The gardens of New Guinea

In the highlands of New Guinea, people dug drains in a swamp and grew taro and bananas, one of the places in the world where farming began on its own.

Date: About 8000 to 2500 BCIII · Farming and the New Stone AgeIV · First cities and the Bronze Age
Place: Kuk Swamp, Papua New GuineaOceania
Laid out as: A siteOne place known mainly from digging, read layer by layer from the top down.
Lessons: 4 planned, none written yet
Themes: Farming, food and drink
Environment, climate and disasters
Technology and engineering

The lessons we plan

Titles may change as they are written

IThe Kuk swamp
IITaro, bananas and yams
IIIDrains and mounds
IVFarming without wheat

Still to come

The people and objects these lessons will cover

People

Jack Golson
Tim Denham

Objects

Ditches and mounds
Starch grains on stone tools

Where it sits

All of human history, era by era

Early human ancestry Our species and the Old Stone Age Farming and the New Stone Age First cities and the Bronze Age The Iron Age and growing states The classical world After the empires Medieval networks and empires Oceans crossed Revolutions and the first factories Industry, empire and world war The world since 1945

8000 BC to 2500 BC. Each era is drawn the same width, so the earliest are squeezed: era II alone is over 300,000 years.

Nearby in time and place

First Australians outline
The Lapita voyagers written

This page is an outline. The summary above is a starting point; each lesson, when it is written, will give its sources, its pictures and where historians disagree. Spotted a mistake?