TY - JOUR
T1 - Envisaging early agriculture in the Highlands of New Guinea
T2 - Landscapes, plants and practices
AU - Denham, Tim
PY - 2005/6
Y1 - 2005/6
N2 - 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.
AB - 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.
KW - Degrees of domestication
KW - Early agriculture
KW - Landscapes
KW - New Guinea Highlands
KW - Practices
KW - Vegetative propagation
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=22144465228&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1080/00438240500095447
DO - 10.1080/00438240500095447
M3 - Review article
AN - SCOPUS:22144465228
SN - 0043-8243
VL - 37
SP - 290
EP - 306
JO - World Archaeology
JF - World Archaeology
IS - 2
ER -