On the ‘Pacification’ of the European Neolithic: ethnographic analogy and the neglect of history

Abstract

In this journal, Spriggs has recently criticized the use of anthropological ethnographies from New Guinea as a source of analogy for the archaeology of the European Neolithic, arguing that they fail to reckon with how radically colonialism had changed New Guinea's communities by the time anthropological fieldwork got under way. Old World archaeologists looking to the Pacific for analogical inspiration, he suggests, would do better to look to its archaeological record. There is much to what Spriggs claims. However, he exaggerates or misinterprets the scale of contact-induced change on New Guinea; his broader case against Melanesian ethnographic analogy unfairly dismisses a substantial corpus of anthropological ethnography; it ignores a massive archive of relevant historical documentation; and it adopts an unnecessarily restrictive view of the uses to which ethnographic analogies can be put.

Keywords:

• Spriggs
• ethnographic analogy
• Pacific
• New Guinea
• colonialism
• archaeological theory

Acknowledgements

For assistance or comments on this paper, I warmly thank Ulrike Claas, Terry Hays, Dan Sandweiss, and two anonymous reviewers.

Department of Anthropology, University of Maine, USA

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