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Article Excerpt
Abstract
Over the last 30 years, successive researchers have portrayed occupation in the highlands of New Guinea during the Pleistocene, or prior to the advent of agriculture, to have been based on hunting and the exploitation of seasonally-producing high-altitude Pandanus spp. (karuka in pidgin). The reporting of high-altitude Pandanus dating to c. 31-30,000 uncal. BP from the Kosipe Mission site (Owen Stanley Range, Papua New Guinea) has breathed new life into this scenario. However, such portrayals are based on long-held and simplistic assumptions regarding Pandanus phenology, vegetation history and resource availability in the highlands during the Pleistocene. I advance an alternative interpretation which highlights the spatial and temporal variability in the seasonality of Pandanus production, the persistence of mixed Castanopsis-Lithocarpus lower montane forest on the lower slopes and floors of some highland valleys during the Pleistocene, the resultant variability in abundance and diversity of plant food resources across space and through time, and the highly variable food procurement strategies adopted by people inhabiting the interior of New Guinea during the Pleistocene.
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According to a long-held view, the highland interior of New Guinea is thought to have been occupied on a temporary basis for hunting and the exploitation of seasonally-producing high-altitude Pandanus spp. during the Pleistocene and prior to the advent of agriculture (see Bulmer 1977: 69; Hope et al. 1983: 40-1, 43-4; Golson 1991: 87; Hope and Golson 1995: 822-3). Fairbairn et al. (2006) draw on new archaeological findings at Kosipe Mission in the Owen Stanley Range of Papua New Guinea, in concert with the emerging palaeoecological record from nearby Kosipe Swamp, to re-evaluate the colonisation and occupation of highland and subalpine environments across New Guinea during the Pleistocene. Fairbairn et al.'s (2006) argument presents a variation on the traditional, yet problematic, theme, albeit a variation that acknowledges the potential for broader-based subsistence and settlement continuity in the interior during the Pleistocene, including the last glacial maximum (LGM).
Here it is argued that the Kosipe finds, along with other lines of multi-disciplinary evidence, do not ground a generalised model of highland (here taken to be land above 1200 m) occupation during the Pleistocene focussed on hunting and the seasonal exploitation of Pandanus. The first two sections of this paper review the new archaeological finds at Kosipe and present relevant aspects of Pandanus spp. ecology. In the third section, three key issues for understanding plant exploitation in the highlands during the variable climates of the Pleistocene are discussed: seasonal variations in Pandanus spp. production; spatially variable vegetation histories, both between and within inter-montane valleys; and, spatio-temporal variations in resource availability. Subsequently, an alternative interpretation of plant exploitation and human occupation of the interior of New Guinea (limited to Papua New Guinea) during the Pleistocene is advanced.
New evidence from Kosipe
The Kosipe data confirm the potential importance of Pandanus as an early food resource, extend greatly direct evidence for the antiquity of its use ..., and suggest that some of New Guinea's distinctive highland agricultural practices derived from the early millennia of human colonization (Fairbairn et al. 2006: 379).
Renewed investigations at Kosipe Mission (at 1950 m altitude) led by Andy Fairbairn, Geoff Hope and Glenn Summerhayes in 2005 followed up on earlier excavations by Peter White and co-workers, principally conducted in 1964 (White et al. 1970). White's excavations determined that the open site was occupied by at least c. 27,000 uncal. BP; his dates were derived from charcoal lumps scattered through a stratigraphic unit that also contained stone tools, including waisted stone axes (White et al. 1970: 167). The new investigations exhibit greater archaeological and chronostratigraphic control; they push back the antiquity of the site to c. 35,000 uncal. BP "based on dates from hearths associated with stone tools" (Fairbairn et al. 2006: 373, 375).
Of far greater significance than the increased antiquity of the site, renewed investigations recovered abundant archaeobotanical remains of Pandanus brosimos/iwen type, with two individual drupes dated separately to c. 31-30,000 uncal. BP (Fairbairn et al. 2006: 379). Previously, the oldest archaeobotanical remains had been unspecified Pandanus spp. (Bulmer 1975: 31), now identified as P. conoideus (marita in pidgin; Bulmer 2005: 392-3), post-dating c. 12,000 uncal. BP at Yuku. Elsewhere in the highlands, Pandanus spp. are relatively abundant in early to mid Holocene contexts at Manim 2, and only minor components of mid and late Holocene contexts at Etpiti, Kamapuk and Tugeri, also in the Wurup valley (Christensen 1975; Donoghue 1988, 1989). The ancient Pandanus at Kosipe is taken to substantiate White's earlier hypothesis that the occupation of Kosipe was based on the exploitation of wild edible Pandanus in the vicinity (White et al. 1970: 168-9). Like several other researchers before them, Fairbairn et al. (2006: 379) interpret the archaeological evidence to evoke a model of highland subsistence during the Pleistocene, and especially the LGM, focussed heavily on hunting and the exploitation of high-altitude Pandanus.
As part of a review of pollen and microcharcoal records indicating highly variable human impacts on the environment in different parts of New Guinea during the Pleistocene (after Haberle et al. 2001), Fairbairn et al. (2006: 376-8, especially Fig. 3) present a modified microcharcoal chronology for Kosipe Swamp. As in previous presentations (Hope 1982; also Hope and Golson 1995: 822-3, especially Fig. 2), the record is discontinuous with an apparent hiatus representing almost 20,000 years at c. 500 cm depth. The record is interpreted to show anthropic burning of vegetation from 35,000 uncal. BE Fairbairn et al. (2006: 379) take the fire record, together with the archaeological Pandanus drupes at Kosipe and waisted axes from that and other sites (Groube et al. 1986; Bulmer 2005) to envisage "a Pandanus management system similar to that seen today" (see Hope and Golson 1995: 823 for the same conclusion).
The findings of renewed archaeological investigations at Kosipe Mission extend the antiquity of Pandanus exploitation, indeed the use of any plant, in the highlands by almost 20,000 years (Fairbairn et al. 2006). Although contributing greatly to a fragmentary record, their interpretations echo long-held assumptions regarding the nature of plant exploitation...
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