Human ecology, historical ecology and history in the Kikori region (Gulf Province, Papua New Guinea)

Principal Investigator: Stefanie Belharte (formerly Klappa)
Project dates: 2008-
Funding: British Academy/ Association of Commonwealth Universities & National Geographic Society (2008)
Collaboration: 'Archaeology of the Gulf Province Lowlands' (Monash University) (2008)
Partners: Monash University & National Museum and Art Gallery of Papua New Guinea (2008)

Aims

• to explore the human ecology of the Kikori region, focusing on land use, migration, and trade
• to trace the social channels along which people and objects travel(led), with particular reference to the role of inter-group relationships
• to document the reflection of these processes, and their changes over time, in the landscape, archival sources, and oral accounts.
  

Project Description

The project region stretches from the Gulf of Papua, northwest along the Kikori River, up to the foothills of the Highlands. This region has so far received little ethnographic attention, consonant with a country-wide under-representation of the forested lowlands in the ethnographic literature. It offers, however, exciting opportunities for research, due both to its inherent characteristics and its position vis-à-vis neighbouring regions. Spanning the country’s southern lowlands, its gradients of land and resource use can highlight the respective ecological and cultural parameters, while its diversity of socio-linguistic groups can point to correlations between cultural traits and subsistence patterns, and emphasise inter-group relations and migration routes. In a wider geographical context, its intermediate position in terms of trade networks (Indonesian expeditions from the west, Austronesian expeditions from the east, local trading into/ from the Highlands), land use (articulation of lowland sago management via mixed systems with the intensive root cropping of the Highlands), and sago technology (‘Indonesian’ features of scraping tools and starch extraction vis-à-vis ‘Melanesian’ designs in neighbouring regions) offers ideal conditions to study the variability and dynamics of these phenomena.

The project complements and expands my doctoral research. Thus, I will generate data following the protocols devised during field research in the far northwest of the country, and integrate them according to the conceptual model developed in my thesis. Such standardisation will allow me to compare subsistence systems within the region and across the central cordillera, which in turn will add to my on-going research on tropical agroforestry. The historical dimension of the project ensures a diachronic perspective; it also serves the express desire of local communities to have their oral traditions laid down in writing and gain access to archival sources pertaining to their region.

The resulting study will contribute to local historiography; enhance the ethnographic visibility of the region; help to advance a coherent perspective on lowland rainforest subsistence in PNG; and refine my theories on indigenous land use in the tropics. It will thereby answer to local needs; help to fill a major gap in PNG ethnography, both regionally and nationally; and add to our understanding of human–environment relations in tropical rainforest.

A pilot study was undertaken in the first quarter of 2008, in association with the multi-disciplinary programme ‘Archaeology of the Gulf Province Lowlands' (Dr. Bruno David, Monash University/ Prof. Jean-Michel Geneste, University of Bordeaux I).

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