Tracking Early Agriculture in the Highlands of New Guinea - Anthropology and Colonial Administration (Paperback)

Conceptually, agriculture in New Guinea was traditionally based on the vegetative propagation of plants including trees, shrubs, grasses and herbs. Contemporary (and past) New Guinean practices are hard to categorise using terminology derived from the investigation of agriculture elsewhere in the world, as such, the investigation of prehistoric agriculture in New Guinea requires new concepts that are not based on traditional genotype and phenotype (domestication-based) interpretations, or on standard manifestations of agriculture. This book will, for the first time, bring together a range of multi-disciplinary evidence to argue for the independent emergence of agriculture in the Highlands of New Guinea during the early Holocene. Multiple lines of evidence will be drawn from published and unpublished work of previous researchers and from the results of recent and ongoing multi-disciplinary research undertaken at Kuk.