| Notes: |
Introduction: By the New Guinea Highlands we mean the high valleys within the central cordillera of the island between about 1300 and 2500 m, which are the home of relatively large populations living in deforested environments at densities of up to 300 per km<sup>2</sup>. Our focus is the better-known Papua New Guinea Highlands, which are continuous across Southern Highlands, Enga, Western Highlands, Simbu, and Eastern Highlands Provinces
but from time to time we look beyond the Indonesian border to Irian Jaya, where, separated from the above by lightly peopled mountain country, are the Baliem and Western Dani and, beyond them, the Kapauku of the Paniai lakes. In a sense, agriculture has been involved in most discussion of sociocultural development in this region. At European contact, everywhere within the last 60 years, the Indo-Pacific staples of lowland New Guinea, such as <i>Colocasia</i> taro and <i>Dioscorea</i> yam, were minor crops. Agriculture was dominated by the tropical American sweet potato (<i>Impomoea batatas</i>), a food plant superior to taro and yam in its yield and maturation at altitude, and in its tolerance of poor and agriculturally depleted soils
but the sweet potato's appearance in the island in generally agreed to have been post-Magellanic (cf 101:317). To what extent, then, was the character of Highlands societies the product of the few hundred years since the sweet potato was introduced? In the most influential contribution on the matter, J. B. Watson (84-87, 88:326-29) argued for an Ipomoean Revolution, in which the sweet potato transformed a region where before there had been only low levels of agricultural activity and population. This is the issue that underlies our review of recent archaeological and ethnographic work on Highlands societies and their developmental contexts.
|
