Robert Skelly
Datos Biográficos
| ID | 107157 |
|---|---|
| NOMBRE | Robert Skelly |
| NOMBRES | Robert |
| APELLIDO | Skelly |
| FIRMA | SKELLY R |
| AFILIACIONES | Monash University |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-3578-0604 |
| VERIFICADO | Sí |
| TOTAL DE OBRAS | 25 |
| TOTAL DE CITAS | 66 |
| TOTAL COMO AUTOR | 25 |
| TOTAL COMO EDITOR | 0 |
| PRIMER AÑO DE PUBLICACIÓN | 2009 |
| AÑO MÁS RECIENTE DE PUBLICACIÓN | 2026 |
| ÍNDICE H | 4 |
Gleaning the Rocky Shore? 2500 Years of Coastal Resource Use at Red Bluff 1, GunaiKurnai Country, SE Australia
Shell middens in Gippsland along the eastern half of Victoria's coastline have usually been characterised as small, short‐duration camp sites with relatively low shell densities and low taxonomic diversity. Here we present new excavation results from a dense, high‐diversity site at Red Bluff near the eastern end of GunaiKurnai Country, a location that features the first intertidal rocky platform habitat between Wilsons Promontory in the west and …
Uncovering Hidden Dynamics of Past Kinship and Exchange Relations on Papua New Guinea’s South Coast (650–300 cal BP) Through Scanning Electron Microscopy Automated Mineralogy Analyses of Pottery Sherd…
Ethnographic accounts of Melanesian exchange systems, such as the Kula and Hiri, have significantly influenced the development of anthropology. These accounts primarily focus on male agency framed by heroic seafaring ventures, while the agency of women and their cultural practices—key to the interconnectedness of Melanesian societies—has often been overlooked. On Papua New Guinea’s south coast details of women’s cultural practices are available i…
Late Lapita seafaring networks
Millukmungee 1
Recent excavations at Millukmungee 1, a limestone rock shelter along the upper bank of the Buchan River in GunaiKurnai Country (southeastern Australia), uncovered archaeological evidence of Mid-to Late Holocene occupation spanning c. 5000 years. Here we report on the stone artefacts and faunal remains, especially in light of a paucity of published details on artefact types and technologies for this part of southeast Australia. Results indicate th…
Agency amongst the entrepôts
The exchange of specialized items and the social connections those exchanges engender play a fundamental role in the trajectories of societal relations. Processual archaeologists developed a core–periphery model to understand how these exchange relations work. The model evoked complex societal “cores” and “peripheries” at societal edges where exchanges with other cultures take place. The rigidity of core–periphery modeling led to the emergence of…
Building culturally meaningful chronologies
This paper examines some of the ways in which Indigenous and Western archaeological chronologies are being negotiated and entwined in Oceania. Indigenous pasts are often known through oral traditions, genealogies and ancestral landscapes; these are vital pasts populated by the ancestors. The archaeological past is often interpreted through taphonomy, stratigraphy and direct dating techniques. There are tensions and intersections between these per…
Agila and the reanimation of seafaring on the south coast of Papua New Guinea after 770 cal BP
Seafaring ceramicists connected widely spaced communities along the expanse of PNG’s south coast for more than 1,500 years following the arrival of people using pots with Lapita decoration c.2,900 cal BP. Archaeological investigations at locations from the Gulf of Papua in the west to Mailu Island in the east suggest a major change occurred to seafaring and social relations after 1,200 cal BP. The following five centuries often referred to as the…
Rethinking agency in hiri exchange relationships on Papua New Guinea's south coast
Investigating the Anthropic Construction of Rock Art Sites Through Archaeomorphology
Dating painting events through by-products of ochre processing
The ‘direct’ dating of rock art has proliferated since the development of accelerator mass spectrometry radiocarbon, uranium-series and optically stimulated luminescence dating, yet still, most rock art is not directly datable due to the mineral nature of the constituent pigments. Here we present another method: the recovery and dating by stratigraphic association of small buried fragments of ochre and dried paint drops deposited onto soft sedime…
The chronology of Popo, an ancestral village site in Orokolo Bay, Gulf Province, Papua New Guinea
Cultural research at Orokolo Bay (PNG) has long focussed on elaborate social-ceremonial practice and maritime exchange (hiri). Previously the chronology of settlement was based on a single radiocarbon determination of 410 ± 80 BP from Popo village. Today, Popo is an important village site along an ancestral migration route for clan groups living up to 125 km to the east. This paper presents archaeological results of a recent excavation at Popo, u…
Changing ceramic traditions at Agila ancestral village, Hood Bay, Papua New Guinea
Accounts of New Guinea’s recent past are replete with both archaeological and ethnographic evidence of trade that indirectly connect virtually the entire country from coast to highland. One consequence has been a bias towards central places (e.g. Mailu Island) and/or large-scale production villages (e.g. of the Port Moresby region) as origin locations for distributed goods. Inversely, there has also been attention paid to distant, recipient point…
Chemical Signatures & Social Interactions
Eleven artefacts made of west Fergusson Island obsidian were recovered in beach sands inland from today’s coastline east of the Vailala River in the Gulf of Papua. These artefacts were found some 900 km by sea southwest of their geological source location. They extend the known western limit for incoming obsidian along the south coast of mainland PNG by 155 km. Here we discuss the chemical signatures of these artefacts towards an interpretation o…
Ruisasi 1 and the Earliest Evidence of Mass-produced Ceramics in Caution Bay (Port Moresby Region), Papua New Guinea
The history of pottery use along the south coast of Papua New Guinea spans from Lapita times, here dated to 2900–2600 cal BP, through to mass production of pottery associated with a number of ethnographically-known interaction (and exchange) networks. Understanding the antecedents and developmental histories of these interaction networks is of considerable importance to archaeological research from local to western Pacific geographical scales. Th…
Petrographic analyses of sand temper/inclusions in ceramics of Kikiniu, Kikori River and modern sand samples from the Gulf Province (Papua New Guinea)
The archaeological site of Kikiniu (a.k.a. Kulupuari) in the mid‐reaches of the Kikori River, Gulf Province (Papua New Guinea) contains a rich assemblage of ceramic sherds dating to 1550–1000 calBP. This is a region for which there is no ethnographic and no prior archaeological evidence of ceramic manufacture, but for which during the ethnographic period premade pottery vessels are well known to have been imported en masse from long‐distance seaf…
Archaeological investigations at Waredaru and the origins of the Keipte Kuyumen clan estate, upper Kikori River, Papua New Guinea
In 2008-2009, the patriarch of the Keipte Kuyumen clan of the upper Kikori River near the Highlands foothills, Papua New Guinea, requested that archaeological excavations be undertaken at the site of Waredaru in a dense rainforest setting, an ancestral village only known from oral traditions. According to these oral traditions, Waredaru was a sago adze-head (‘sago-pounder’) manufacturing centre, and it is at this village that the Keipte Kuyumen u…
Kumukumu 1, a hilltop site in the Aird Hills
Dating of in situ longhouse ( dubu daima ) posts in the Kikori River delta
Tracking ancient beach-lines inland
The Lapita expansion took Austronesian seafaring peoples with distinctive pottery eastward from the Bismarck Archipelago to western Polynesia during the late second millennium BC, marking the first stage in the settlement of Oceania. Here it is shown that a parallel process also carried Lapita pottery and people many hundreds of kilometres westward along the southern shore of Papua New Guinea. The key site is Hopo, now 4.5km inland owing to the p…
A New Ceramic Assemblage from Caution Bay, South Coast of Mainland PNG
This paper reports on the ceramics from Squares A and B of Bogi 1, a newly excavated site at Caution Bay, south coast of mainland Papua New Guinea. A dense cultural horizon dated from c. 2150 to c. 2100 calBP and preceded by earlier cultural deposits contains previously undescribed ceramics of limited decorative variability almost exclusively focused on Anadara shell edge impressions below finger-grooved lips, which we term the Linear Shell Edge-…
Magnetometer surveys in archaeological research in Papua New Guinea
A magnetometer survey was conducted on the abandoned village site of Keveoki 1, near the Vailala River, Gulf Province, PNG. The survey, using a single sensor proton precession magnetometer, was successful in locating and defining the boundaries of areas confirmed by excavation to contain dense assemblages of pottery. The combination of geophysical and excavation results allowed a broader understanding of the spatial distribution of human occupati…
Morphometric analyses of Batissa violacea shells from Emo (OAC), Gulf Province, Papua New Guinea
Archaeological investigations of human predation pressures on shellfish usually rely on measurements of complete shell specimens. However, most archaeological shell assemblages consist predominantly of broken shells, limiting measurable sample sizes, and thus potentially biasing results in cases where shell fragmentation is biased towards particular size classes (due to shell size‐fragility correspondences). This paper presents a recent applicati…
The ritual dugong bone mounds of Koey Ngurtai, Torres Strait, Australia
The islands of Western Torres Strait, between Papua New Guinea and Australia, saw the emergence of ritual dugong bone mounds approximately 400 years ago. These mounds were used as a means to commune with, and as an aid for the hunting of, dugongs. This paper explores the bone contents of three dugong bone mounds on the small, uninhabited island of Koey Ngurtai as a means to determine their construction and in doing so to explore the historical em…
The Emo Site (OAC), Gulf Province, Papua New Guinea
Since the 1970s the site of Emo (aka ‘Samoa’, ‘OAC’) in the Gulf Province of Papua New Guinea has been cited as one of the earliest-known ceramic sites from the southern Papuan lowlands. This site has long been seen as holding c.2000 year old evidence of post-Lapita long-distance maritime trade from (Austronesian-speaking) Motu homelands in the Central Province, where pottery was manufactured, to the (non-Austronesian) Gulf Province some 400km to…
Koey Ngurtai
Koey Ngurtai is a small, uninhabited island located midway between the residential islands of Badu and Mabuyag in western Torres Strait. In 2003 and 2004, 100% surveys of the islet revealed 166 cultural sites. Fifty archaeological excavations were undertaken, revealing a rich history of islet use culminating with the emergence of Koey Ngurtai as a ritual centre after 550–700 cal BP, and a proliferation of ritual structures focused on dugong hunti…
Koey Ngurtai
Koey Ngurtai is a small, uninhabited island located midway between the residential islands of Badu and Mabuyag in western Torres Strait. In 2003 and 2004, 100% surveys of the islet revealed 166 cultural sites. Fifty archaeological excavations were undertaken, revealing a rich history of islet use culminating with the emergence of Koey Ngurtai as a ritual centre after 550–700 cal BP, and a proliferation of ritual structures focused on dugong hunti…
Morphometric analyses of Batissa violacea shells from Emo (OAC), Gulf Province, Papua New Guinea
Archaeological investigations of human predation pressures on shellfish usually rely on measurements of complete shell specimens. However, most archaeological shell assemblages consist predominantly of broken shells, limiting measurable sample sizes, and thus potentially biasing results in cases where shell fragmentation is biased towards particular size classes (due to shell size‐fragility correspondences). This paper presents a recent applicati…
Dating painting events through by-products of ochre processing
The ‘direct’ dating of rock art has proliferated since the development of accelerator mass spectrometry radiocarbon, uranium-series and optically stimulated luminescence dating, yet still, most rock art is not directly datable due to the mineral nature of the constituent pigments. Here we present another method: the recovery and dating by stratigraphic association of small buried fragments of ochre and dried paint drops deposited onto soft sedime…
The Emo Site (OAC), Gulf Province, Papua New Guinea
Since the 1970s the site of Emo (aka ‘Samoa’, ‘OAC’) in the Gulf Province of Papua New Guinea has been cited as one of the earliest-known ceramic sites from the southern Papuan lowlands. This site has long been seen as holding c.2000 year old evidence of post-Lapita long-distance maritime trade from (Austronesian-speaking) Motu homelands in the Central Province, where pottery was manufactured, to the (non-Austronesian) Gulf Province some 400km to…
Agency amongst the entrepôts
The exchange of specialized items and the social connections those exchanges engender play a fundamental role in the trajectories of societal relations. Processual archaeologists developed a core–periphery model to understand how these exchange relations work. The model evoked complex societal “cores” and “peripheries” at societal edges where exchanges with other cultures take place. The rigidity of core–periphery modeling led to the emergence of…
Rethinking agency in hiri exchange relationships on Papua New Guinea's south coast
Tracking ancient beach-lines inland
The Lapita expansion took Austronesian seafaring peoples with distinctive pottery eastward from the Bismarck Archipelago to western Polynesia during the late second millennium BC, marking the first stage in the settlement of Oceania. Here it is shown that a parallel process also carried Lapita pottery and people many hundreds of kilometres westward along the southern shore of Papua New Guinea. The key site is Hopo, now 4.5km inland owing to the p…
Investigating the Anthropic Construction of Rock Art Sites Through Archaeomorphology
Changing ceramic traditions at Agila ancestral village, Hood Bay, Papua New Guinea
Accounts of New Guinea’s recent past are replete with both archaeological and ethnographic evidence of trade that indirectly connect virtually the entire country from coast to highland. One consequence has been a bias towards central places (e.g. Mailu Island) and/or large-scale production villages (e.g. of the Port Moresby region) as origin locations for distributed goods. Inversely, there has also been attention paid to distant, recipient point…
Agila and the reanimation of seafaring on the south coast of Papua New Guinea after 770 cal BP
Seafaring ceramicists connected widely spaced communities along the expanse of PNG’s south coast for more than 1,500 years following the arrival of people using pots with Lapita decoration c.2,900 cal BP. Archaeological investigations at locations from the Gulf of Papua in the west to Mailu Island in the east suggest a major change occurred to seafaring and social relations after 1,200 cal BP. The following five centuries often referred to as the…
Petrographic analyses of sand temper/inclusions in ceramics of Kikiniu, Kikori River and modern sand samples from the Gulf Province (Papua New Guinea)
The archaeological site of Kikiniu (a.k.a. Kulupuari) in the mid‐reaches of the Kikori River, Gulf Province (Papua New Guinea) contains a rich assemblage of ceramic sherds dating to 1550–1000 calBP. This is a region for which there is no ethnographic and no prior archaeological evidence of ceramic manufacture, but for which during the ethnographic period premade pottery vessels are well known to have been imported en masse from long‐distance seaf…
The ritual dugong bone mounds of Koey Ngurtai, Torres Strait, Australia
The islands of Western Torres Strait, between Papua New Guinea and Australia, saw the emergence of ritual dugong bone mounds approximately 400 years ago. These mounds were used as a means to commune with, and as an aid for the hunting of, dugongs. This paper explores the bone contents of three dugong bone mounds on the small, uninhabited island of Koey Ngurtai as a means to determine their construction and in doing so to explore the historical em…
The chronology of Popo, an ancestral village site in Orokolo Bay, Gulf Province, Papua New Guinea
Cultural research at Orokolo Bay (PNG) has long focussed on elaborate social-ceremonial practice and maritime exchange (hiri). Previously the chronology of settlement was based on a single radiocarbon determination of 410 ± 80 BP from Popo village. Today, Popo is an important village site along an ancestral migration route for clan groups living up to 125 km to the east. This paper presents archaeological results of a recent excavation at Popo, u…
Koey Ngurtai
Koey Ngurtai is a small, uninhabited island located midway between the residential islands of Badu and Mabuyag in western Torres Strait. In 2003 and 2004, 100% surveys of the islet revealed 166 cultural sites. Fifty archaeological excavations were undertaken, revealing a rich history of islet use culminating with the emergence of Koey Ngurtai as a ritual centre after 550–700 cal BP, and a proliferation of ritual structures focused on dugong hunti…
The Emo Site (OAC), Gulf Province, Papua New Guinea
Since the 1970s the site of Emo (aka ‘Samoa’, ‘OAC’) in the Gulf Province of Papua New Guinea has been cited as one of the earliest-known ceramic sites from the southern Papuan lowlands. This site has long been seen as holding c.2000 year old evidence of post-Lapita long-distance maritime trade from (Austronesian-speaking) Motu homelands in the Central Province, where pottery was manufactured, to the (non-Austronesian) Gulf Province some 400km to…
A New Ceramic Assemblage from Caution Bay, South Coast of Mainland PNG
This paper reports on the ceramics from Squares A and B of Bogi 1, a newly excavated site at Caution Bay, south coast of mainland Papua New Guinea. A dense cultural horizon dated from c. 2150 to c. 2100 calBP and preceded by earlier cultural deposits contains previously undescribed ceramics of limited decorative variability almost exclusively focused on Anadara shell edge impressions below finger-grooved lips, which we term the Linear Shell Edge-…
Magnetometer surveys in archaeological research in Papua New Guinea
A magnetometer survey was conducted on the abandoned village site of Keveoki 1, near the Vailala River, Gulf Province, PNG. The survey, using a single sensor proton precession magnetometer, was successful in locating and defining the boundaries of areas confirmed by excavation to contain dense assemblages of pottery. The combination of geophysical and excavation results allowed a broader understanding of the spatial distribution of human occupati…
Morphometric analyses of Batissa violacea shells from Emo (OAC), Gulf Province, Papua New Guinea
Archaeological investigations of human predation pressures on shellfish usually rely on measurements of complete shell specimens. However, most archaeological shell assemblages consist predominantly of broken shells, limiting measurable sample sizes, and thus potentially biasing results in cases where shell fragmentation is biased towards particular size classes (due to shell size‐fragility correspondences). This paper presents a recent applicati…
The ritual dugong bone mounds of Koey Ngurtai, Torres Strait, Australia
The islands of Western Torres Strait, between Papua New Guinea and Australia, saw the emergence of ritual dugong bone mounds approximately 400 years ago. These mounds were used as a means to commune with, and as an aid for the hunting of, dugongs. This paper explores the bone contents of three dugong bone mounds on the small, uninhabited island of Koey Ngurtai as a means to determine their construction and in doing so to explore the historical em…
Tracking ancient beach-lines inland
The Lapita expansion took Austronesian seafaring peoples with distinctive pottery eastward from the Bismarck Archipelago to western Polynesia during the late second millennium BC, marking the first stage in the settlement of Oceania. Here it is shown that a parallel process also carried Lapita pottery and people many hundreds of kilometres westward along the southern shore of Papua New Guinea. The key site is Hopo, now 4.5km inland owing to the p…
Archaeological investigations at Waredaru and the origins of the Keipte Kuyumen clan estate, upper Kikori River, Papua New Guinea
In 2008-2009, the patriarch of the Keipte Kuyumen clan of the upper Kikori River near the Highlands foothills, Papua New Guinea, requested that archaeological excavations be undertaken at the site of Waredaru in a dense rainforest setting, an ancestral village only known from oral traditions. According to these oral traditions, Waredaru was a sago adze-head (‘sago-pounder’) manufacturing centre, and it is at this village that the Keipte Kuyumen u…
Kumukumu 1, a hilltop site in the Aird Hills
Dating of in situ longhouse ( dubu daima ) posts in the Kikori River delta
Chemical Signatures & Social Interactions
Eleven artefacts made of west Fergusson Island obsidian were recovered in beach sands inland from today’s coastline east of the Vailala River in the Gulf of Papua. These artefacts were found some 900 km by sea southwest of their geological source location. They extend the known western limit for incoming obsidian along the south coast of mainland PNG by 155 km. Here we discuss the chemical signatures of these artefacts towards an interpretation o…
Ruisasi 1 and the Earliest Evidence of Mass-produced Ceramics in Caution Bay (Port Moresby Region), Papua New Guinea
The history of pottery use along the south coast of Papua New Guinea spans from Lapita times, here dated to 2900–2600 cal BP, through to mass production of pottery associated with a number of ethnographically-known interaction (and exchange) networks. Understanding the antecedents and developmental histories of these interaction networks is of considerable importance to archaeological research from local to western Pacific geographical scales. Th…
Petrographic analyses of sand temper/inclusions in ceramics of Kikiniu, Kikori River and modern sand samples from the Gulf Province (Papua New Guinea)
The archaeological site of Kikiniu (a.k.a. Kulupuari) in the mid‐reaches of the Kikori River, Gulf Province (Papua New Guinea) contains a rich assemblage of ceramic sherds dating to 1550–1000 calBP. This is a region for which there is no ethnographic and no prior archaeological evidence of ceramic manufacture, but for which during the ethnographic period premade pottery vessels are well known to have been imported en masse from long‐distance seaf…
The chronology of Popo, an ancestral village site in Orokolo Bay, Gulf Province, Papua New Guinea
Cultural research at Orokolo Bay (PNG) has long focussed on elaborate social-ceremonial practice and maritime exchange (hiri). Previously the chronology of settlement was based on a single radiocarbon determination of 410 ± 80 BP from Popo village. Today, Popo is an important village site along an ancestral migration route for clan groups living up to 125 km to the east. This paper presents archaeological results of a recent excavation at Popo, u…
Changing ceramic traditions at Agila ancestral village, Hood Bay, Papua New Guinea
Accounts of New Guinea’s recent past are replete with both archaeological and ethnographic evidence of trade that indirectly connect virtually the entire country from coast to highland. One consequence has been a bias towards central places (e.g. Mailu Island) and/or large-scale production villages (e.g. of the Port Moresby region) as origin locations for distributed goods. Inversely, there has also been attention paid to distant, recipient point…
Dating painting events through by-products of ochre processing
The ‘direct’ dating of rock art has proliferated since the development of accelerator mass spectrometry radiocarbon, uranium-series and optically stimulated luminescence dating, yet still, most rock art is not directly datable due to the mineral nature of the constituent pigments. Here we present another method: the recovery and dating by stratigraphic association of small buried fragments of ochre and dried paint drops deposited onto soft sedime…
Investigating the Anthropic Construction of Rock Art Sites Through Archaeomorphology
Agila and the reanimation of seafaring on the south coast of Papua New Guinea after 770 cal BP
Seafaring ceramicists connected widely spaced communities along the expanse of PNG’s south coast for more than 1,500 years following the arrival of people using pots with Lapita decoration c.2,900 cal BP. Archaeological investigations at locations from the Gulf of Papua in the west to Mailu Island in the east suggest a major change occurred to seafaring and social relations after 1,200 cal BP. The following five centuries often referred to as the…
Rethinking agency in hiri exchange relationships on Papua New Guinea's south coast
Millukmungee 1
Recent excavations at Millukmungee 1, a limestone rock shelter along the upper bank of the Buchan River in GunaiKurnai Country (southeastern Australia), uncovered archaeological evidence of Mid-to Late Holocene occupation spanning c. 5000 years. Here we report on the stone artefacts and faunal remains, especially in light of a paucity of published details on artefact types and technologies for this part of southeast Australia. Results indicate th…
Agency amongst the entrepôts
The exchange of specialized items and the social connections those exchanges engender play a fundamental role in the trajectories of societal relations. Processual archaeologists developed a core–periphery model to understand how these exchange relations work. The model evoked complex societal “cores” and “peripheries” at societal edges where exchanges with other cultures take place. The rigidity of core–periphery modeling led to the emergence of…
Building culturally meaningful chronologies
This paper examines some of the ways in which Indigenous and Western archaeological chronologies are being negotiated and entwined in Oceania. Indigenous pasts are often known through oral traditions, genealogies and ancestral landscapes; these are vital pasts populated by the ancestors. The archaeological past is often interpreted through taphonomy, stratigraphy and direct dating techniques. There are tensions and intersections between these per…
Uncovering Hidden Dynamics of Past Kinship and Exchange Relations on Papua New Guinea’s South Coast (650–300 cal BP) Through Scanning Electron Microscopy Automated Mineralogy Analyses of Pottery Sherd…
Ethnographic accounts of Melanesian exchange systems, such as the Kula and Hiri, have significantly influenced the development of anthropology. These accounts primarily focus on male agency framed by heroic seafaring ventures, while the agency of women and their cultural practices—key to the interconnectedness of Melanesian societies—has often been overlooked. On Papua New Guinea’s south coast details of women’s cultural practices are available i…
Late Lapita seafaring networks
Gleaning the Rocky Shore? 2500 Years of Coastal Resource Use at Red Bluff 1, GunaiKurnai Country, SE Australia
Shell middens in Gippsland along the eastern half of Victoria's coastline have usually been characterised as small, short‐duration camp sites with relatively low shell densities and low taxonomic diversity. Here we present new excavation results from a dense, high‐diversity site at Red Bluff near the eastern end of GunaiKurnai Country, a location that features the first intertidal rocky platform habitat between Wilsons Promontory in the west and …
Geography (23 obras) · Pacific and Southeast Asian Studies (22 obras) · Archaeology (21 obras) · Ethnology (17 obras) · History (17 obras) · Archaeology and ancient environmental studies (16 obras) · Geology (14 obras) · New guinea (14 obras) · History (12 obras) · Pleistocene-Era Hominins and Archaeology (11 obras)