© Eric Lafforgue
In Papua New Guinea, humans began mastering agriculture 10,000 years ago.

Against all odds, Kuk Swamp proves that agriculture started in Papua New Guinea 10,000 years ago. Kuk Swamp, a new World Heritage site, holds treasured remains of early agriculture and drainage. By cultivating the land, the Kawelka people preserve their heritage.

In Papua New Guinea, the Kuk Swamp agricultural community is well-organized, and despite what people think, that’s not new! The traditional landowners of the area, the Kawelka, have been cultivating sweet potatoes, bananas and coffee across the area most recently since the 1990s, but they inhabited the area during various periods of the twentieth century and before.

The Kawelka say they told stories to anthropologists who took them away, whereas archaeologists told them stories that they didn’t know. Among these stories is the fact that 7,000 to 10,000 years ago, Kuk was a centre of early independent agricultural development. It was a place where people undertook a transition from pre-existing foraging practices to agriculture.

For many people including archaeologists, the mountains of Papua New Guinea seem an unlikely place to find evidence of early independent agricultural development. But archaeological excavations in the 1960s and investigations carried out by Jack Golson [a now retired Australian archaeologist who passed on the torch to Tim Denham,] have proven otherwise.

Archaeological remains such as cultivated surfaces, raised beds and ditches of ancient cultivation have been found buried in Kuk Swamp, located 1,550 metres above sea level in the Upper Wahgi Valley, which is one of the largest valleys in the mountainous spine that runs east-west across the centre of the island of New Guinea. Such archaeological findings are exceptional because the transition from foraging practices to early independent agriculture occurred in very few places in the world. Thus, each of them including Kuk is of global significance for understanding one of the greatest technological developments of modern humans.

Different types of agriculture based on certain crops and cultivation methods emerged independently in Southwest Asia, Southeast China, the Americas, potentially Africa, and New Guinea. In Southwest Asia and Southeast China, early agriculture was seed-based on cereals, legumes and other plants.
By contrast, early New Guinean agriculture- as it is still practiced on the island today,
was based exclusively on the propagation of a range of food and economic plants including fruit and nut-bearing trees, root crops like yams and taro, sugarcane, herbs, leafy vegetables and bananas. Recent studies suggest most of these plants, especially the banana, were first domesticated in the New Guinea region. Some seed-based planting also occurred, but cultivation consisted mainly of vegetative reproduction utilizing tubers, corms, suckers, stems and cuttings.

Ten thousand years ago, people were clearing patches within the rainforest and modifying the wetland environment at Kuk, whose landscape probably looked like a mosaic of forest, grassland patches and habitats disturbed by human activities. A few pits dug into the wetland edge and stone tools embedded with microscopic residues of tubers of taro and yam suggest the population had already started to focus on starch-rich plants.

Three thousand years later, the inhabitants really started developing the area. They grew plants on mounds, a type of raised bed, along the wetland margin: the underground bases of these preserved beds are still discernible in the mud. They cultivated water-tolerant plants like taro at the base of the mounds, and water-intolerant plants such as bananas and yams on the top. It also seems that these starch-rich staples were inter-cropped with leafy vegetables.

Similar forms of multi-cropped cultivation have occurred on adjacent slopes of the Kuk Swamp area. The rainforest of the Upper Wahgi valley was completely cleared because of horticulture activities and burning. Most of the valley has remained a grassland since then.

A drainage system of articulated ditch networks was implemented 4,000 years ago to enable cultivation. The Swamp contains the oldest, best-preserved and most extensive cultivation remains in New Guinea, which consist of traces in different types of mud made of old soils and former drainage feature fillings. The extent and patterns of ditch networks have varied through time. Although the reasons for periodic drainage and abandonment of the wetland are unknown, it could be related to climatic, hydrological or social factors.

Today, several hundred Kawelka live on and cultivate Kuk Swamp and its surroundings. Despite oral traditions that intimately relate the community to the land, the Kawelka are not sure whether their connection to Kuk extends back over millennia. But it doesn’t matter.

They have voluntarily committed themselves to protect the buried archaeological remains, which includes leaving certain areas free of cultivation and regulating development in other areas. To the Kawelka, heritage is something they are directly connected to through their land and history. Thus, the protection of Kuk is achieved by allowing the Kawelka to continue to occupy and cultivate the site.

Tim Denham, Monash University, Australia.

back to the summary

Photo 2: © Taro Taylor
Fruit and nut trees were among the first to be cultivated in New Guinea.

Photo 3: © Eric Lafforgue
Hand of a « mud man » (Papua New Guinea) with sharpened bamboo.