Language and Material Culture on the Sepik Coast of Papua New Guinea: Using Social Network Analysis to Simulate, Graph, Identify, and Analyze Social and Cultural Boundaries Between Communities

ABSTRACT

A basic premise underlying much of archaeology is the working assumption that similarities in material culture may be used as proxies for mapping social interactions between communities across time and space. What about the reverse? Do clear differences in material culture mark major social and cultural boundaries? The partitioning of people by language is perhaps more extreme on the Sepik Coast of Papua New Guinea than anywhere else on earth. Shortly before the First World War, the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago acquired ethnographic material culture collections from a number of village communities there. Computer-aided social network analysis of these collections suggests that isolation by distance, rather than by language, has patterned their cultural relationships. Furthermore, it would be difficult for archaeologists to successfully “reverse engineer” existing language boundaries along this coastline given only observed differences in material culture.

Keywords:

• material culture
• language
• archaeology
• Melanesia

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I want to thank Ethan Cochrane and Carl Lipo for introducing me to social network analysis, and Ethan Cochrane, Mark Donohue, Jim Koeppl, Carl Lipo, and Esther Schechter, as well as two anonymous reviewers, for comments and assistance with the evolving manuscript.