ABSTRACT
This chapter outlines the conceptual framework used to define agriculture and to identify it in the multidisciplinary record of the highlands. The effects of agriculture are evident in plant cultivation and use, environmental transformation and in the archaeological remains of former cultivation practices. Archaeological remains enable specificity in interpreting what people were doing, their use of plants and the cumulative effects of the practices on the environment. A priori, the recursivity of human-environment interactions hinders the interpretation of a singular, or ultimate, cause of early agriculture. In terms of the environmental domain, the palaeoecology of the New Guinea highlands from the Pleistocene to the present is reasonably well understood. Genotypic and phenotypic changes are a continuum of change, along which measures of domesticity, as opposed to wildness, are determined. The conceptual differentiation of 'food procurement' and 'low-level food production without domesticates' is complex and difficult.
