ABSTRACT
The adoption of mound cultivation expanded the plant exploitation repertoire people could draw on and provided a means of subsistence that enabled communities to permanently occupy the grasslands of the Upper Wahgi Valley and, presumably, other locales. The adoption of the practices represents a continuing elaboration of plant exploitation practices from the early Holocene. Deforestation on the floor of the Upper Wahgi Valley around 7000 years ago was relatively rapid, occurring within a few hundred years. Comparable archaeological evidence to that at Kuk has been documented at two other wetlands in the Upper Wahgi Valley: Mugumamp and Warrawau. Multidisciplinary investigations of the integrated, early palaeosurface at Kuk suggest that the fills of the cut features between the mounds were not deposited under water. Although the palaeoenvironments at Kuk have been characterised throughout the Holocene, methodological questions remained regarding the archaeological associations of samples from the fills of features on the mounded palaeosurface.
