From the Mountains to the Sea: A Deep-Time Perspective on the Heritage of Foods in Papua New Guinea

Summary

This is an abstract from the "The Archaeobotany of Early Peopling: Plant Experimentation and Cultural Inheritance" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Papua New Guinea’s (PNG) geography ranges from the high alpine mountains of its Highland provinces to remote oceanic islands and is home to a diverse spectrum of subsistence practices, most notably intensive tuber-focused horticulture, but also arboriculture and polycultures featuring many endemic species. Archaeobotany is starting to disentangle PNG’s unique deep-time food history with evidence from 50,000 years ago demonstrating a combination of adaptation to the archipelago’s unique biota with the introduction of new crops and local innovation. That innovation continues today as PNG looks to monetize its endemic crops through commercial production and export, including the galip nut (Canarium indicum), which has an at least 20,000-year history of exploitation. Focusing on the often-overlooked tree crops, this paper reviews the archaeobotanical knowledge of the Highland karuka (Pandanus julianettii) and lowland galip (Canarium indicum), demonstrating marked discontinuities and continuities in their exploitation from the Pleistocene to present. Considering previously unpublished data and the experiences of applying standard macrofossil techniques to PNG’s varied archaeology, some pointers for future practice are also provided.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• The Archaeobotany of Early Peopling: Plant Experimentation and Cultural Inheritance   •
• Society for American Archaeology 89th Annual Meeting, New Orleans, LA (2024)

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 39153.0