Potsherds from Bougainville Island

Abstract

The potsherds described in this report were collected by Conrad Johnson Jr, in 1949, from the village of Tiop, on Bougainville Island.It is a surface collection from a banana grove.We are grateful to the University of Colorado Museum of Anthropology for permission to study the collection.We do not know whether the specimens came from one site at Tiop, or from around the village area.As the sherds are from the surface, it is impossible to make comparisons of design elements on a relative frequency basis by depth or by chronological association.Of the 75 sherds in the collection all but one are decorated.This would seem to indicate that it is not a random sample, and that a special effort was made to collect only decorated sherds.Pottery we have seen from New Caledonia, Fiji, and New Guinea is decorated only around the upper part of the vessel.As only one plain sherd was collected, there is no way of telling from this collection if this is also the case on Bougainville.Variation in surface colour of the sherds (red to black), indicates that the ware was fired in a poorly controlled atmosphere, at a low temperature, thus producing a relatively low grade of pottery.The sherds are coarse-textured and crumble or shatter readily.No firing clouds are apparent, although there is considerable variation of colour even on individual sherds.No carbon streaks were noted.A description of the temper was not attempted, as it is a surface collection with no known provenance.While the sherds are too small to indicate the size of the vessels, the curvature of the rim sherds, and other specin1ens suggest that they all represent fragments of bowls.

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