Edai Siabo 535

8. K.Kohu Moi. (English). Son of Moi Higo, redactor of version 1. Former Education Department teacher and magistrate (1979:1-81).

9. Moi Avei. (English). Motu, Boera village. Served as a welfare officer in Darwin and as a senior official in the Papua New Guinea Government. Now in private business. Abridged translation of version 1 (1976).

10. Eno Madaha. (Motu). Motu, Boera village. Villager bom c. 1917. Cassette AC32/134 (University of Papua New Guinea Library series-Oram tapes), 5 October 1972. (Part Only).

11. Dairi Dairi. (Motu). Motu, Porebada village. Villager b.c. 1906. Cassette AC32/62, 13 January 1974.12. Lohia Dogae. (Motu). Motu, Elevala village. Villager born c. 1910. Claimed to have learned this version from

Eka Koro of Vailala, Gulf province while on hiri expedition. Cassette AC32/62, 13 November 1974.13. Iamui Maraga (Motu). Koita, Boera village. Villager bom c. 1915. Cassette Ac32/68, 26 August 1974.14. Lohia ’Ume. (Roro). Roro, Tarova village, Kairuku sub-province. Villager bom c.1920. Cassette AC32/98,

24 October 1975.15. Ivia Laura. (Hiri Motu). Purari, Ravikapara village, Kikori sub-province. Bom 1932. Innovative cultivator.

He has spent some time in Port Moresby. Cassette AC32/134, 17 January 1979.16. J.H.P. Murray. (English). Lieutenant-Governor, Papua, 1907-1940. (n.d.:1013).17. L. Lett. (English). Planter and government official under Sir Hubert Murray. Wrote several books on Papua

including a biography of Murray. (1946).

ORAL PREHISTORY AND THE SEQUENCE OF EVENTS

Marie Reay Australian National University

Anthropologists are not so contemptuous of speculative history as their predecessors were. Several have tried to account for social development in the New Guinea Highlands, either in the region as a whole or in the contrasting eastern and western extremities of the region. The aim of this paper1 is more modest. My interest in speculative history derives from curiosity about the prehistoric stone artifacts found in many parts of the Highlands and abundantly in the Mid-Wahgi area. According to the Bulmers (1964:67-9), upward of 160 of the artifacts had been recorded from the Wahgi valley. This gives no idea of the proliferation of the artifacts found in the vicinity of Minj alone during 1953-65.2 Sometimes a man unearthed a broken mortar when making a new garden. When this was an old abandoned burial ground, made available for cultivation by the death of all who had known the people buried there, he assumed that the article belonged to one of his ancestors, for it was customary to smash a dead m an’s possessions and bury them with him. He therefore kept the object in case it brought him good fortune. But it was also commonplace to discover a mortar on a mountain path or a pestle or clubhead among the stones piled up by the river in flood. Men eager for money hawked artifacts for sale to expatriates, who purchased them as curios. As well as the artifacts that were publicly accessible, some were lodged in the Kuma’s ‘taboo houses’ (nggar m a-bit). These were the war- magic houses (Aufenanger 1959, Reay 1987). Apart from the war-sorcerers and war-magicians themselves, only a few mature men - group leaders and distinguished warriors - knew about the stone objects in the ‘taboo houses’ and were aware that the mortars were used for mixing potions of snake venom and pig’s blood. The artifacts strewn about the surface of the valley do not figure in oral prehistory or mythology. Nevertheless I am using these sources, together with some aspects of modem ethnography, to flesh out the archaeological findings and construct a kind of preliminary sketch towards the life history of a particular culture.3

The Wahgi swamplands extend from the vicinity of Mount Hagen eastwards into the Mid-Wahgi area. The Kuma and their congeners lived in the mountains and on the spurs and ridges that surround the valley. They avoided the unhealthy and defenceless environment of the swampy valley floor unless driven there in warfare. Swamp reclamation, malaria control, and the suppression of warfare enabled some to come down from the hills and plant coffee there in colonial times.

At Kuk in the upper Wahgi swamps towards Mount Hagen, prehistorians have discovered that a sizeable population used a sophisticated irrigation system for intensive cultivation, presumably of taro, long before the introduction o f the sweet potato (Golson 1976 and elsewhere).4 About the same time as the sweet potato arrived, an ash fall destroyed the swamp-dwellers’ irrigation system and, reduced in number, they moved to higher ground. Some much less developed peoples inhabited the surrounding hills. The mysterious stone

536 Marie Reay

artifacts found scattered in the surface of the valley appear to have originated with the sophisticated swamp- dwellers.

A people’s oral prehistory is their own version of what things were like before they were as they were in living memory, their own conception of the remote past. This may be completely mythologised like that, for example, of the Australian Aborigines. But the oral prehistory of the Kuma is quite separate from their mythology. Prosaic accounts of the remote past feature ‘people’ and ‘men’ and ‘women’, but never individual characters. The myths, by contrast, are stories of individual persons, who are mostly named. Spirits interact with these characters as if they too are real people; and there are many magical happenings.

Kuma speak of a wild period when men roamed the forest as solitary hunters, sleeping in rock shelters and in the aerial roots of giant trees. They had no proper language but grunted like wild pigs. M an’s basic nature, which is even today that of a wild pig, found free expression in snatching anything he wanted and destroying anything that displeased him. He fought over women. Women themselves were more sedentary. They fashioned crude shelters where they slept with their children, but moved periodically to ensure a plentiful supply of wild vegetables. They cooked and ate wild taro but did not cultivate it.

The people abandoned this existence to settle down to raise pigs and cultivate sweet potato.5 At this time they learned a civilised language and the rules for living together in groups. Up to this time they had left their dead exposed on the hillsides, but now they interred them in unused drainage ditches.

The oral prehistory of the Kuma echoes W atson’s (1965) theory that the sweet potato precipitated social development. But it is unsatisfactory as a sequence of events. There is a sudden leap from hunting and gathering to cultivating sweet potato, from roaming about individually to living together in groups. There is no explanation of how people came to abandon a language that is so despised that it is dismissed as ‘grunting like wild pigs’.

My interpetation is that when the swamp-dwellers fled from the valley floor some of them fetched up in Kumaland where they introduced pig-keeping and agriculture to the hunters and gatherers after they themselves had switched from taro to sweet potato cultivation. I turn now to Kuma mythology for clues as to how this may have happened.

The myths are in no sequence, but I have been able to sort many of them into three prehistoric periods on the basis of residence patterns changing in the direction of modem practice. First there are the nomadic hunters and semi-settled women of oral prehistory. Second, a few people have formed permanent settlements while the rest are still hunting and gathering. Third, all are permanently settled, though not yet in large segmented groups; the men of one settlement arc a set of brothers or a father and his son or sons. There is another change. Residence at marriage is uxorilocal in the first two phases, the man residing with the woman; but in the third phase it is virilocal, the rule followed in modem times.

In the earliest period the myths depict a single homogeneous population roaming the forest. But in the two ensuing periods others are inhabiting the valley at the same time. The myths present these beings as spirits, but they intermarry with real people and I suggest that they are based on populations that were just as real, but in some respects different from the mainstream ‘real people’.

So-called ‘spirits of place’ (kono kibe) are present in the second period. They are named for the places where they live and they keep domestic pigs. They hold Konggar pig festivals and the real people attend these as spectators and receivers of pork. I suggest that the ‘spirits of place’ are based on the former swamp- dwellers, now settled on the high ground. Male ‘spirits of place’ marry real girls - not those who are shacked up in the forest with their mothers, but girls living with their fathers and brothers on cleared land in permanent settlements. There are suggestions that some of the communities of ‘spirits of place’ are greatly depleted, despite the ability of others to hold pig festivals. By the third prehistoric period these spirits are no longer present. Presumably the last have been absorbed by the real people.

Spirits of the forest (kibe kangi) are present in the third period. They have no abode but the forest itself where men out hunting occasionally encounter them. They do not eat proper food but subsist on berries. They have magical powers including the ability to transform themselves into animals and objects of the forest. There are cannibal witches among the real people, always old men and women who live alone. Modem witches are also cannibals, though they are not necessarily old and do not live alone. Kuma attribute to them the kibe kangi's power to change into animals and, like the spirits of the forest, they are outsiders and exhibit eccentric behaviour. The mythical spirits of the forest may well be based on some dropouts from social development who clung to their nomadic mode, perhaps deterred by the hard labour of agriculture and pig husbandry.

These categories o f spirits survive as supernatural constructs to modem times. The kibe kangi are bothersome and even dangerous. But the ‘spirits of place’ are the guardians of pigs at the particular places where they reside. And a figurine of a bird, which was sometimes lodged in a ‘taboo house’, was supposed to protect the people of the place where the house was situated. The hereditary guardian of one ‘taboo house’ told me that the spirits gave the stone bird to his ancestors.

Oral Prehistory and the Sequence of Events 537

A prominent character in the myths is the hunter and wanderer Noldari. In a myth of the second period Noldari’s mother is a frog. It is very tempting to infer that the hero himself may have been a swamp-dweller, for he was responsible for certain innovations and his very name translates as ‘water (nogllnolt) left-hand direction’.6 Noldari figures in all the myths purporting to account for the origin of marriage. These span all three prehistoric periods. In a myth of the second period, when the ‘spirits of place’ or resettled swamp- dwellers are present, Noldari discovers the sweet potato by encountering a community of women who are cultivating it. If Noldari himself is a renegade swamp-dweller who goes off by himself to try his luck in the forest while the others are settling themselves in communities, he is more likely than other hunters would be to be led by the woman in the myth to view the sweet potato field. Noldari himself has not seen sweet potatoes before.

It is unusual in the myths for a man to marry a woman from a culture more developed than his own. Usually a male ‘spirit of place’ marries a real woman, and a real man marries either a real woman or a spirit of the forest. Noldari marries one of the sweet potato women and in a myth of the third period a man makes a woman of high status his ‘first’ (kumna) wife although he has already acquired another. The myths reserve the term ‘spirits of place’ for men. The sweet potato women are simply ‘wom en’, even though they are cultivating crops that are unknown to ‘real people’.

The Konggar pig festival was already present in the Kum a’s second prehistoric period. The swamp- dwellers must have invented this after settling on high ground. It is reasonable to postulate a certain uniformity of culture throughout the swamplands; and people to the west of the swamps practise the linear m oka and tee rather than the radiating Konggar. The sophisticated agriculturalists would have influenced different prehistoric populations in different ways. This makes it even harder to surmise how and why the stone artifacts were abandoned and not incorporated in the cultures we know today. Nic Modjeska (1977) has suggested that the swamp-dwellers used them as items of exchange. But they are unsuitably heavy objects for hunters (or even shifting villagers) to acquire, even if they had the same use, religious, and aesthetic value for people of such contrasting life styles. Daryl Feil (1987) has posited that the first item of exchange was the pig. But the archaeological evidence does not support the proposition that the swamp-dwellers kept herds of domestic pigs; and hill-dwellers who lived by hunting had more direct access to wild ones. My theory is that the first exchange was of vegetable foods specific to the swamps and the forest - cultivated taro, which is much more palatable to all tastes than wild taro, for that delectable and nutritious food o f the mountains, pandanus nuts.

In living memory the spectacular w ubalt nut festival was a delayed exchange of pandanus nuts. In colonial times this changed radically in response to government and missionary initiatives. Only clans inhabiting the high side valleys had direct access to the massive quantity of pandanus nuts required for the festival and groups living on the edge of the main valley had to depend on individual links for the supply of nuts. In the mid-1950s an enormous surplus of peanuts, which the government had been promoting to increase the consumption of protein, enabled such disadvantaged groups to substitute peanuts for pandanus and exchange like for like among themselves. By 1960 the government had switched its promotion to cash-producing coffee and this had taken over the extra gardens traditionally devoted to the production of vegetables for exchange. These had been included with the nuts and also exchanged separately. Missionaries were attacking the religious pig festival and in the mid-1960s effectively abolished it. Determined to detach the killing of pigs from pagan concerns, they introduced it into celebrations of baptism and encouraged people, all hungry for money, to butcher their animals for market. A w u ba lt in 1964 included several live pigs, some tinned food and loaves of bread, and fewer traditional items than previously. A festival held in 1968, re-named p a ti to satisfy the missionaries that it was a secular occasion, featured 20 pigs and the recipients were planning to reciprocate with 50 pigs some years later. But soon the p a ti was requiring hundreds of pigs as the sole item of exchange.7 I am not, of course, arguing that the exchange of nuts for taro developed into an exchange of pigs in prehistoric times. The pig and nut festivals of the 1950s were quite separate and it is reasonable to assume that their development would have been different.

The parties to the w u b a lt were clans that had never been at war with one another and so were virtual strangers who had never intermarried. It was an invitation to consider exchanging women. So it may have been in early relations between the people of the swamps and the hills.

According to a snatch of oral prehistory recorded by Vicedom and Tischner (cited by Blong 1982:4) as a myth, the ash fall ruined the crops and fields. The people went hungry while waiting for new crops to grow and after a month nearly all the people died.

When it rained ashes the swamp-dwellers suffered a double disaster. Their principal means of subsistence was destroyed; so also was their chance of obtaining food by exchange. All they had left to exchange were women. I consider that the first pig to enter the exchange system was the bride-price pig, captured in the wild by the hill-dwellers. The swamp-dwellers would have tasted pork, even if they did not yet keep pigs, and in the time of hunger they would have been desperate. Observing pigs in captivity before killing them for food

538 Marie Reay

would have given them the idea of looking after them and fattening them. Or, if they already kept domesticated pigs, they would have lost many of these in the ash fall and the hill-dwellers would have to supply them with feral pigs to replenish their herds. The swamp-dwellers might well offer women as an earnest of their intention to reciprocate the gift of live pigs with pork. The spirits’ Konggar of the second prehistoric period would then be a delayed reciprocation.

The stone-workers died out as distinct communities and the survivors joined colonies of newly settled real people through marrying into them. Such a survivor attaching himself to a small family group would accelerate social development. He could school them in sweet potato cultivation and pig husbandry. He could guide them in the rules for living together. They would gradually become monolingual in his civilised language and discard the rough vernacular their descendants were to describe as ‘grunting like wild pigs’.

At this time the swamp-dwellers had already discarded the stone artifacts; otherwise we might expect to find some reference to them in Kuma mythology. But the swamp-dwellers had already settled on the high ground, since the artifacts were lying there and not in the swamplands. I suggest that they were deliberately discarded.

I have spoken of the artifacts originating with the swamp-dwellers. But perhaps these agriculturalists learned the art o f stone-working in association with a new religious cult from people outisde the valley a relatively short time before the ash fall - short enough, that is, for them to know that it was acquired from outside and not indigenous to their own culture. Let us suppose it was a kind of prehistoric cargo cult promising some enormous benefit such as perpetual prosperity or even eternal life. The calamity of the ash fall might weaken people’s faith, but a second calamity would surely destroy it. The second calamity could be the decline and certain extinction of the ‘spirit’ population. I do not know why a population already greatly reduced should continue to decline. But if a group self-consciously facing extinction were to decide that the stone-working cult not only failed in its promise but also even angered their gods to produce the opposite effect, members would be in a mood to discard the artifacts and even strew them around the countryside as a demonstration to the powerful ghosts. This would have to have a domino effect, each settlement following suit as it seemed to approach extinction.

Antiquity for the Kuma stretches back no further than the period immediately preceding their adoption of the sweet potato. Even the myths recounting the origins o f the various clans and phratries are clearly set within the latter two periods of oral prehistory. This is consistent with the late development of tiny family settlements into the sizeable groups the Australians first encountered.

According to this sequence of events, organised warfare must have begun long after the adoption of the sweet potato and beyond the third prehistoric period when the men of the settlements were numerous enough to stage a battle. Thus the use of stone artifacts in war-magic must be relatively recent and this suggests that the spirits who allegedly gave the figurine to the ancestors of my informant could not have been the resettled swamp-dwellers. Hence the Kuma acquired the stone objects in their war-magic houses long after the former swamp-dwellers had abandoned the artifacts and these were lying around the landscape. There are fragmentary clues which may help us to explain how the separation of secret and publicly accessible artifacts came about.

I do not entirely rule out the possibility that the figurines (as distinct from the mortars, pestles and clubheads) may have been the clandestine gift of the former swamp-dwellers. The only figurines I knew about in the Minj area during 1953-5 were hidden in war-magic houses. During 1963-5 some were in the possession of expatriates, but these had been collected in North Wahgi where missionaries had already destroyed the war-magic houses. In m id-1965 missionaries burned the last taboo houses in the south.

The objects men unearthed in new gardens seem to have been mostly mortars, though occasionally a pestle or a clubhead might appear. A man identifying one of these objects as belonging to an ancestor kept it in his house in the hope that it would bring him prolific gardens and many pigs and sons. But if he had a father or a brother killed in warfare he usually interpreted the find as a message from his ancestor to do everything he could to avenge the death. A leader or seasoned warrior might build a little war-magic house of his own to contain the stone object along with minor relics of his killed relative (a tuft of his hair, an armband, a fragment of his pubic apron) which he had kept to place about his person when going to war. Or, if he himself did not wish to maintain a war-magic house, he would give it to one of his subclan’s war magicians to place in an existing ‘taboo house’. When a young man found ‘something belonging to our ancestors’ (yek kobandjin yap) an older agnate undertook to look after it and instructed him to tell anyone who had seen the object that he had lost it. The artifact usually found its way into a war-magic house. The complex of war-magic centring on the artifacts in the ‘taboo houses’ may well have originated in the discovery of ‘things of the ancestors’ in abandoned graveyards.

The method of acquiring new war-magic during the 1930s and 1940s may be related to the process by which this complex managed to spread from group to group. A clan that achieved successive triumphs in war aroused the envy of less fortunate groups. Those who lived nearby were possible future enemies, but leaders

Oral Prehistory and the Sequence of Events 539

and senior warriors of a safely distant clan could be trusted with the secret of success (a particular kind of war- magic) in return for a number of pigs, women, and other valuables.

The war-magic of the ‘taboo houses’ was remarkably uniform over a wide area (Aufenanger 1959, Reay1987). Elsewhere (1987) I have criticised an interpretation in Aufenanger’s otherwise valuable study which disagrees with my own finding in Minj that the stone objects were so closely connected with the ancestors that men believed they could address the ancestral spirits through them. This difference does not necessarily reflect a difference in the beliefs men held in different places. Aufenanger based his statement that men believed the stone artifacts to be the actual ancestors on a misunderstanding of what an informant said at Kup. ‘E l kenim ye kovandin’, which Aufenanger translates as ‘This is our male ancestor’, is a careless rendering of ‘E l kenim yek kovandin” . He translates ye as ‘m ale’. But it is not idiomatic to specify sex in conjunction with a kinship term. And yek (‘of ancient times’) has to precede the term for ‘our grandfather/s’ (kovandin) to signify a more remote ancestor. The informant said simply ‘This our ancestor’ or ‘These our ancestors’. Aufenanger himself supplied the crucial ‘is’. There are several ways a completed statement might have expressed quite a different relationship between a stone and an ancestor. Until we discover what the informant intended to say there are no grounds for attributing to the war magician at Kup a naïve and mystical conviction not shared by his counterparts only a few miles away at Minj.

This paper is intended to be merely a sketch towards a life history of Kuma culture. I am hoping that it may stimulate other ethnographers of the New Guinea Highlands to produce similar accounts of the possible development of related cultures. ‘Only connect’, as E.M. Forster advised, and while this is the method of anthropology in all its forms, speculative history is one of the most creative tasks that can engage anthropologists. It travels towards the truth but does not pretend to reach it. The first test is whether it makes sense of the sequence of events in the light of other knowledge. But its true value probably lies in its power to provide hypotheses or half truths for other disciplines to test.

NOTES

1. Paper presented at the Annual Conference of the Australian Anthropological Society, Newcastle, New South Wales, August 1988. See also my ‘Papua New Guinea Highlanders Ancient and Modem: a Critique’, a review article, Canberra Anthropology, 13(2):61-74, 1990.

2. See Bulmer 1964 on the distribution of these artifacts.3. Anthropologists’ biographies of individuals in the field populations face the difficulty of determining precise

dates of birth and other experiences. Thus the anthropological life history is to some extent a sequence of events afloat in time. Studies of individual New Guinea Highlanders (Kavagl, Matoto, Ongka) have focussed on despotism and bigmanship. In essaying a life history of a particular culture I am not concerned to elicit the nature of that culture but am trying to establish the sequence of events leading up to its situation immediately before 1930.

4. The reasons for agriculturalists to choose to live in swampland and undertake the laborious work of modifying the landscape to their needs are unclear. Serpenti (1965) rejects the obvious reason of safety (escape or protection from attack) and judges that the Kimam of Prince Frederik-Hendrik Island took to creating their garden-islands for ‘good economic reasons’.

5. The swamplands, viewed from the centre of Kumaland, are certainly on the left hand side, being roughly north­west, but the usual way of expressing this direction is wug menye. Wug is ‘west’ and menye is ‘down’. Kuma use special terms for ‘east’ and ‘west’ but indicate ‘north’ and ‘south’ by reference to the mountains and the valley floor. ‘South’ is ep minya, ‘up above’ and ‘north’ is mi menye, ‘down below’. (Mi is also the word for ‘taro’.)

6. Many people see the modem pati as a substitute for the Konggar or a new form of it, despite its obvious derivation from the wubalt. The formally hesitant approach of the decorated recipients and their spectacular arrival on the grounds of the donors are the most prominent features shared by the pati and the wubalt.

7. Catholic missionaries (among them Aufenanger) burned the war-magic houses and their perishable contents in a large part of the Wahgi valley in 1960-61. They met resistance in the south. In 1965 missionaries of the Swiss Evangelical Brotherhood attacked the remaining war-magic houses. They did not consult the authorities in charge of the houses. Government officers made no attempt to stop the missionaries’ acts of trespass, arson, and vandalism. A Catholic missionary destroyed a few of the war-magic houses at the request of some leaders whom the Swiss had antagonised.

REFERENCES

AUFENANGER, H., 1959. The War-magic Houses in the Wahgi Valley and Adjacent Areas (New Guinea). Anthropos, 54:1-26.

BLONG, R.J., 1982. The Time of Darkness: Local Legends and Volcanic Reality in Papua New Guinea. Canberra, ANU Press.

540 Marie Reay

BULMER, S. and R. BULMER, 1964. The Prehistory of the Australian New Guinea Highlands, in J.B. Watson (ed.), New Guinea: the Central Highlands. American Anthropologist, special publication, 66(4/2):39-76.

FEIL, D.K., 1987. The Evolution of Highland Papua New Guinea Societies. Cambridge University Press.GOLSON, J., 1976. Archaeology and Agricultural History in the New Guinea Highlands, in G. Sieveking, I.H.

Longworth, and K.E. Wilson (eds), Problems in Economic and Social Archaeology. London, Duckworth, pp.201-20.

MODJESKA, C.N., 1977. Production among the Duna: Aspects of Horticultural Intensification in Central New Guinea.. PhD thesis, Australian National University, Canberra.

REAY, M., 1987. The Magico-religious Foundations of New Guinea Highlands Warfare, in M. Stephen (ed.), Sorceror and witch in Melanesia. Melbourne, MUP. pp.83-120.

SERPENTI, L.M., 1965. Cultivators in the Swamps: Social Structure and Horticulture in a New Guinea Society (Frederik-Hendrik Island, West New Guinea). Assen, Van Gorcum. 2nd Edition 1977.

WATSON, J.B., 1965. From Hunting to Horticulture in the New Guinea Highlands. Ethnology, 4:295-309.

THE ARCHAEOLOGY OF BELIEF: STRUCTURALISM IN STRATIGRAPHICAL CONTEXT

Douglas G. Sutton University of Auckland

I sent a draft of this paper to Ralph Bulmer for comment early in 1988, after it had been read in what turned out to be a controversial departmental seminar.1 His reply began,

“Doug,You know how ignorant I am in matters Maori & Polynesian. B u t. . . ”

There followed a lucid critique of what Ralph very generously termed “The one dimension the paper doesn’t touch . . . ”. Although Ralph was ill even when he received the manuscript he signed off, “Thank you indeed for sending it to me . . I offer this paper as my tribute to Ralph Bulmer who was by any measure a very fine anthropologist, and an extraordinarily knowledgeable man.

INTRODUCTIONThe theory of prehistoric archaeology currently practised in New Zealand is firmly in the grip of environmentalism and assumptions of the primacy of “practical reason”, in the sense in which Sahlins (1976) uses that term. This has a number of detrimental consequences. These include an absence of systematic research into sociocultural change and a strong tendency for explanations of almost anything prehistoric to be based on “density dependent processes” (Kirch 1984:13-15, 114ff; examples include Anderson 1982; Davidson 1984; Irwin 1985; Leach 1981; and Sutton 1986). A major epistemological shift towards recognition of the primacy of culture is overdue.

I begin from the notion that “the world of the adult [is] mediated by meaning and motivated by values” (Longeran 1980:31). Therefore, if one wants to understand that world as it exists or existed in a particular socicty the delineation of meanings and values is the objective of investigation. Within a particular culture, and in the study of particular culture, “one can rise to full stature only through full knowledge of the world . . .” (Longeran 1980:34). As Collingwood (1939) pointed out over forty years ago this commits the archaeologists to the study of the meanings of past cultural events (see also Hoddcr 1986 and for a spirited review Binford 1988).

TOWARDS A METHODOLOGYIn searching for a methodology I turn to Ricoeur’s (1977) view that the hermeneutical circle consists of two

parts. The first of these is a movement of investigation from the whole to the part, termed the “descending analytic” or the “archaeological moment”. If one is to construct the whole and its values from the delineated parts this downward movement of analysis m ust be complemented by the second element which is upward movement of interpretation (Olson 1980:101).

This suggests a research design for the archaeological interpretation of cultural structures:1. selection of an appropriate body of evidence.