ABSTRACT
New Guinean stone artefact assemblages are somewhat infamous for their amorphous quality (White 1972, 1977). A typical New Guinean lithic assemblage contains large quantities of debitage, a very low incidence of secondary retouch, and few if any recognisable, repeated forms or ‘types’. Where stratigraphic sequences have been analysed, these typically reveal little or no change over time, even over long periods (White 1972). Naturally, there are exceptions to this generalisation – the major ones being the ground and polished stone adzes and axes, known from a number of Highlands sites in Papua New Guinea from ‘about 4,000-3,000 BC’ (Bulmer 1991: 475); the famous waisted blades known from various Late Pleistocene localities (Bulmer 1964, 1966; White et al. 1970; Groube 1984, 1989; Groube et al. 1986); and the distinctive sago-adzes described by Rhoads (1980) from the Gulf Province of Papua New Guinea. However, these rather specific exceptions merely highlight the fact that, for the most part, New Guinean lithic assemblages really are ‘crude, colourless and unenterprising’, as White (1977) suggested in a parody of early views of Australasian lithic assemblages in general.
