Plant Resources and Palaeobotanical Evidence for Plant Use in the Papua New Guinea Highlands

Abstract

The natural vegetation of Papua New Guinea is extremely diverse, with many different plant communities occupying the varied terrain of coastal Strandlines and flats, lowland riverine and mountain swamps, drier plains, and moister foothills and mountain slopes (Paijmans 1976). Altogether 1465 plant genera (in 246 families) of widespread tropical, Malesian and Australian affinities are recorded (van Balgooy 1976) and many of them are used for various purposes by the local inhabitants (Powell 1976). The majority of the 3.4 million people living in New Guinea are subsistence agriculturalists, cultivating in swiddens with long-term fallows, or in particular garden types with specialized features and shortterm, often controlled fallows. As well, they tend plants in natural or semi-natural situations, and gather plant products from the forests, open woodlands, grasslands and swamps.1 A number of their crop plants are considered to have been domesticated in the area (e.g. sugarcane, sago, Cyrtosperma, Australimusa bananas, oil and nut Pandanus species, and the vegetables Saccharum edule, Setaria palmirolia and Rungia klossir, Warner 1962, Barrau 1958, 1959, Simmonds 1959, Yen 1971, in press, Powell 1976, in press), although the staples of most regions are exotic crops originating in areas to the north and northwest (taro, major species of yams, Eumusa bananas; Yen and Wheeler 1968, Burkill 1960, Simmonds 1959), or from America in the case of the sweet