19

The burgeoning field of anthropology and archaeology (1918–45)

Matthew Spriggs

World War I marks a convenient break between the earlier phase of very active field research in the Pacific, described in the previous section of this volume (Spriggs, Chapter 8, through Van Tilburg, Chapter 18, this volume), and the next one, spanning the years from 1918 to 1945. Certainly there are strong continuities with the previous section as far as knowledge practices are concerned, in particular the continuing search for the origins of Pacific peoples and the ongoing involvement of missionaries (Aigner, Chapter 22, and Spriggs, Chapter 24, both this volume). However, the political landscape in the Pacific changed dramatically over the course of the ‘Great War’. All of Germany’s South Seas Protectorates were occupied by Allied forces shortly after the outbreak of war in 1914 and were permanently renounced when Germany signed the Treaty of Versailles on 28 June 1919 (Gründer 2001:44–50; Pelizaeus 2008:222–225). The League of Nations, itself a creation of the victorious Allies, subsequently distributed Germany’s former possessions among the Allied powers as mandated territories. German New Guinea, including the north-eastern quarter of mainland New Guinea and the Bismarck Archipelago, was assigned to the Australian Commonwealth, which had already assumed responsibility for the external territory of Papua – the southern half of present-day Papua New Guinea – in 1906 (Edmundson, Chapter 21, this volume; see also Nelson 1982; Waiko 1983). Islands north of the equator in the Western Pacific, including the Caroline, Mariana and Marshall Islands and Palau, were assigned to Japan (Peattie 1988). Western Samoa (now the Independent State of Samoa) was assigned to New Zealand and Nauru was administered jointly by Australia, New Zealand and the UK (Field 2006; Meleisea and Schoeffel 1987; Storr 2020).

The effects of these political ruptures are perhaps less evident in the chapters in this section than the effects of the abovementioned knowledge continuities. These can largely be attributed to the networks of scholarly communication connecting anthropologists and archaeologists of different generations, nationalities and language traditions. We see, for example, that American anthropologist Roland Burridge Dixon (Jones and Ahlgren, Chapter 20, this volume) met with Stephenson Percy Smith, the British-born founder of the Polynesian Society (see Nolden, Chapter 11, this volume), in New Zealand. Hubert Murray, Acting Administrator of the Australian Territory of Papua and later Lieutenant Governor of Papua, was influenced by a visit from the British anthropologist Alfred Cort Haddon (see Herle and Wright, Chapter 12, this volume) to advocate for a permanent post of government anthropologist to ‘look after the collections, train patrol officers in the “rational science” of anthropology and carry out investigations as per the needs of the colony’ (Edmundson, Chapter 21, this volume). This is a particularly clear example of the close yet complex connection between the disciplines of anthropology and archaeology on the one hand, and the attempts of colonial authorities to more effectively administer supposedly ‘primitive’ societies on the other (see for example Asad 1973; van Bremen and Shimizu 1999; Campbell 1998; McNiven and Russell 2005; Pels and Salemink 1999; Stocking 1991; Wolfe 1999). Further scholarly connections during this period include those of German-born missionary ethnologist and historian of religions Father Wilhelm Schmidt (Aigner, Chapter 22, this volume) and Australian ethnologist Dermot Casey (Spriggs, Chapter 24, this volume) with Father Otto Meyer (see Howes, Chapter 15, this volume), as well as Haddon’s formative influence on New Zealand–based museum curator Henry Devenish Skinner (White, Chapter 23, this volume).

Although no new Pacific territories accrued to the USA during the interwar period, American anthropologists and archaeologists were active participants in field research in the Pacific. Much of their work was determined in the 1920s by the leadership provided by the second director of the Bishop Museum in Honolulu, Herbert Gregory. His Yale connections led to generous private funding for the Bayard Dominick Expedition to undertake the ‘systematic investigation of the origin, migration, and culture of the Polynesian peoples’ (Gregory 1923:21), involving natural scientists, anthropologists and archaeologists. Fieldwork took place from 1920 to 1922, and as described by Gregory:

In formulating the plans for the expedition, it was recognized that the origins and migrations of a people constitute a problem made up of many diverse elements – a problem which involves contributions not only from physical anthropology, material culture, archaeology, philology and legends, but also from economic botany, geography and zoology. A profitable search for Polynesian origins obviously involves fundamental research in two distinct fields: (1) the source of the physical racial characteristics which have combined to make the different Polynesian types; (2) the source of the original elements in the customs, habits and beliefs – in a word, the culture of the Polynesians. (Gregory 1923:21)

Four field parties were sent out, ‘the first in Tonga [Edward Gifford and William McKern], the second in the Marquesas [E.S.C. Handy, Willowdean Handy and Ralph Linton], the third in Rurutu, Raivavai, Tubuai and Rapa of the Austral Islands [involving among others Robert Aitken and J.F.G. Stokes], the fourth to the islands of the Hawaiian group [Kenneth Emory]’ (Gregory 1923). Collaboration with New Zealand colleagues also allowed measurement of living Māori and a full study of the Moriori of the Chatham Islands by Henry Devenish Skinner (further discussed later). Throughout the 1920s there were further archaeological and anthropological expeditions and collaborations of the Bishop Museum involving Niue, Samoa and the Society Islands. An expedition to Fiji, seen as the ‘gateway to Polynesia’, to be led by Edward Gifford was aborted at the last moment in 1927 (Spriggs 2019:402–404). The researchers involved were still generating publications based on this 1920s spurt of research to well after the next war, many of them published in the Bishop Museum Bulletins.

Despite Stokes’s demonstration in 1913 that stratigraphic excavation could yield valuable results in Eastern Polynesia, the initial results of the Bayard Dominick Expedition had not seemed so promising in archaeological terms, and discussion of Polynesian origins and migration patterns continued to rely very largely on comparison of ‘ethnographic’ material culture and considerations of physical anthropology. Gregory had early concluded that the expedition

revealed no very ancient human habitation in the central and south Pacific. For the Polynesian settlement the evidence serves to substantiate the conclusions of William Churchill, based on linguistic and cultural study. (Gregory 1923:24)

Gregory concluded that Polynesian migration had begun in AD 0 (sic), with a further wave in AD 600 and with AD 1000 as a period of major expansion.

There were of course other institutions heavily engaged with questions of Pacific archaeology, including scholars whose initial training and involvement had predated 1914 but whose greatest impact on the subject came in the interwar period. One such figure was Roland Burrage Dixon (1875–1934), associated throughout his career with Harvard University and the Peabody Museum. His story is told by Tristen Jones, Collective Biography of Archaeology in the Pacific (CBAP) research assistant, and Ingrid Ahlgren, one of our project associates (Jones and Ahlgren, Chapter 20, this volume). Dixon was the sixth American to receive a PhD in anthropology, his being for a study of a Californian Native American group. Given the paucity of his personal papers, many of which appear to have been destroyed upon his death, it is not exactly clear when he shifted a major part of his focus to Pacific ethnology and archaeology. In 1900 he had been sent to visit the Museum für Völkerkunde in Berlin to examine their Northwest Coast American and Polynesian material, presumably in the company of Felix von Luschan who had worked there since 1885. In 1903 he commenced teaching the first American course on ‘Ethnology of Polynesia and Australia’. Apart from a single visit across the Pacific in 1909, Dixon was basically an armchair theorist of Oceania,¹ but a refreshingly critical commentator on the German and British diffusionist traditions of the time concerning the Pacific; Jones and Ahlgren refer to several of his significant Pacific publications.

Dixon was the mainstay of Harvard’s anthropology department and the Peabody Museum for several decades until his death and inspired many students who were later to have distinguished careers in Pacific archaeology and anthropology. The 1943 memorial volume in his honour (Coon and Andrews 1943) included contributions from former students such as Kenneth Emory, E.S.C. Handy, Ernest Hooton, William Howells, Ralph Linton, Gordon MacGregor, Douglas Oliver² and Harry Shapiro, who were all to continue on with their Pacific interests. Dixon is part of the ‘hidden history’ of Pacific archaeology, someone rarely mentioned in general accounts but who has been revealed by the Uncovering Pacific Pasts initiative as a key figure, not least for his training of and inspiration to later generations of Pacific scholars.

We have seen how mining, missionary and plantation activities in New Guinea had led to early archaeological investigations on that island and the neighbouring Bismarck Archipelago prior to World War I. Development activities after the Australians took over former German New Guinea during the war continued apace, both there and in the Territory of Papua, taken over by agreement from the British in 1906 (the former British New Guinea). Hubert Murray, Acting Administrator and later Lieutenant Governor of Papua from 1906 until his death in 1943, had always wanted to establish a collecting program of traditional material culture and a local museum, as described by Anna Edmundson (Chapter 21, this volume). He was encouraged in this ‘base-line inventory’ by Haddon, who visited Port Moresby in 1914 (see Herle and Wright, Chapter 12, this volume), and by 1920 had created the position of government anthropologist of Papua, held first by medical officer Walter Mersh Strong.

Rock art recording was one topic of interest for Strong, but his main ethnological concentration was on the surprising artefacts coming to light at the time in the form of often highly decorated stone mortars and pestles that seemed to have no relation to modern artefact types. Strong described them as ‘the most mysterious anthropological question which I know of in Papua’ (quoted by Edmundson) and they were often seen, in the usual trope, as being a relic of a more advanced civilisation on the island.³ As Edmundson notes, these mortars and pestles featured in diffusionist, even ‘hyper-diffusionist’ explanations by scholars of the time. Chinnery (1919) saw them as the gold-crushing mortars of foreign miners, ultimately Egyptian in origin, who had penetrated the interior of New Guinea in search of minerals, just as modern itinerant miners had been doing from the beginning of the twentieth century. William Perry, in Children of the Sun (1923), developed these ideas much further, bringing in a range of other supposed lines of evidence to track the migrant course of his ‘archaic civilisation’ from Egypt through the Pacific to the Americas, with the search for gold and pearls being the major stimulus.

Strong’s assistant from 1922 and successor as government anthropologist 1928–43 was F.E. Williams, with a formal qualification in anthropology from Oxford. His tenure bridged the time during which interest shifted from the evolution and/or diffusion of culture to functionalism and a desertion of interest in material culture by anthropologists. Despite his functionalist orientation, Williams did undertake small-scale excavation and recording of rock art in the earlier part of his career in Papua, as discussed by Edmundson (Chapter 21, this volume). The equivalent anthropological position in the League of Nations Mandate Territory of New Guinea was held by Ernest William Pearson Chinnery (1887–1972), with postwar anthropological qualifications from Cambridge where he studied under Haddon and Rivers. He had earlier held a series of positions in Papua from 1909, finishing as a resident magistrate before enlisting in war service. As discussed above, he seems to have also come under the more extreme diffusionist influence of Elliot Smith during his time in the UK. He was appointed government anthropologist of New Guinea, based in Rabaul from 1924 to 1938, adding other administrative responsibilities along the way (see Gray 2008 for his earlier career and influences). Between 1938 and 1946 he was the director of native affairs in Australia’s Northern Territory.

Standing behind the leading ideas of both Chinnery and Perry was the towering figure of Grafton Elliot Smith (1871–1937), born where else but in Grafton, New South Wales. Smith was a leading intellectual of the early twentieth century and had an impact in several fields. He was the top comparative anatomist of his time, outstanding too as a neurologist and physical anthropologist, expert in the study of mummification, and contributed to our modern understanding of ‘shell shock’. He held positions as professor of anatomy in Cairo (1900–09), Manchester (1909–19) and University College London (1919–36). He is of most relevance to us here as the leading exponent of ideas about the diffusion of culture out from Egypt to the rest of the world, including the Pacific (see Spriggs 2018; a somewhat uncritical biography is provided by Crook 2012). Indeed, the Pacific was crucial as the intermediary area to spread civilisational ideas to the Americas, such as pyramid building, aspects of symbolism and myth, and the attributes of divine kingship (Smith 1933). He had no time for ideas of independent invention of technologies or concepts, apart from the single example of Egyptian civilisation. His ideas were a rejection of the stadial evolutionism of Tylor and his associates and the idea of ‘the psychic unity of mankind’, the belief that all human groups possessed ‘essentially the same kind and level of intelligence and the same basic emotions’ (Spriggs 2018:412–413; Trigger 2006:100–101). Elliot Smith was also reacting in part to German ‘Pan-Babylonianism’ ideas that all civilisation spread out from that locus – but behind both Babylon and Egypt surely are the biblical interpretations of world history we have already encountered among nineteenth-century Protestant missionaries? These were largely replaced after 1918 by (seemingly) secular ideas such as those of Elliot Smith and other long-distance diffusion enthusiasts.

Among these other enthusiasts was Catholic priest Wilhelm Schmidt (1868–1954), as discussed by CBAP Project Associate Katherine Aigner (Chapter 22, this volume). Schmidt’s earliest work was in linguistics, contributing the term ‘Austronesian’ to describe the most widespread language family of the Pacific and Island Southeast Asia (Schmidt 1899a, 1899b), and contributing as well to the systematisation of Australian linguistics. Schmidt’s major ideas of Kulturkreise or ‘cultural circles’ – we might say ‘cultural complexes’ – built upon those of Leo Frobenius (1873–1938) and Fritz Graebner (1877–1934). The method was basically to ‘establish a chronological sequence of cultures on the basis of the geographical distribution of a number of culture traits’ (Heine-Geldern 1964:412) and had been applied by Frobenius (1900) and Graebner (1905) to examine Kulturschichten or ‘cultural strata’ in the Pacific, successive cultures that had succeeded each other over time.

Schmidt took up these ideas and became the founder of the so-called ‘Vienna Culture-Historical School’, developing a series of sometimes worldwide Kulturkreise that succeeded each other to various degrees in different regions (Schmidt 1939; Schmidt and Koppers 1924). He found the efforts of the diffusionist school of Elliott Smith and Perry to be shoddy: ‘their lack of any real method is so complete that it can bring only discredit on the new movement’ (quoted in Penniman 1952:329). While perhaps a fair criticism, the discussions of evolution, migration and diffusion by all these authors were often more tightly defined than many such discussions today. Recast within the context of global or world systems such as ‘the Bronze-Age World System’ they point to some surprisingly modern debates (Spriggs 2018).

Schmidt’s Catholic missionary contacts in the Pacific provided much of his information. They often published in Schmidt’s anthropological journal Anthropos, which he established in 1906. This was where Otto Meyer published his discoveries of what we now know as Lapita pottery from Watom in 1909–10 (see Howes, Chapter 15, this volume). In setting up the major exhibition of world cultures at the Vatican in 1925, the predecessor to today’s Anima Mundi Museum (Aigner with Miotk 2015), Schmidt used his ideas of Kulturkreise and Urmonotheismus (the idea of an original monotheistic religion) to organise the exhibits (Aigner, Chapter 22, this volume).

Margarete Schurig in 1926 was among the pioneering women to obtain a doctorate in ethnology in the German-speaking countries, her topic concerning the traditional and archaeological pottery traditions of the Pacific and parts of Island Southeast Asia. She had enrolled at the University of Leipzig after earlier training as an art teacher. She argued that particular potting techniques – coiling for instance – were associated with distinct migration events into the New Guinea area and could be separated according to language group (Beer 2007:201–203). After expanding her museum-based thesis study with visits to institutions in England, Belgium and Holland ahead of publication of her thesis, she fell ill and died in 1928 at the age of only 36. Her thesis supervisor Fritz Krause, with assistance from other colleagues, brought her work to posthumous publication (Schurig 1930). It was widely influential within the material culture field and was still being referred to by archaeologists for original information into the 1970s.⁴

The aim of these strands of German-speaking thought was to bring seemingly ahistorical cultures into a historical framework to write their history in the absence of Indigenous historical records. It was an ethnological methodology that was perhaps appropriate in the absence of directly dated archaeological remains. But like Elliot Smith’s and Dixon’s views of the Pacific and the external influences on its cultures, such views were destined to fade with the first sequences of archaeologically defined cultures from the region that would appear in the aftermath of World War II.

Another prominent archaeological/ethnological figure in the Pacific of the interwar years was Henry Devenish Skinner (1886–1978), whose father had been a founding member of the Polynesian Society in 1892 along with Percy Smith. Skinner was long associated with the University of Otago (where he began the teaching of anthropology in New Zealand) and with the university-administered Otago Museum where he began employment in 1919. Moira White (Chapter 23, this volume) gives significant details of his career, and there are further interesting episodes recorded by anthropologist Derek Freeman (1959). Skinner had fought at Gallipoli in 1915 and was awarded the Distinguished Conduct Medal, had been injured and evacuated from there for an extended hospital stay and was discharged on medical grounds in 1917. He then took up anthropology at Cambridge University, yet another scholar whose career was encouraged by Haddon. His other teachers included Baron von Hügel, the founding director of what is now the Cambridge University Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, and Disney Professor of Archaeology William Ridgeway. He was active in the Royal Anthropological Institute and met many prominent figures in early British archaeology and anthropology, including the Egyptologist Flinders Petrie, W.H.R. Rivers and Grafton Elliot Smith.

He thus brought back to Otago a wealth of knowledge and influences and completed a thesis on The Material Culture of the Moriori – he had visited the Chatham Islands in 1919. In the thesis he had shown that the ideas of S.P. Smith and Elsdon Best – that the Moriori of the Chatham Islands were a relic of a supposed pre-Māori (Melanesian) population once spread over all of New Zealand – were unfounded. Instead, the Moriori were clearly Polynesians with closest affinities to the Māori, and their immediate origins were from New Zealand itself. As White (Chapter 23, this volume) recounts, the Bishop Museum published his thesis in their Memoirs series as The Morioris of Chatham Islands (Skinner 1923) constituting ‘Bayard-Dominick Expedition Publication Number 4’. A further visit to the Chathams in 1924 led to a second co-authored Memoir on The Morioris (Skinner and Baucke 1928).

Skinner marks a decisive shift from reconstruction of Polynesian prehistory based on oral traditions to that derived from comparative studies of material culture, particularly stone adze typology (Gathercole 1974:15). His student Roger Duff (see second half of Brooks, Chapter 9, this volume for Duff’s career), as quoted by Freeman (1959:25), adjudged that:

His message was the importance of the geographical distribution of cultural traits; the belief that no trait can yield its full meaning except in the light of its geographical range, and no less, its development in time. He taught us to study cultures as a biologist studies species, defining and classifying them with precision, comparing them in space and time.

As White (Chapter 23, this volume) notes, Skinner’s systematic approach to adze typology had first been noticed by other scholars in his 1923 Moriori monograph. He was later part of a landmark publication, along with Peter Buck (Te Rangi Hīroa), Kenneth Emory and J.F.G. Stokes, on ‘Terminology for Ground Stone Cutting-Implements in Polynesia’ (Buck et al. 1930), and later expanded his adze typologies in major foundational studies, the first presented at the Third Congress of Prehistorians of the Far East in Singapore in January 1938 (Skinner 1940, 1943). Almost as soon as taking up his positions at the University of Otago in 1919 he began a fruitful archaeological collaboration with David Teviotdale, whom he instructed in best-practice archaeological techniques of the time, seen by Freeman (1959:22), as quoted by White, as ‘an association that marks for New Zealand the beginning of archaeology as a scientific discipline’.⁵ Important excavations managed by the two of them were a feature of the interwar years in the South Island, with Skinner using the artefacts recovered in a series of comparative material culture papers. Skinner, during a Rockefeller Foundation Travelling Fellowship to the USA in 1927, took the opportunity to hone his own digging skills as a participant on several excavations including classic sites like Pecos, Mimbres and Pueblo Bonito. In 1932 he worked with Kenneth Emory in French Polynesia and in 1936 in the UK with Mortimer Wheeler on the classic Iron Age hillfort excavation of Maiden Castle in Dorset (Freeman 1959:23).

Particularly after World War II, Skinner’s pioneering adze studies were extended further by his student Roger Duff (see Spriggs and Howes, Chapter 26, this volume which begins with Duff’s largely postwar career). Skinner continued in his roles at Otago University after the war, retiring in 1954, celebrated by his colleagues and students with a 1959 festschrift (Freeman and Geddes 1959) and producing a selection of his own papers, Comparatively Speaking (Skinner 1974), four years before his death.

Father Meyer (see Howes, Chapter 15, this volume) had sent some of the Watom pottery to Schmidt’s Vatican Exhibition in 1925 but it was not retained as part of the permanent museum that was set up as a result and was returned to New Britain. One museum that retained a small collection of pottery sent by Meyer, however, was the National Museum of Victoria (now Melbourne Museum). Spriggs (Chapter 24, this volume) discusses the mystery of when it actually arrived there and in what circumstances. The collection of 24 sherds that was accessioned attracted the interest of Dermot Casey (1897–1977), an honorary ethnologist at the museum from 1932. As noted in the chapter, Casey was the best-trained archaeologist in Australia at that time, having had an archaeological career working for Mortimer Wheeler in England (see also Spriggs 2020 for further details of Casey’s career). His interest level in the pottery was raised further after he saw ceramics with similar toothed stamp designs from Malaysia in London museums, as well as a 2,000-year-old textile from Peru with a distinctive ‘interlocking branched (cymose) key pattern’ (Casey 1936:97) as found on some of the Watom sherds.

Casey asked Father Meyer to lend some further sherds for study and ‘several hundred pieces’ were sent in 1936 (Spriggs, Chapter 24, this volume). Later that year Casey published the first detailed English-language discussion of the Watom pottery (Casey 1936). It was not the first anglophone discussion of Lapita pottery, however. That honour goes to W.C. McKern (1929), who conducted archaeological research in Tonga in 1920–21 as part of the Bishop Museum’s Bayard Dominick Expedition, mentioned earlier.⁶ Casey’s paper was very largely ignored until the mid-1960s when the pace of Lapita research was picking up. The pottery loan had a worse fate after its return to New Britain late in 1936. Meyer died in Brisbane on his way home to Watom from medical leave in Sydney in December 1937 and artefacts and any notes on his research at his mission station were lost, while bombing in World War II destroyed both the Rabaul Museum and the Vunapope Mission on New Britain where collections of his pottery were held. Casey’s drawings and descriptions are now all that remain from the 1936 loan to Melbourne.

Although Casey maintained a general interest in Pacific material culture throughout his life, most of his subsequent efforts were directed towards Australian archaeology, where he was from 1956 onwards to be the ‘right-hand man’ assisting John Mulvaney in a crucial phase of the development of field archaeology in Australia (Spriggs 2020). An early synthesis of his research in that field was delivered at the Third Congress of Prehistorians of the Far East in Singapore in January 1938 (Casey 1940), which he attended along with Skinner. Also present was Frederick D. McCarthy, Curator of Ethnology at the Australian Museum in Sydney (Macknight, Chapter 25, this volume). While Casey’s paper at the congress was very specifically about Australian material, McCarthy’s was more wide-ranging, bringing in as well artefactual parallels among material from island and mainland Southeast Asia, and including New Guinea and Island Melanesia in his purview (McCarthy 1940). McCarthy already had an impressive publication record in Australia and New Guinea material cultures. Casey had travelled out to Singapore at the very end of December 1937 but McCarthy had ventured to Indonesia much earlier that year to join the excavations of P.V. van Stein Callenfels on Sulawesi Island and then to visit museums on Java, as Macknight recounts. McCarthy’s experience excavating with van Stein Callenfels was a disappointing one but his museum visits did allow him to compare stone artefacts in museums in Indonesia, Malaysia and Singapore with those from Australia. In making such comparisons he was following in the footsteps of Fritz and Paul Sarasin who had conducted excavations on Sulawesi at the turn of the century; indeed, he specifically compared the ‘Maros points’ and other point types they had recovered to Australian types (see Spriggs, Chapter 8, this volume for discussion of the Sarasins).

McCarthy also compared the collections he saw in Southeast Asia with those he knew of from New Guinea, New Ireland and Bougainville such as the mortar and pestle complex also discussed in Spriggs (Chapter 8, this volume). As Macknight notes, his analysis was way off in this regard as he compared the mortars and pestles to ‘the late phase of the megalithic period which is associated with metal-working’ (Macknight, Chapter 25, this volume, quoting McCarthy 1940:45): shades here of Perry’s Children of the Sun and Egyptian miners! Sections of his paper were specifically on Bronze Age and ‘Megalithic’ influences on Australia. He was on firmer ground with his comparisons of microliths and other artefact types on Sulawesi and from Palaeolithic sites on Java with Australian assemblages. He also made comparisons of the latter with Hoabinhian assemblages from Vietnam and the Malay Peninsula (McCarthy 1940), but as Macknight notes, the problem was the lack of any methods of direct dating of the Australian assemblages. McCarthy was cautious of the implications of these comparisons, stating:

A point to bear in mind in regard to Australia is that it is a land of survivals of primitive arts and practises, no doubt a result of long isolation, and, whilst the occurrence and use of types of stone tools which are of more or less great antiquity in other countries is of considerable importance and interest, it should not be allowed to confuse us in our study of the origin or age of an implement type or industry. (1940:32)

In his Singapore paper he thanked the renowned Dutch palaeoanthropologist G.H.R. von Koenigswald (1902–1982), associated with many of the Homo erectus discoveries on Java, and Indonesian-born archaeologist H.R. van Heekeren (1902–1974), who was to become the first synthesiser of Indonesian prehistory (van Heekeren 1957, 1958) and to train the first generation of Indonesian archaeologists as the country gained its independence at the end of the 1940s. McCarthy also drew on the diffusionist study of polished stone adzes by Robert Heine-Geldern (1885–1968), a student and colleague in Vienna of Father Schmidt, who had himself examined Australian and Pacific adzes.

All four of these scholars were to survive World War II (although van Heekeren endured forced labour on the Thai–Burma Railway under the Japanese) and to contribute to research thereafter, as of course did McCarthy. He maintained the diffusionist perspective highlighted in his Singapore paper into the late 1970s: one of his latest papers was ‘The use of stone tools to map patterns of diffusion’ (1977), where he referred to many of the classic diffusionists such as Frobenius, Elliot Smith, Graebner, Haddon and Rivers in an approving vein. He gave reference to no fewer than 15 papers by Daniel S. Davidson, the most prominent exponent of diffusion within and from outside of Australia apart from McCarthy himself.

The pre–World War I era had seen the establishment of archaeology as a discipline in the Pacific, notable for the first archaeological excavations in the region and for some attempts at social evolutionary sequence-building and understanding (see Spriggs, Chapter 8, this volume). The interwar period, however, was the heyday of diffusionist perspectives to explain culture change, and still without any agreed framework of absolute dating beyond long-distance correlations of geological sequences and matching artefact types. The post–World War II period was finally to give archaeologists the chronometric tools to test and place securely their putative cultural sequences, until then based more on supposed typological correlations than firm stratigraphic evidence, as will be discussed in Spriggs and Howes (Chapter 26, this volume) and the chapters that follow it.

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