Reuniting communities in Papua New Guinea with long-lost burial pots

“That’s right, we remember that.”

This was the response of the community on the remote island of Panaeati in Papua New Guinea when Dr Ben Shaw mentioned burial pottery that had been taken almost a century ago.

The archaeologist from The Australian National University (ANU) had been invited by the primary landowner, Weda Gaunedi, to view a cave called Biniwaga.

The cave was used as a burial site hundreds of years ago and Shaw remembered reading about someone in Australia who had some pottery from the cave.

While for him, it was a vague memory of a passage of text, for the landowners it was remembered as though the theft had happened yesterday. A story passed on and held in the community’s long collective memory.

“It was passed down from generation to generation, and the communities were still angry about it,” Shaw says.

“Someone came in, they took it, they left – and the community never saw it again.”

Only as good as your word

It was then that Shaw made a promise to track down the pottery. Keeping his word took him closer to home than expected.

In Canberra, he was going through a storage room at the ANU School of Culture, History and Language when he spotted a box labelled ‘Panaeati’. By a stroke of luck, it contained the missing pottery. The original serial numbers and records all matched.

Shaw remembers pausing in a state of shock.

He recalls discovering that a reverend took the pottery during the establishment of a methodist mission on the island, at a time when wider missionisation was occurring across Papua New Guinea.

“I don’t know if it was part of a deliberate process of trying to suppress the old practices, because the pottery is associated with bones and the ancestors,” Shaw says.

“But it was definitely part of that colonial period when a lot of collecting was occurring.”

After it was taken, the pottery reached anthropologist Norman Tindale who, at the time, worked with the South Australian Museum. After that, its path to ANU is a bit murky but it was probably relocated in the 1960s or 70s for research.

The pain associated with these missing objects stuck with Shaw.

“Communities do have a really long memory. That’s one of the things I teach my students – always think about the long-term impacts of your presence in the community as a researcher. You have to take your time, be transparent, be honest and always work ethically, because people do talk and they do remember,” Shaw says.

“Once I talked to the community about that incident, all these other incidents started coming up. It’s remembered history – this person came in 1942, or this person came in the late 1800s – they still have all these stories about all these people and what they did, right or wrong.

“Everything comes back to relationships. It’s part of what I love about the job and it’s hard, as it should be because you are a visitor to these places. You can’t teach that in the classroom, right?”

The missing piece

The people of Panaeati Island gave Shaw permission to study the pottery before it was returned. He called on a Masters student, Zali Boyd, to reconstruct what the full pots would have looked like and estimate their age.

PhD scholar Simon Coxe used this information to inform his studies mapping burial caves, pottery and differences in burial traditions across Papua New Guinea.

“I’d excavated a whole bunch of archaeological sites on different islands in the area, and I’d seen pottery pieces that had the same decoration and were the same type, but they were all tiny – a few centimetres across,” says Shaw.

This sample from Biniwaga, however, turned out to represent 21 pots. Of these, in some cases, half the pot had been preserved.

“You could put it into a sequence of how pottery changed over time across all the islands. It was the missing link – we’d found the later stuff and earlier stuff, and this was the piece in the middle that made it all make sense.”

The pots are thought to be between 470 and 740 years old. As the missing connection between ‘the later and earlier stuff’, they provide vital clues about the development of cultural burial practices. They also indicates the age of the bones buried in Biniwaga in a less invasive way than radiocarbon dating.

“These practices tap into how the communities see a person, how they treat a person after death and how it connects to the living,” Shaw says.

“Although the communities don’t remember the people buried in the caves, the importance of the burial custom is remembered and respected.”

Symbolism and meaning

Shaw’s hosts on Panaeati had stressed that the pottery should be returned on the symbolic date of 16 September – the country’s celebration of independence from Australia in 1975.

Thinking it would be both an important occasion and a teachable moment, Shaw arranged the annual ANU field school to coincide with the repatriation.