Envisaging early agriculture in the Highlands of New Guinea: landscapes, plants and practices

Abstract

Although the antiquity and nature of the earliest agriculture in the Highlands of New Guinea are debatable, several key facets of those practices can be elicited. Here, ethnographic, archaeological and palaeoecological information are used to envisage the earliest gardening practices. Gardening represents the spatial co-occurrence of specific, constituent practices, many of which were conducted individually or in combination across the landscape. Differentially articulating, historically contingent practices produced, and continue to yield, mosaics of habitats and land use across the landscape, as well as mosaics comprising differing degrees of domestication for exploited plants. The adoption of a perspective focused on specific practices, rather than traditional classifications, erodes dichotomies of agriculture/hunting and gathering, wild/domesticated and forest/garden. Instead, the impacts of people on plants and the landscape are seen to be temporally and spatially discontinuous, polyvalent and multi-layered.

Keywords:

• New Guinea Highlands
• early agriculture
• vegetative propagation
• degrees of domestication
• practices
• landscapes

Acknowledgements

I am grateful to Marijke van der Veen for the invitation to contribute to this volume and to an anonymous reviewer for helpful comments. The ideas presented here, although my own, have grown out of an interpretation of Jocelyn Powell's, Doug Yen's, Jack Golson's and Simon Haberle's investigations of early plant exploitation in the Highlands of New Guinea. I thank Jack Golson for permission to cite Jocelyn Powell's and Laurie Lucking's unpublished macrobotanical research.

Notes

Biographical Notes

Tim Denham is an Honorary Research Associate, School of Geography and Environmental Science, Monash University. His recently completed doctoral thesis focused on early and mid-Holocene plant exploitation at Kuk Swamp in the Highlands of Papua New Guinea. He first undertook fieldwork in the Highlands of Papua New Guinea in 1990 and has undertaken archaeological projects across the Pacific since 1991. He is currently continuing his investigations of early agricultural and arboricultural practices in New Guinea and has initiated an environmental historical study of the McLaren Vale, South Australia.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Tim Denham

Biographical Notes Tim Denham is an Honorary Research Associate, School of Geography and Environmental Science, Monash University. His recently completed doctoral thesis focused on early and mid-Holocene plant exploitation at Kuk Swamp in the Highlands of Papua New Guinea. He first undertook fieldwork in the Highlands of Papua New Guinea in 1990 and has undertaken archaeological projects across the Pacific since 1991. He is currently continuing his investigations of early agricultural and arboricultural practices in New Guinea and has initiated an environmental historical study of the McLaren Vale, South Australia.