ABSTRACT
The years 1880–1910 were therefore a period when coastal people increasingly took up intensive agriculture, while bush people settled on the coast and increasingly took up fishing. Somerville's account resulted from his eight months of coastal surveying work on board the HMS Penguin in Marovo Lagoon and elsewhere around New Georgia. It thus seems likely that both the sweet potato and steel tools were introduced in Marovo through the trading contacts of the coastal people, whether by Europeans or by visitors from other islands in the Solomons. Traditionally the coastal people who were benefiting from this new trade had depended for much of their food supply on barter with the bush communities. The headhunters had become dedicated "horticulturists", and it is said by old people of Marovo that many a tough man who had previously rarely set foot in a garden now showed great concern for the finer technicalities of swidden cultivation.
