| Abstract: |
Introduction: The island societies of Melanesia have inspired a lengthy anthropological discourse on exchange and interaction, in which the classic monographs of Malinowski (1922) and Fortune (1932) on the <i>kula</i>, or Harding (1967) on the Siassi, are justly famous. Yet despite this long-standing anthropological interest in Melanesian exchange, until recently the emphasis has been almost exclusively ethnographic, and hence, <i>synchronic</i>. Anthropological attempts to explain Melanesian exchange systems are generally couched in functionalist terms. For example, it has been proposed that the <i>kula</i> exists in order to "recirculate unevenly distributed material resources," or alternatively, that it functions in a Durkheimian sense of "maintaining a social order" (Leach 1983: 5-8). Such explanations are wholly post hoc and ahistorical. Recently, archaeologists have begun to take up the problem of exchange in Melanesian prehistory, thus finally opening up the possibilities of a diachronic understanding of these complex networks. Archaeological work on the <i>kula</i> itself, although still preliminary (Irwin 1983), suggests a time depth of perhaps five hundred years, before which somewhat different exchange connections tied many of the Massim islands to communities along the Papuan coast. Allen's studies of the south coastal Papuan <i>hiri</i> (1977, 1984a), Irwin's Mailu work (1985), and that of Egloff at Collingwood Bay (1979) have demonstrated that the whole Papuan-Massim region has a complex prehistory of shifting exchange networks that extend back in time at least two thousand years. In the Siassi region, Lilley (1986) has similarly documented a lengthy prehistory of ex-change relations linking the Huon Peninsula and New Britain, of which the ethnographically attested Siassi trade network is only the most recent configuration. That long-distance trade or exchange indeed has a long antiquity in Island Melanesia is shown by evidence for the movement ofTalasea-source obsidian to New Ireland by about 7000 B.P. Based on current knowledge of western Melanesian prehistory, the most geographically extensive-and possibly complex-long-distance exchange network ever to have existed in this region appeared rather suddenly at about 3600 B.P. This network links sites of the distinctive Lapita Cultural Complex (Green 1979).
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