Social networks, language, and material culture on New Guinea

It is common in both the popular imagination and in scientific research to treat humans as members of distinctive ethnolinguistic groups, populations, or races with different histories. How to best model human diversity has reemerged as a significant issue owing to the prominence of ancient genetic evidence now being used to study the human past. The island of New Guinea, where people speak more than 800 languages or dialects, has served as a test case of competing models of how human biocultural diversity is created and maintained. We present a new test of the degree to which language and material cultural patterning align, using a sample of elaborately decorated bone daggers from museum collections spanning large areas of New Guinea and its surrounds. We compare technological and stylistic variability in these daggers to language as well as a large ethnographically modelled social network. We find that how people socially engage with each other is more predictive of how they make daggers than what language they speak, particularly for daggers dating to the later 19th and early 20th century. While it is often assumed that ancient communities were relatively socially isolated from one another, we argue that there is no reason to assume this default hypothesis about ancient social life. Empirical studies of material culture, and emerging archaeological and genetic understanding of the New Guinean past suggests that language diversity there was developed and maintained within structured social networks linking communities to one another.