Agricultural intensification in pre-colonial Melanesia
Fifty years ago, when cultural geographers like Carl Sauer were constructing world models of agricultural origins and dispersals, it was assumed that the island of New Guinea was a backwater, with a prehistory that had been almost unaffected by economic and social developments in South East Asia and beyond. It was further assumed that until the arrival of the sweet potato, a South American crop introduced to the region via the Spanish and Portuguese, the New Guinea highlands was inhabited by sparse bands of hunter-gatherers. Today, the picture that we have of New Guinea prehistory is transformed, thanks to work by palynologists on Holocene deforestation and by archaeologists on sites of early agriculture, of which the Kuk site near Mount Hagen is the best known. New Guinea is now seen as a 'hearth' of early domestication (bananas, sugar cane, taro), and as a place with long history of agrarian innovation, environmental management, and long-distance exchange.
The New Guinea project involves collaboration by Tim Bayliss-Smith with Jack Golson (Australian National University, Canberra), Philip Hughes (also ANU) and others. It is an attempt to reconstruct the prehistorical geography of the Highlands of Papua New Guinea using archaeological data. Investigations in the 1970s by Golson at his team at the Kuk archaeological site involved the recording of ditches over many hectares of the wetland, classified into six phases spanning 9,000 years. Tim's work has involved the reconstruction of the last three phases of drainage at Kuk during the past 2,000 years, and interpretation of the meaning of the observed changes in drainage effort. Topics include the response of highlands society to tephra fallout from volcanic eruptions, implications of agricultural intensification for gender relations, and links between production, exchange and warfare.
Parallel work by Tim Bayliss Smith in New Georgia island, Solomon Islands, collaborating with Edvard Hviding (University of Bergen), has involved the reconstruction of terraced fields and irrigation channels in areas that have reverted to tropical rainforest since 19th century depopulation. This intensive system generated surplus taro production, and has been interpreted as a symptom of growing social stratification and the elaboration of exchange systems between inland and coastal peoples. Even less than in the Highlands of New Guinea, simple Boserupian models of intensification cannot be applied.
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Publications
Publications arising from the two projects include:
- 1999: The meaning of ditches: deconstructing the social landscapes of New Guinea, Kuk, Phase 4 (with J. Golson), chapter 11 in- C. Gosden and J. Hather (eds) The Prehistory of Food. Appetites for Change, London: Routledge, pp. 199-231.
- 1999: Intensification in the Pacific: comment, Current Anthropology 40, pp. 323-324.
- 2003: The archaeology and ethnohistory of exchange in precolonial and colonial Roviana: comment, Current Anthropology 44 (suppl.), pp. S70-S71.
- 2003: Rain forest composition and histories of human disturbance in Solomon Islands (with E. Hviding and T.C. Whitmore), Ambio 32, 5, pp. 346-352.
- 2005: Archaeological evidence for the Ipomoean Revolution at Kuk swamp, Upper Wahgi Valley, Papua New Guinea (with J. Golson, P. Hughes, R. Blong and W. Ambrose), chapter 11 in C. Ballard et al. (eds) The Sweet Potato in Oceania: a Reappraisal, Pittsburgh: Ethnology Monograph 19, Department of Anthropology, University of Pittsburgh, and Sydney: Oceania Monograph 56, University of Sydney, pp. 109-120.
- 2007: Understanding agricultural change: interpreting the archaeological record using insights from ethnography, in T.P. Denham, J. Iriarte & L. Vrydaghs. (eds), Rethinking Agriculture: Archaeological and Ethnoarchaeological Perspectives, London: UCL Press.
- 2008: Comment on variable development of dryland agriculture in Hawai'i. Current Anthropology 49(5): 788-789.