Witnesses of the Past: Notes on Some Food Plants of Oceania

Abstract

In his discussion of the occurrence of a previously unreported root crop, a legume of the genus Pueraria, in the New Guinea highlands, Watson (1964) raised certain questions important to the ethnobotany of Oceania, specifically, the evolution of sustenance in the pre-European era.1 Prior to the recent discussions on the antiquity of the cultivation of the sweet potato, Ipomoea batatas (L.) Lamarck, in the New Guinea highlands, there was a tendency to assume that food-plant patterns found by Europeans in the South Pacific islands were representative of subsistence economies established in ancient times. Attention seldom was paid to the changes which may have occurred in the economic or cultivated flora of pre-European Oceania. In this respect, Watson is to be congratulated for drawing attention to a little-known food plant which may well have been a staple subsistence crop in pre-ipomoean New Guinea. In the following notes, I give some additional information on the Pueraria reported by Watson, and also men? tion some other food plants which are now of minor importance but which, like this Pueraria, might have been staple foods in the diets of previous South Pacific islanders. Though frequently overlooked, these witnesses of the past have not been completely ignored by either botanists or anthropologists. At least two au? thors, Guppy, a botanist, and Leenhardt, an anthropologist, have paid at? tention to them and are worthy of quotation here. Guppy (1906: 412-415) distinguished two sets of food plants in tropical Oceania: a first set comprising wild or occasionally cultivated plants which served as food mainly in times of scarcity; and a second set which included plants extensively cultivated by Pacific islanders at the time of Guppy's observations, e.g., bananas, breadfruit, taro, some species of yams. Those of the first wrote Guppy, probably formed the food of the earliest inhabitants of the Pacific islands. It is indeed interesting to note that, as an example of an edible plant belonging to this first set, Guppy in? cluded Pachyrrhizus trilobus. This is in fact the Pueraria (cf. Index Kewensis, MDCCCXCV) reported by Watson and which, for the sake of simplicity, I shall call Pueraria thunbergiana. The popular nomenclature of pre-European food plants in Melanesian