Drawing ethnographic data from the foraging communities of New Guinea, an underused resource in hunter-gatherer research, this article examines the relationship between subsistence form and four aspects of cultural complexity: density, settlement size, settlement form, and settlement permanence. On the basis of global data, it is commonly proposed that in forager communities, these characteristics are directly related to the degree of dependence on aquatic resources. For serendipitous reasons, the New Guinea data allow these propositions to be assessed with some precision, and the results strongly corroborate them. The implications of these findings for understanding the generation of complexity in forager societies are briefly discussed.
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