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

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.