ABSTRACT
"Agroforestry" describes agricultural practices which achieve an integration of trees with food plants, either through inter-cropping or through shifting cultivation. In fact none of the English words used to describe Melanesian cultivation practices are altogether satisfactory. The Solomon Islands, as a chain of high volcanic islands stretching southeast from the Bismarck archipelago, is a core area of the Island Melanesian region not just in a purely spatio-geographical sense, but also in profound cultural-historical terms. On a somewhat shorter and better-documented time scale, the rainforests of the Marovo area, as well as of most major islands of the Solomons, may contain very little primary or "virgin" forest at all. The Marovo example is in many ways a remarkably rich representative of the typical Pacific Islands pattern whereby the "indigenous" agricultural systems and their knowledge bases have expanded continuously through increased contact with new species, tools and aspirations.
