In 1966, archaeologist Jack Golson began to excavate the site of Kuk Swamp, located among extensive wetlands at the base of the Upper Wahgi Valley, one of the largest intermontane valleys in the highlands of New Guinea, 1,560 meters above sea level. Here Golson found evidence of the development and use of irrigation, drainage, and agriculture, which he dated to ca. 9,000 years ago. This was a remarkably early date for New Guinea, whose agricultural practices were believed to have originated or been “triggered” by developments in Southeast Asia ca. 3500 years ago.
Up until Golson’s work at Kuk, New Guinea was regarded as a Stone Age anomaly. So this early date for agriculture in New Guinea, earlier than any agriculture sites found on the Asian mainland, not only challenged assumptions about the origins and spread of agriculture, but also challenged fundamental assumptions about the development of human civilization. Since the 1920s archaeologists theorized that plant domestication developed in a few central or “core” areas, such as the Near East, China, South America, Mesoamerica, and the eastern United States, and then spread to other parts of the world. In these core areas, plant domestication and agriculture were linked to the growth of social complexity and towns, to the rise of early states, and hence to the development of civilization. The Kuk finds prompted these questions: Why and how had plant domestication and agriculture occurred this early in the New Guinea highlands? What had prevented the development of a complex society and civilization like the others? Understanding the former was thought to provide a basis for answering the latter.
Golson’s controversial finds required ongoing work by a multidisciplinary group of scientists. In recent times, work on Golson’s discovery has intensified, and the new evidence, comprising calibrated radiocarbon dates as well as stratigraphic, archaeobotanical, and paleoecological analyses (including diatom, insect, phytolith, pollen, and starch grain analyses), was assembled and published in 2003. This recent work conclusively demonstrated that plants were exploited, and some were cultivated, on the wetland margins of Kuk Swamp ca. 10,000 years ago, and that agriculture developed independently in the highlands of New Guinea at least 7,000 years ago. It also proved that two of the world’s most valuable crops, sugar cane and bananas, originated there ca. 7,000 years ago.
The transition from gathering and foraging to cultivation took several thousand years, and three phases of archaeological evidence at Kuk illustrate this shift.
The oldest evidence, ca. 10,000 years ago, comprises pits, stake holes and postholes, runnels, and a channel on slightly elevated and better-drained banks of soil. On one side is the edge of a wetland, and grassland is on the other. These finds are consistent with the sowing, digging in, and tethering of plants, and with improving their immediate drainage, and are probably the result of using dryland practices on the wetland margins during a drier period.
The archaeobotanical evidence of edible plants at Kuk expands and complements the archaeological finds. Edible plants such as bananas would have grown in the forests during the first and oldest phase of agriculture, ca.
10.000 years ago, and would have been gathered, transplanted, and tended in their wild forms on the wetland margins. There is evidence of forest disturbance, cultivation on the wetland margins, and microfossils from taro and bananas at Kuk during this early period.
There is also evidence that taro originated in the New Guinea lowlands and was deliberately taken to the highlands and cultivated. Taro starch grains were found on the worked edges of stone tools from this early phase, and from the next phase. Taro and bananas were the most important food staples in the New Guinea highlands until Europeans introduced sweet potatoes 300 years ago.
The second phase of archaeological evidence, ca. 7,000 years ago, comprises disturbed mounds, with stake holes, postholes, and charcoal to create better-drained and aerated soils along the wetland margins. This implies increasing reliance on the wetland for subsistence and efforts to increase the availability of edible and other useful plants by cultivating them. So between
7.000 and 6,300 years ago, using mounds, the planting and husbanding of wild species at the margins of the swamp became more intensive. There is also evidence at this time for the deliberate planting of bananas.
While banana phytoliths are present throughout Kuk, evidence for the deliberate planting, and consequent hybridization of bananas, occurs during the second and third phases of agricultural development, ca. 5,000-4,500 years ago. Kuk has the earliest date for the domestication of bananas, which prior to this, was believed to have taken place in Southeast Asia.
The third phase of archaeological evidence, ranging from 4,500 to 3,000 years ago, comprises networks of ditches and large drainage channels for deliberate, ongoing, and intensive cultivation of edible and useful plants. Some of these plants, such as bananas, yams, and sugar cane, were thought to have been brought to New Guinea as a consequence of the “Austronesian” expansion (migrations across Melanesia from Southeast Asia ca. 3,500 years ago). Evidence from Kuk proves that they were in fact cultivated in the New Guinea highlands for at least a thousand, if not several thousand, years before these migrations, and that they probably originated there. And archaeological evidence from sites in Island Melanesia corroborates that these plants were also cultivated there at similarly early dates, again before the Aus-tronesian expansion.
Evidence from Kuk proves that the New Guinea highlands were a primary center of agricultural development and plant domestication ca. 6,500 years ago, rather than a secondary and passive recipient of these developments via Southeast Asia from mainland Asia. While growth in social complexity and towns, and the development of civilization, can all be linked to the early use of agriculture at other “core” areas, in New Guinea this did not occur, or it did not occur in a similar way. Perhaps highland New Guinea societies, although characterized by high-status “big men,” are fundamentally persuasive, egalitarian, and consensual, rather than hierarchical, and have always been so. Kuk makes it clear that prehistoric human societies were not all uniform, and they did not all move along similar developmental trajectories despite similar characteristics, such as the early development of agriculture.
See also Lapita Homeland Project (1983-1990); Dating the Settlement of New Zealand (1991).
Further Reading
Denham, T. P., S. G. Haberle, C. Lentfer, R. Fullagher, J. Field, M. Therin, and N. Porch. 2003. Origins of agriculture at Kuk Swamp in the highlands of New Guinea. Science 301 (5630): 189-193.
Golson, J. 1977. No room at the top: agricultural intensification in the New Guinea highlands. In Sunda and Sahul: Prehistoric studies in South East Asia, Melanesia and Australia, ed. J. Allen, 601-638. London: Academic Press.
World History
