| Popis: |
On 1 November 1910, after a year-and-a-half collecting ethnological specimens in Melanesia for The Field Museum, the anthropologist A. B. Lewis called in at the Catholic mission station at Vuna Pope on the Gazelle Peninsula of eastern New Britain in what is now Papua New Guinea. Here he was shown a peculiar kind of pottery that had been found by one of the Catholic priests that was unlike any he had observed or collected in other parts of Melanesia. He wrote in his diary that “On the island of Watom broken pottery is found, with ornamental patterns of fine incised lines and dots. This is different from anything I have seen”. Lewis was one of the first anthropologists or archaeologists to see these distinctive potsherds, some of which were described in two short papers by Father Otto Meyer. Having been Franz Boas's fourth PhD student as well as a curator at The Field Museum, Lewis was broadly trained as an anthropologist. He had seen dozens of pottery-making traditions in Melanesia, both contemporary and archaeological, yet he did not recognize and identify this style of dentate stamped potsherd as Lapita as any Pacific archaeologist would today. The reason was that it would be more than 40 years before similar sherds would be found at the site now known as Lapita in New Caledonia, which gave this pottery the name by which it is known today. |
