A Holocene sequence from Walufeni Cave, Southern Highlands Province, and its implications for the settlement of the Great Papuan Plateau, Papua New Guinea
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Lamb, Lara
Leavesley, Matthew
Manne, Tiina
Fairbairn, Andrew
Coe, Andrew
Lowe, Kelsey M
Beni, Teppsy
Neanda, Betty
Aubert, Maxime
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This paper presents preliminary results from the 2019 excavations at Walufeni Cave, at the eastern end of the Great Papuan Plateau (GPP) in western Papua New Guinea. Preliminary dating and analysis of the unfinished excavations at Walufeni Cave span the Holocene and probably continue into the Late Pleistocene, confirming the presence of people on the Plateau from at least the Early Holocene and potentially much earlier. The data presented here offer a site-specific model of early intensive site use from at least 10,000 years ago, then ephemeral use, followed by a sustained Late Holocene occupation. Although there are significant changes in the quantity of material discard over time, there is little evidence for significant change in the subsistence base or technology, reflecting a degree of relative homogeneity until the Late Holocene, when we see the introduction of pig, a change of focus in the plant economy and the presence of marine shell from the southern coast.
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Australian Archaeology
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89
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1
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© 2023 The Author(s). Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/), which permits non-commercial re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited, and is not altered, transformed, or built upon in any way. The terms on which this article has been published allow the posting of the Accepted Manuscript in a repository by the author(s) or with their consent.
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Archaeology
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Barker, B; Lamb, L; Leavesley, M; Manne, T; Fairbairn, A; Coe, A; Lowe, KM; Beni, T; Neanda, B; Aubert, M, A Holocene sequence from Walufeni Cave, Southern Highlands Province, and its implications for the settlement of the Great Papuan Plateau, Papua New Guinea, Australian Archaeology, 2023, 89 (1), pp. 47-65