ABSTRACT
The significance of early agricultural history within Papua New Guinea is demonstrated by the successful nomination of the Kuk Early Agricultural Site to the World Heritage List in 2008. The multidisciplinary evidence clearly demonstrates that the island was not a 'backwater' at the margins of agricultural developments on Eurasia. The New Guinea chronology is amongst the oldest evidence for agriculture in the world. The record of early agriculture in the highlands is comparable in antiquity to that reconstructed for Southwest Asia, China and Central America. Importantly, rather than searching for 'agricultural origins' in other places in Southeast Asia or Australasia, the focus should be upon establishing robust regional records of plant exploitation and developing a common framework for interpretation. Through time, and especially during the Holocene, initial differences in emphasis in plant exploitation practices accumulated to become differences in kind across Island Southeast Asia, lowland Melanesia, the highlands of New Guinea and northern Australia.
