Multi‑Cultural Frontiers and Influences on Lapita Dispersals in Papua New Guinea

Ben Shaw

Australian National University, Australia; ben.shaw@anu.edu.au

The island of New Guinea hosts approximately 17% of the world's languages on less than 0.5% of its landmass, attesting to a long and complex multicultural human history. Past peoples would therefore have had to regularly negotiate cultural frontiers that required dynamic strategies to develop and maintain connections across linguistic and cultural boundaries. Present‑day diversity is influenced by the cumulative outcomes of these interactions, that can be investigated archaeologically. This paper explores the application of multicultural frontiers as a conceptual and interpretive framework using evidence from several recently excavated and investigated sites associated with the dispersal of Lapita culture on the north coast and in the Massim island region of Papua New Guinea from ~3300 years ago. Here I suggest that the ways in which new technologies, languages, ideas, and peoples were incorporated into, or resisted by, existing cultural landscapes varied, creating a mosaic of divergent cultural histories that shaped longer‑term trajectories of human settlement in these regions. This modelling approach can be applied to other parts of the globe where interactions between different cultures induced fundamental changes to societies.