New
Guinea
Growth
within Limits
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| Farms: Highlands New Guinea |
In the 1920’s when people began to
explore the interior of the island of New Guinea what they found surprised them
immensely. Beforehand the dense jungles and swamps of the coast and the fact
that these areas were chock full of fevers, disease and parasites aside from
being a stunningly forbidden landscape of primeval jungle had prevented
European explorers from getting far into the interior. The coastlines were
generally not that thickly populated with a Neolithic tribal people divided
into numerous small tribes that spoke numerous diverse languages. The
expectation was that they would find that the interior was similarly
populated with scattered tribes separated by thick jungle in a thinly populated
landscape.
The actuality was a surprise instead of
thick jungle with a thin tribal population; they found a thick population of
Neolithic farmers living in mile after mile of villages and gardens numbering
in the millions. The population of Highland New Guinea was dense; where one
village and its gardens ended another began. Jungle was confined to high steep
areas and swamps and was scattered about in isolated spots.
To say no one expected this is an
underestimate. It was the last thing that westerners expected to find. Further
these were a Neolithic people with stone tools and virtually no use of metal
for any purpose whatsoever. Further they were divided into hundreds of small
tribal groups speaking hundreds of mutually unintelligible languages. In fact
their culture was so Stone Age that they didn’t even have “Chiefs”, what they
had were what Anthropologists call “Big Men”. The difference being that
“Chiefs” had some sort of coercive authority and prestige and the position had
hereditary aspects and further that chiefs acquired products for redistribution
that further cemented their authority by setting up networks of obligation. In
the case of “Big Men”, the coercive authority was non-existent, networks of
obligation minimal to non-existent. “Big Men” were simply men who had acquired
more influence than others in local affairs.
In fact the societies were pretty
egalitarian and the only truly significant difference in status was a rather
sharp sexual division of labour. The other common characteristic of the various
societies was a rather chronic state of war between the various tribal groups.
The result was a fairly significant level of deaths in males through
inter-tribal conflict. In fact it was the very loose way in which authority was
structured that prevented conflicts from being settled in any permanent fashion
so that disputes become conflicts that created a situation of feud and counter
feud. The resulting violence was endemic and persistent. The lack of the
authority of "Chiefs" or the equivalent meant that conflicts could never be
settled securely.
What did emerge was the codification and
ritualization of violence and dispute settlement that helped to keep the
violence within bounds and to at least some of the time settle disputes. Thus
war between tribes in New Guinea tended to be highly ritualized and refined.
Although this presumably helped to keep the violence from wreaking the
societies involved it didn’t particularly help end it. That would have required
an exterior authority imposing peace and since no such authority existed, peace was at best intermittent.
The intrusion of Western influence did
bring that outside authority and it was able to impose peace of a kind.
Something that the older generation of New Guineans are perfectly happy with.
Other changes not so much.
And aside from being linguistically so
different from each other. The cultural variety among the New Guineans was and
is amazing. Not surprisingly it has provided much grist for the anthropological
mill since then. And for being the source of a great many stories of
headhunting and cannibalism.
When Westerners first saw these
societies they thought that they were seeing a fossilized series of Neolithic
societies that had little changed in thousands of years. Thus New Guinea 1000 or 2000 etc., years ago would be little different from what is now
and that New Guinea society provided a glimpse into the past of human societies
during the Neolithic period.
The argument was that basically New
Guinean societies had little “real” history and that things stayed the same.
Further that New Guinean society and people “must” be highly conservative and
fearful of change so that their societies would change so little over the
years. Added to this it was thought that agriculture in New Guinea at most c.
3,000 years ago where it was adopted by the hunter gatherers of the island who
swiftly adopted it and then basically stagnated shortly after the adoption.
All of the above is simply wrong.
New Guinea seems to have been originally
settled more than 45,000 years ago by hunter gatherers who lived in and off the
dense jungles with their abundant plant and animal life. For almost 37,000
years New Guineans lived has hunter gathers in New Guinea. Then agriculture
came. And remarkably it was far older than anyone expected. It was thought that
agriculture had entered New Guinea from outside that proved not to be the case.
Firstly agriculture was established in
New Guinea not 2,000 - 3,000 years ago but more than 7,000 years ago and further the
New Guineans had developed agriculture on their own.
The New Guineans cultivated taro, bananas,
yams and sugarcane, which they appear to have domesticated entirely on their
own. Thus making New Guinea one of the small number of places on Earth in which
agriculture originated independently. The New Guineans added to the list of
items they cultivated and domesticated, pigs, chickens and most importantly the
sweet potato. Those three items came from outside New Guinea. And they also had
the dog. They of course continued to exploit jungle and rivers and creeks for
their natural resources.
After the adoption of agriculture the
population of the New Guinea highlands slowly increased and the jungle
decreased. This was because as the population expanded the areas under cultivation
grew. Further the woods were increasingly mined out for wood. The resulting deforestation
was gradually apparent and by 1,200 years ago it appears a crisis was reached.
Now often the effects of deforestation are cataclysmic in this case the New
Guineans adopted a solution. They, if the pollen, records are anything to go
by, fairly quickly took up silviculture, the planting and cultivation of trees.
They started growing en-mass and deliberately the Casuarina tree, (“Ironwood”).
For both fuel and for buildings material and tools. The tree also grows fairly
quickly and has a positive effect on the soil. The wood is also very hard,
hence the name “Ironwood”, although it is also brittle. This enabled the New Guineans to
stop the continuous encroaching on what was left of the native forests in the
highlands and so preserved them for future generations to exploit for their
natural resources.
In the meantime several volcanic
eruptions significantly increased soil fertility and thus led to an expanding
population. But far more important in leading to an expanding population was
the arrival of the sweet potato c. 400 years ago. The sweet potato from the
Americas wasn’t just a supplement to the previously domesticated plants and
animals it was a earth shaking arrival. That was because the yields of sweet
potato per acre of cultivated land were several time that of the other New
Guinea domesticated plants. The result was a population explosion. Yet it
appears the New Guineans adapted. By intensification of their cultivation
techniques.
Thus the New Guineans used intensively
natural fertilizers, such as weeds and, grass etc., pig and chicken manure,
even ash from fires. They practiced irrigation to both get water to where it
was needed and to carry it away. They practiced crop rotation, built terraces
on steep slopes. And so on and so forth. The Casuarina tree proved to be a
perfect tree in that it could be grown in amidst their gardens. It had a large
leaf fall that added nutrients to the soil and further its roots helped to fix
nitrogen into the soil.
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Agricultural fields
Highlands New Guinea |
The New Guineans were thus able to avoid
a collapse caused by too much pressure on the ecological system. In fact the
only serious problem New Guinean’s faced traditionally was getting enough protein
in their diets hence the importance of chickens and pigs.
However it is also clear that the
New Guinean’s do have a history. They developed agriculture by domesticating
their own plants then their population expanded has agriculture spread
throughout highland New Guinea. They then adopted from outside both the Chicken
and the pig, with the ecological and social changes that brought. Later still
they coped with, successfully volcanic eruptions and with the population growth
brought by the adoption of the sweet potato. Thus these Neolithic / stone age
people did in fact have a history. It was however a history with limits.
Instead of stagnation we have change over time within the matrix of Neolithic,
hoe agriculture societies. In fact the fragmentation and variety of New Guinea
traditional societies was a the product of vigorous growth both in population
and changes in technology and social relations brought on by both.
Thus instead of being a picture of the
past New Guinea when first encountered in the early part of the 20th
century were the end product of thousands of years of change and adaption. And
pretty successful adaption at that.
For it appears to be the very fact that
traditional New Guinea societies were so fragmented that helped them to adapt.
Has said above traditional New Guinea societies do not even have chiefs. The result
is that things are decided by endless discussion and debate until a decision is
reached. This is important because it means that decisions once made are implemented
locally in these small scale societies. So how did this help them to adapt?
Well the very fact that societies were
small scale made moving very difficult. You try to move and you run into angry
neighbours who won’t let you move. So just moving away was not much of a
solution. Also there were too many societies to make dispossession of your
neighbours a realistic option to begin with. The highly ritualized nature of
warfare also didn’t help. Further the democratic ethos of the societies
inhibited the emergence of war chiefs who could have created or tried to
create a militaristic society. Well if moving and conquering was not an option
than adaptions had to be local.
Everyone could see that deforestation,
poor yields from gardens, lack of wood was a problem. Since moving was not an
option other solutions had to be tried. The democratic ethos ensured that
decisions had the approval of the majority and so were carried out by consensus
and peer pressure. Since everyone could see the problem and new solutions had
to be found and that moving was not an option, solutions were found, adopted and
carried through to completion.
Thus within the limits imposed by the
geography and culture of New Guinea societies growth happened and change happened.
This was no world outside of history but a world of growth and change within
limits.
I wonder if this as any lessons for us?
I suppose what it means is that growth does not necessarily have to involve
endless qualitative growth to greater and greater accelerating growth and
development. Growth can involve the steady improvement of technique within
limits. The limits being that the structure of society and even certain basic
technologies change surprisingly little. It is possible that human technology
does indeed have growth limits. I suppose that the continued growth of output of
human power sources does have a limit. After all on current trends the growth
of such energy sources would turn cause the earth surface to radiate
temperatures of 6,000 degrees Fahrenheit in a few centuries. Or that in a few
thousand years the number of humans would weigh as much as all the mass in the
Universe. So I suppose there are real limits.
Of course the New Guinean’s didn’t live
in paradise. The area had lots of tropical diseases, there were certain dietary
problems that occurred and of course the chronic state of inter-tribal warfare
didn’t help things. Still over all the New Guineans adapted and adapted successfully
to various challenges over the past couple of thousands years. And so can we.
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| New Guinea Man |
Bibliography
Practically all the stuff about New
Guinea and adaption to change is taken from:
Diamond, Jared, Collapse, Penguin Books, London, 2005, pp. 277-286.
Other material
Diamond, Jared, Guns, Germs and Steel, W.W. Norton & Co., New York, 1998, pp.
147-150, 303-304, 306-307, 317-319, 346-347.
Neumann, Katharina, New Guinea: A Cradle of Agriculture, Science Express, June 19, 2003.
Denham, Ted, Envisaging early agriculture in the Highlands of New Guinea:
landscapes, plants and practices, World
Archaeology, v. 37, no. 2, 2005, pp. 290-306.
Denham, T. P., Haberle, S. G, Lentfer,
C, Fullagar, R, Field, J, Therin, M, Porch, N, Winsborough, B, Origins of Agriculture at Kuk Swamp in the
Highlands of New Guinea, Science
Express, June 19, 2003.
For a view of how agriculture, ecology
and culture interact in a traditional New Guinea society along with warfare
see:
Rappaport, Roy A., Pigs for the Ancestors, Yale University Press, New Haven CONN, New,
enlarged Edition, 1984.
For an interesting if exaggerated gloom
and doom prediction of man’s future and limits to growth see:
Meadows, Donella H., Randers, Jorgen, Meadows,
Dennis L., Behrens, William W., The Limits
to Growth, Universe Books, New York, 1972.
Pierre Cloutier
