Is archaeology a western science? Indigenous interpretation of the subsurface in the Papuan Gulf (Papua New Guinea)

Chris Urwin (Postdoctoral fellow, Anthropology Department, National Museum of Natural History, Smithsonian Institution)

The professionalised discipline of archaeology has a well-documented (if complex) history, with intellectual roots in northern and central Europe. Today, the discipline is diverse and global; it has been transformed by myriad ideological and cultural influences, including the new methods and perspectives Indigenous people have brought to the ostensibly Western science. But are there alternative archaeologies – ways of interpreting the past through cultural materials and landscapes – which developed separately? In this paper I describe a habitual form of archaeology conducted by people in part of the Papuan Gulf (Papua New Guinea).

In Orokolo Bay, people interpret and negotiate their ancestral past using subsurface archaeological and geomorphological features. When cultivating and clearing land at past village sites, locals unearth buried pottery sherds and thin black lenses of sand. These features help anchor and enrich cosmological and more recent historical (genealogical) narratives. The features are reminders, material evidence of the actions of the ancestors and of the spatiality and antiquity of past village sites. I conclude by unpacking other non-Western ways of reading the material past to place this tradition in regional and global context. I argue that understandings of the (sub)surface are crucial to the construction and maintenance of oral traditions.

Biography

Chris Urwin is a postdoctoral fellow in anthropology at the National Museum of Natural History (Smithsonian Institution, USA). His current research examines narratives of Indigenous voyaging and American collecting through the social histories of Pacific canoes acquired by the Smithsonian Institution. He completed his PhD at Monash University in 2019, for which he worked with villages in Orokolo Bay (PNG) to establish radiocarbon chronologies for their ancestral sites, alongside a programme to document local oral traditions. Since his doctoral research, Chris has worked as archaeology curator at Museums Victoria and as a research fellow at Monash Indigenous Studies Centre (Monash University).