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 in ethnography, and the remains of the pottery they made survive well in archaeological contexts. This paper reports the results of Scanning Electron Microscopy based Automated Mineralogy (SEM-AM) analyses of selected pottery sherds from two regions on the Papua New Guinea’s south coast located 80 km apart. The sherds are very similar in form and decoration, so we employed precise mineral characterisations to assign the pottery sherds to mineralogical groups and test whether they originated in the same manufacturing location and were traded along the coast. The mineralogical analyses uncovered nuances of past social entanglements, revealing that seafaring alliances and networks were maintained through kinship. We argue that in this instance, pottery-making traditions spread along the coast through the movement of women and intermarriage.

对美拉尼西亚交换系统的民族志描述，如 Kula 和 Hiri，对人类学的发展产生了重大影响。这些叙述主要关注由英勇的航海冒险所构建的男性能动性，而女性的能动性及其文化习俗——美拉尼西亚社会相互联系的关键——往往被忽视。在巴布亚新几内亚的南海岸，民族志提供了女性文化习俗的细节，她们制作的陶器遗迹在考古环境中保存得很好。本文报告了基于扫描电子显微镜的自动矿物学 （SEM-AM） 分析结果，分析了来自巴布亚新几内亚南海岸相距 80 公里的两个地区的选定陶片的结果。这些陶片在形式和装饰上非常相似，因此我们采用了精确的矿物特征，将陶片归入矿物学组，并测试它们是否来自同一制造地点并沿海岸交易。矿物学分析揭示了过去社会纠葛的细微差别，揭示了航海联盟和网络是通过亲属关系来维持的。我们认为，在这种情况下，陶器制作传统通过妇女的流动和通婚沿着沿海地区传播开来。