Kuk Swamp

Where bananas were domesticated, 6,900 years ago

Kuk Swamp lies in the upper Wahgi Valley of the Papua New Guinea highlands, about 1,550 metres up and 12 to 13 km northeast of Mount Hagen. It is one of the few places in the world where archaeological evidence suggests people developed agriculture independently, and UNESCO listed 116 hectares of it in 2008 as the Kuk Early Agricultural Site.

The evidence came to light through drainage. From the 1950s the Australian administration drained Wahgi swamps for tea and coffee plantations, and in 1965 a visitor at one of them, Warrawau, saw a stone mortar that had been dug up along with stone axes, wooden digging sticks and paddle-shaped spades. His letter was passed on to Jack Golson, hired in 1961 to set up an archaeological unit at the Australian National University. A digging stick from the bottom of the oldest ditch there was dated to about 2,300 radiocarbon years, well before the sweet potato reached New Guinea. In 1969, as the western part of a new tea research station at Kuk was being drained, the archaeologist Jim Allen noticed the same signs, and Golson's long investigation followed.

The excavations show a wetland worked almost continuously for 7,000 and possibly 10,000 years. Pits, postholes and runnels point to planting and digging, and ditches of three kinds, major disposal channels, large field ditches and small field ditches, turned the swamp into a managed grassland. Taro was grown here at the edge of its cultivable range, and the abundance of banana phytoliths in plots dated between 6,950 and 6,550 years ago shows bananas were deliberately planted. They were Eumusa bananas, the largest and most significant group of banana domesticates, and sugar cane was grown alongside them. UNESCO dates the technological leap from plant exploitation to agriculture to around 7,000 to 6,400 years ago, on mounds at the wetland margins, and the digging of drainage ditches with wooden tools from about 4,000 years ago to the present. Wooden digging sticks and a grindstone have come out of the channels.

Kuk is the home territory of the Kawelka people, Melpa speakers. When the first European party reached the Wahgi Basin in 1933 it stood empty: the Kawelka had been defeated by more powerful neighbours, possibly around 1920, and had taken refuge with relatives in the hills to the north. They began returning around 1960, and modern farming on the site remains low-key.