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International audience; Hand stencils directly represent modern humans in landscape settings around the world. Yet their social and cultural contexts are often overlooked due to the lack of ethnography associated with the artwork. This paper explores the hand stencils from Kundumbue and Pundimbung rock art sites, situated in the traditional boundaries of the Auwim people in the East Sepik Province of Papua New Guinea. Combining archaeological rock art analysis with ethnographic knowledge, we demonstrate that the hand stencils are a priority in each clan's place-making practices, around which they construct the community's social narratives. Rock shelters and their rock art also show a form of communal history that is evoked through their production in contemporary settings, in addition to having been a form of esoteric magic in the past. We conclude that hand stencils can have multiple meanings over time and across space as a widespread cultural marker. However, aspects of the identities of individuals, groups and communities who created the now static hand imagery, remain in place.

Cassowaries (Casuarius) are one of the largest indigenous animal species of New Guinea. Researchers have long been trying to understand their local socio-cultural significance. Here we present new results from interviews recorded in 2018 on ethnography associated with bone daggers, a material culture ornament and tool carved from the cassowary's tibiotarsus. We present a ‘storied notion’—a contemporary narrative from oral history of why cassowary is not simply a bird, and briefly describe cassowary bone ornamentation in Auwim, East Sepik Province of Papua New Guinea. By exploring the material history of Casuarius through a ‘storied notion’ approach, we reveal that cassowary bone daggers in rock art are narrative ideas of the species from its landscape to ornamentation and through to people's cosmological beliefs surrounding Casuarius. We argue that the cassowary bone dagger stencil can be seen as part of the life history of this animal.

This paper reports a pilot study undertaken at the Lavongai rectilinear earth mounds site in New Hanover, New Ireland Province, Papua New Guinea. The objective of the study was to determine whether the mounds were formed as part of a prehistoric agricultural system. X-ray Diffraction and phytolith analyses were used on a series of sediment samples from a test pit excavated into one of the Lavongai mounds. The phytolith results indicate a change from forest species in the lowest samples to grass species in the highest samples and the presence of a variety of plant species recorded in the ethnography of medicinal plants. The XRD results indicate that the sediments throughout the depth of the mound have a similar origin, suggesting that the changes in phytoliths do not represent changes in the source of the sediments. It is proposed that the phytolith results reflect four phases of gardening practices beginning between c. 3000 bp and c. 4000 bp.