West New Guinea’s Deep Human History: A Missing Piece of the Pacific Puzzle

Dylan Gaffney1* and Marlin Tolla2

1University of Oxford, United Kingdom; 2National Research and Innovation Agency (BRIN), Indonesia; *dylan.gaffney@arch.ox.ac.uk

West New Guinea represents an archaeological enigma, but is critical for understanding the Pacific’s human past, from the Pleistocene to the Holocene. This paper synthesises the sparse information available about the environmental and cultural history of the area and identifies seven key themes to direct ongoing and future research: the early peopling of Oceania, human adaptation within varied and challenging ecologies, the emergence of food production, the dispersal of languages, the connections between the Pacific and global trade networks, the history of museums and collecting practices, and the transformative lives of material culture. The paper then describes recent advances relating to these themes, building upon the recently published volume West New Guinea: Social, Biological, and Material

Histories.