Archaeology and Language III

Artefacts, Languages and Texts

Roger Blench, Matthew Spriggs

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN: 9780415100540
• eBook ISBN: 9781134855858
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Archaeology
• Index: Social Sciences

Archaeology and Language III interprets results from archaeological data in terms of language distribution and change, providing the tools for a radical rewriting of the conventional discourse of prehistory. Individual chapters present case studies of artefacts and fragmentary textual materials, concerned with the reconstruction of houses, maritime technology, pottery and grave goods.

Part I

LINGUISTIC MODELS IN RECONSTRUCTING MATERIAL CULTURE

1 Early Oceanic architectural forms and settlement patterns: linguistic, archaeological and ethnological perspectives

ROGER GREEN AND ANDREW PAWLEY

ABBREVIATIONS

In citations of cognate sets the following abbreviations are used for names of subgroups and proto-languages.

Adm	Admiralty Islands
An	Austronesian
CMP	Central Malayo-Polynesian
CPa	Central Pacific (Fijian, Polynesian, Rotuman)
EMP	Eastern Malayo-Polynesian
Fij	Fijian
Fma	Formosan
Mic	Nuclear Micronesian
MM	Meso-Melanesian (C. and E. New Britain, New Ireland, W. Solomons)
NC	New Caledonia
NCV	North & Central Vanuatu
NNG	North New Guinea (from Sepik to Huon Gulf, plus E. New Britain)
PAn	Proto-Austronesian
PCEOc	Proto-Central Eastern Oceanic
PCPa	Proto-Central Pacific
PCPn	Proto-Central Polynesian
PEOc	Proto-Eastern Oceanic
PEPn	Proto-Eastern Polynesian
PMP	Proto-Malayo Polynesian
PNPn	Proto-Nuclear Polynesian
Pn	Polynesian
POc	Proto-Oceanic
PPn	Proto-Polynesian
PT	Papuan Tip (S.E. Papua and Central Province of Papua New Guinea)
PWMP	Proto-Western Malayo-Polynesian
PWO	Proto-Western Oceanic (comprising MM, NNG and PT)
SES	South-east Solomonic (Guadalcanal, Nggela, Bugotu)
SHWNG	South Halmahera–West New Guinea
SV	Southern Vanuatu
WMP	Western Malayo-Polynesian

AIMS AND METHODOLOGICAL PRELIMINARIES

Proto-Oceanic (POc) is the immediate common ancestor of the putative Oceanic subgroup, which comprises all the Austronesian languages of the Polynesian and Micronesian regions except Chamorro, Belau and possibly Yapese, and all those of the Melanesian region spoken east of 136 degrees E. This paper¹ seeks to reconstruct something of the architectural elements and settlement patterns of speakers of Proto-Oceanic and its immediate descendants, speech communities that many associate with the colonisation of southwest Oceania by bearers of the archaeological culture known as Lapita in the second half of the second millennium BC (Bellwood 1978; Pawley and Ross 1995; Shutler and Marck 1975; Spriggs 1995).

Some methodological questions are in order. Are such culture historical reconstructions feasible? Which disciplines and methods can provide evidence relevant to this task? What is each method good for, and to what extent, if at all, can evidence provided by different methods be connected?

At least three distinct disciplines – historical linguistics, archaeology and comparative ethnology – are used to do culture history. Each discipline has particular strengths and limitations. Blust (1976) points out ways in which archaeological and linguistic evidence can be complementary, corroboratory or contradictory. Although their combined testimonies are likely to reveal a fuller picture than any yielded by a single discipline, synthesising evidence from diverse disciplines and methods is not a straightforward matter. A synthesiser can accept the testimony of different disciplines, but it is not easy to know when the witnesses are talking about the same historical events: a situation that recalls the story of the six blind philosophers, each of whom touched a different part of an elephant, who then equated the parts with six unrelated objects.

The richest primary data for culture historical reconstruction come from comparative ethnology (or comparative ethnography, if you prefer). This discipline has the advantage, under favourable circumstances, of starting with descriptions of contemporary or historical societies and cultures that are immensely more complete than anything the archaeologist can hope to recover. However, the historical method of comparative ethnology is a fairly blunt instrument. The nature of the contrast between the historical methods of comparative ethnology and linguistics is discussed in Blust (1980a), Green (1994a) and Pawley and Ross (1993, 1995). The method is based on general arguments from typology. From contemporary reports of cultures, the comparative ethnologist may arrive at a theory of earlier cultural types and their transformations or their directions of diffusion. The proofs for drawing such inferences are essentially statistical, based on the frequency and distribution of types and typological associations in contemporary societies: often the most common and/or most widely distributed type is assumed to be the oldest. A problem familiar to archaeologists and linguists who use ethnographic analogy is that the reconstructed past becomes simply an extension and reflection of one’s knowledge of present-day traditional societies. Quite different pasts are not easily recognised.

The following remarks by Waterson about the antiquity of houses on piles and roof styles are fairly typical of the kinds of argumentation used by historical ethnologists:

Architectural styles can change rapidly – but they can also maintain continuity over surprisingly long periods. The antiquity of some aspects of architectural style in the Austronesian world is undoubted. Elements such as pile building and the saddle roof with its extended ridge line are first to be seen on the bronze drums of the Dong Son era, but to judge from their appearance in regions as distant from the [South-east Asian] mainland as Micronesia and New Guinea, it is reasonable to assume they are much older than their earliest surviving pictorial representations; in other words, that this style is a genuinely Austronesian invention.

(Waterson 1993: 221)

In her two-volume work, Kulthäuser in Nordneuguinea, Hauser-Schäublin writes of houses in a region that contains numerous non-Austronesian languages as well as a smaller number of Austronesian languages:

The hut on piles with supports carrying both the roof and the built-in floor seems to belong to Austronesian cultures. On the North Coast both elements are combined: the first floor platform is supported by its own poles, whereas the upper floors are slotted into the horizontal beams. In areas settled by non-Austronesian groups, all parts of the building are traditionally lashed with lianas. Pin and peg techniques are only known in those regions where Austronesian languages are spoken. The Middle Sepik cultures took over the idea of buildings with projecting gables from the Austro-nesians who settled at certain places on the North Coast. They adapted it to their own technology and architectural experience, giving it a new expression.

Hauser-Schäublin 1989: 618, translated from the German, in Waterson 1993).

Note the temporal prior...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of figures
• List of tables
• List of contributor
• Preface
• General introduction
• Introducing the papers
• Part I Linguistic models in reconstructing material culture
• Part II Interpreting text
• Index