3 4 9
Instead of the usual small village of low huts, surrounded by large gardens
sufficient to feed the village, and with a few canoes drawn up on the beach,
most of the area of Malai was occupied by two-story wooden houses side
by side, leaving no ground available for gardens—the New Guinea equivalent
of downtown Manhattan. On the beach were rows of big canoes. It
turned out that Malai islanders, besides being fishermen, were also specialized
potters, carvers, and traders, who lived by making beautifully decorated
pots and wooden bowls, transporting them in their canoes to larger
islands and exchanging their wares for pigs, dogs, vegetables, and other
necessities. Even the timber for Malai canoes was obtained by trade from
villagers on nearby Umboi Island, since Malai does not have trees big
enough to be fashioned into canoes.
In the days before European shipping, trade between islands in the New
Guinea region was monopolized by such specialized groups of canoebuilding
potters, skilled in sailing without navigational instruments, and
living on offshore islets or occasionally in mainland coastal villages. By the
time I reached Malai in 1972, those indigenous trade networks had collapsed
or contracted, partly because of competition from European motor
vessels and aluminum pots, partly because the Australian colonial government
forbade long-distance canoe voyaging after some accidents in which
traders were drowned. I would guess that the Lapita potters were the interisland
traders of the New Guinea region in the centuries after 1600 B.C.
The spread of Austronesian languages to the north coast of New Guinea
itself, and over even the largest Bismarck and Solomon islands, must have
occurred mostly after Lapita times, since Lapita sites themselves were concentrated
on Bismarck islets. Not until around A.D. 1 did pottery derived
from the Lapita style appear on the south side of New Guinea's southeast
peninsula. When Europeans began exploring New Guinea in the late 19th
century, all the remainder of New Guinea's south coast still supported populations
only of Papuan-language speakers, even though Austronesianspeaking
populations were established not only on the southeastern peninsula
but also on the Aru and Kei Islands (lying 70-80 miles off western
New Guinea's south coast). Austronesians thus had thousands of years in
which to colonize New Guinea's interior and its southern coast from
nearby bases, but they never did so. Even their colonization of North New
Guinea's coastal fringe was more linguistic than genetic: all northern
coastal peoples remained predominantly New Guineans in their genes. At