Divergent pathways to tropical agriculture in highland New Guinea, Wallacea and northern Australia duringthe Holocene

The Proposal seeks to develop capacity for tropical archaeobotany within Australia and to revolutionise concepts of plant exploitation, domestication and cultivation in tropical Australasia and Wallacea during the Holocene (last c.11,500 years). The Proposal addresses major questions in world archaeology: why did some people develop agriculture in the past, while others did not A major Project outcome is to establish plant macrofossil and microfossil reference collections for three wet tropical regions: highland Papua New Guinea, Moluccas in eastern Indonesia, and western Arnhem Land in Australia. Another major outcome is to use previously excavated archaeobotanical assemblages to establish robust plant-use chronologies for these regions.