Kuk

In July 2016, I spent a few days in Mount Hagen, where I stayed at the Highlander Hotel. Mount Hagen is a short drive from the Kuk Early Agricultural Site, Papua New Guinea's only World Heritage Site, which demonstrates a technological leap that transformed plant exploitation to agriculture around 7,000 to 6,400 years ago, based on vegetative propagation of bananas, taro and yam. Kuk, however, is probably only interesting to agricultural historians and wasn't that interesting to a more casual visitor; in fact, the core area, at least to me, was indistinguishable from the buffer zone, which looked similar to most of the agricultural areas surrounding Mount Hagen. Prospective visitors should contact Nicholas Namba (email: nnamba77 (at) gmail.com), who acts in some type of official capacity and has lived at the site since the early Australian excavations; he's very familiar with the site and was, in fact, the first guide that I've had at any WHS to point out the core area as distinct from the buffer zone. It would be difficult, if not impossible, to rely on the WHS map to identify the core area, so a visitor should seek guidance from Mr. Namba. Perhaps the most surprising thing about my visit to Kuk was that the weather app on my iPhone recognized that I was at Kuk Agricultural Site.

Papau New Guinea is best known for its avifauna, so my main objective was to see at least one species of bird-of-paradise in the wild. I …

In 1977, it was my great good fortune to be part of professor Jack Golson's multi-disciplinary team during the field season at Kuk Station. My husband, Art Rohn (North American anthropologist/prehistorian) and myself (cartographer) were visiting Australia for a year's sabbatical where we became friends with Jack Golson and faculty members at Australia National University and Sydney University.

I left cartography and archaeology years ago to pursue other interests. But Kuk left such an indelible stamp on me that for years I searched the Internet for mentions of the site. There were only a few papers on Kuk, one citing our work there. However, since Kuk's inclusion as a World Heritage Site in 2008, all manner of Kuk publications abound.

Kuk remains one of the most happy and vibrant memories in a life thus far liberally sprinkled with adventure. Imagine how exciting it was for a young woman of 34 to contribute to what would become one of the most important continuously cultivated agrarian sites in the world. I remember vividly how my husband at the time, Art Rohn, offered his vast expertise to help interpret what Kuk was all about.

The excavations, of course, were paramount to this multi-disciplinary interpretation. At first I used the previous mapping techniques, increasingly aware of their inability to represent sometimes amorphous features without diffinitive boundaries. One evening we sat around the dinner table, in one of the 2 stilt houses we called camp, hashing over better ways to map the mounds and valleys …

If Kuk does get inscribed in 2008 it will be another case of a “near miss” for us I am afraid! We may well have flown over it when we took a light plane along the Waghi valley from Goroka to Mt Hagen (the site is a short distance NE of Mt Hagen airfield) but I wouldn’t claim that as “seen”! However, I wonder if it is really “seeable” by anyone other than archaeologists connected with the government or university research.

But we did achieve some “connection” with the site as we visited the JK McCarthy Museum in Goroka (This is the main "Highland Museum"). Its exterior is painted with a mural (Photo) depicting the early agriculturalists of the area (described in the museum as the “world’s first gardeners” or similar words! PNG is clearly, and rightly, proud of this historical development by its peoples). A section of the museum was devoted to the discovery at Kuk Swamp (which is situated further west near the town of Mt Hagen) of the remains of these early agricultural practices. Excavations have identified plant residues, stone implements and indications of ditch/mound building which show that, as long ago as 10000 years BP, there had been “agriculture” in the area based initially on taro and then, around 6500 years BP, involving bananas, sugar cane and yams. The dates are very significant because they indicate that these people in the Highlands of PNG were not recipients of the knowledge and skills for sedentary agricultural practices …