On July, 8, 2024, Sébastien Plutniak gave a presentation at the “European Roundtable on Southeast Asian Archaeology: Current Research and Perspectives” held at the Institut national d’histoire de l’art in Paris (France). Based on fieldwork in carried out in the Sepik region in 2018 and 2019, he addressed relations between environmental knowledge and power social structure.
What do locals know, think they know, and what does it teach us? The case of caves-related knowledge in a rural community, northern New Guinea
Since the 19th century and the development of scientific anthropology, rock art has been a continuous source of fascination and rumination about the possible thoughts and cognitive capacities of past humans. Because in some regions of the world people still live around rock art locations—or create rock art—attempts at relating past and current practices and people were continuously reinvented in multiple forms. In this perspective, recent literature published in English called to “bridge the gap” between rock art studies and ethnoarchaeology. I propose a radical answer to this call from the case of a rural community in the Sepik region, northern New Guinea, where multiple caves (adorned or not) exist. This study, focusing on the distribution of knowledge about these caves in the social structure, addresses issues related to the anthropology of archaeological knowledge, of ownership, and to the local consequences of anthropological research.