Early Agriculture, Tropical Rainforests and Conservation in Papua New Guinea: Translating the Past into the Present

Abstract

The island of New Guinea contains some of the most extensive tracts of tropical rainforest in the world. Like Am-azonia, the Congo Basin and Borneo, the tropical rainforests on New Guinea are today being heavily disturbed, degraded and destroyed by a combination of competing land uses, primarily subsistence and commercial agriculture, oil palm arboriculture and logging (Mack, 2014; Bryan, 2015; also see Tollefson, 2008; Ghazoul and Sheil, 2010). Yet, present-day human impacts on tropical rainforests need to be evaluated against long-term temporal trajectories during which people have acculturated, and effectively domesticated, these forest landscapes.