Tim Denham

Australian National University | ANU · School of Archaeology & Anthropology

Research on prehistoric mainland Southeast Asia is dominated by mortuary contexts, leaving processes such as the transition to sedentism relatively understudied. Recent excavations in southern Vietnam, however, have recovered new evidence for settlement. The authors report on investigations at the neolithic site of Loc Giang (3980–3270 cal BP) in s...

Archaeological investigations have documented an ideological and occupied frontier in the Lower Tagali Valley along the southern margins of the Highlands of Papua New Guinea. Open-area excavations document two types of house structure associated with Huli occupation of the Lower Tagali Valley landscape, a women's house (wandia) and a lodge and cere...

The investigation of archaeological parenchyma derived from underground storage organs (USOs) is under-represented in archaeobotany globally. Although some regional reference collections have been assembled and applied to archaeobotanical materials, these are not generally accessible to researchers. Here, the initial steps in the development of a v...

Abstract Hearths exposed on the eroding surface of the Lake Mungo lunette include the remains of ovens lined or capped with heat retainers, discrete patches of cemented and organic rich sediment, and discrete clusters of burned bone. Microstratigraphic investigation of four late Pleistocene hearths was undertaken using thin section microscopy and m...

Recent DNA studies have shown that selected populations in Southeast Asia, and Oceania in particular, have inherited genetic material from Denisovans, with the highest percentage found in Papua New Guinea (PNG) and Aboriginal Australians. Multiple divergent ancestries are seen in New Guinea with two unique Denisovan lineages; the latest (D1) occurr...

Abbo and Gopher contend that we offer nothing new to the study of domestication in three recent papers (Bogaard et al., 2021; Allaby et al., 2021, Allaby et al., 2022b). They claim that we offer no “innovation, a new venue of research” and “use a new jargon to express old ideas.” They further claim as erroneous our key conclusions about domesticati...

This paper introduces several archaeobotanical papers published in the same issue of Archaeology in Oceania and presents strongly argued reasons why archaeobotany should become an important subdiscipline within archaeological research in the Indo‐Pacific. Cet article présente plusieurs articles archéobotaniques publiés dans le même numéro d'Archéol...

In the tropics, outdoor areas are important arenas of social life and the scene of economic and daily activities. Yet, outdoor areas are not often detected due to destructive post-depositional processes and low archaeological visibility. Here, we use microarchaeology to establish the settlement history and outdoor use of space at Lo Gach in Long An...

Archaeobotanical evidence for the exploitation of vegetatively propagated underground storage organs (USOs) in the tropical regions of Australia, Southeast Asia and the Pacific is currently limited. Although there have been several key studies of archaeological parenchyma published in the past two decades, systematic application of identification m...

Across the prehistoric period in Mainland Southeast Asia (MSEA), very few architectural remains and settlements have been identified and there is an absence of evidence for dwellings and domestic spaces. Loc Giang (3980–3270 cal BP) in Long An Province, southern Vietnam is one of the few prehistoric settlements excavated in the region, revealing co...

Shell mounds are an important component of the archaeology of coastal regions in northern Vietnam. Understanding cultural dynamics and settlement patterns within seemingly homogenous layers of shell accumulation is difficult based on field survey and excavation records alone. Here, we use microstratigraphic and microfacies analysis to decipher the...

The causes of the Late Pleistocene extinction of most larger‐bodied animals on the Australian continent have long been controversial. This is due, in no small part, to inadequate knowledge of exactly when these species were lost from different ecosystems. The Nombe rockshelter in the highlands of Papua New Guinea is one of very few sites on Sahul w...

Here, we report on the results of microCT scanning and Accelerator Mass Spectrometry (AMS) radiocarbon dating of fragments of charred archaeological parenchyma collected from surface deposits at Nombe rockshelter in the highlands of Papua New Guinea. Five fragments are taxonomically identified as sweet potato (Ipomoea batatas). Two subsamples from...

Quantitative Evaluation of Minerals by Scanning Electron Microscope (QEMSCAN®) provides a diagnostic analytical tool to investigate clay-rich stratigraphy in early agricultural contexts at Kuk Swamp, Papua New Guinea. Previous in situ microstratigraphic analyses at Kuk, comprising thin section description and X-radiography, have been unable to diff...

The terminology and definitions for farmers, foragers and those who undertake in-between subsistence strategies have attracted recurrent debate by archaeologists, anthropologists, geographers and others. These debates are plagued by semantic and conceptual confusions in terms of the definitions proffered to the ‘middle ground’ between foragers and...

Process philosophy offers a metaphysical foundation for domestication studies. This grounding is especially important given the European colonialist origin of ‘domestication’ as a term and 19th century cultural project. We explore the potential of process archaeology for deep-time investigation of domestication relationships, drawing attention to t...

Imprints of domesticated pearl millet (Pennisetum glaucum (L.) R. Br.) spikelets, observed as temper in ceramics dating to the third millennium BC, provide the earliest evidence for the cultivation and domestication process of this crop in northern Mali. Additional sherds from the same region dating to the fifth and fourth millennium BC were examin...

This article examines three key aspects of New Guinea Highlands prehistory, with important implications for regional and global archaeology, including evidence for (1) adaptive flexibility at high altitudes, particularly within montane rainforests and grasslands; (2) plant-food production and cultivation in the tropics; and (3) the emergence of inc...

MicroCT visualisations of organic inclusions within pottery sherds from Khashm el Girba 23 (KG23), Sudan, reveal domesticated sorghum (Sorghum bicolor subsp. bicolor) at c. 3700-2900 BCE. The percentage of non-shattering spikelet bases was c. 73% of identifiable visualizations, with c. 27% representing wild types. These analyses demonstrate the dom...

Phytolith records from three proximal freshwater shell midden sites document plant exploitation and local palaeoecological changes during the early Holocene in present-day Nanning City, Guangxi Province, China. Radiocarbon dating of freshwater gastropod shells indicates the midden sites formed sequentially, with variable chronological overlaps: Bao...

Multiproxy archaeobotanical analyses (starch granule, phytolith and microcharcoal) of an abandoned agricultural terrace at Wagadagam on Mabuyag Island, Torres Strait, Australia, document extensive, low-intensity forms of plant management from at least 2,145–1,930 cal yr bp and intensive forms of cultivation at 1,376–1,293 cal yr bp. The agricultura...

The earliest claim for domesticated rice in Island Southeast Asia (4960–3565 cal BP) derives from a single grain embedded in a ceramic sherd from Gua Sireh Cave, Borneo. In a first assessment of spikelet-base assemblages within pottery sherds using quantitative microCT analysis, the authors found no additional rice remains within this sherd to supp...

Background: Vegetatively propagated crops are globally significant in terms of current agricultural production, as well as for understanding the long-term history of early agriculture and plant domestication. Today, significant field crops include sugarcane (Saccharum officinarum), potato (Solanum tuberosum), manioc (Manihot esculenta), bananas an...

A synthetic history of human land use Humans began to leave lasting impacts on Earth's surface starting 10,000 to 8000 years ago. Through a synthetic collaboration with archaeologists around the globe, Stephens et al. compiled a comprehensive picture of the trajectory of human land use worldwide during the Holocene (see the Perspective by Roberts)....

Archaeological research is constantly shifting the date for Aboriginal occupation of Australia further back into the Pleistocene. Occupation of Boodie Cave, Western Australia, dates to 50, 000 years BP (Ward et al. 2017). New dates for the occupation of Madjedbebe Rock Shelter, northern Australia, suggest initial occupation at 65,000 years BP (Clar...

Archaeologists have long recognised the need for multi-analytical approaches to the study of pottery whereby several types of analyses are selected for their ability to complement each other and enhance the final dataset obtained. This pilot study tests a protocol for the integration of MicroCT and QEM-EDS analyses of two pottery sherds of differen...

Intensified settlement persistence emerged at different times in wet tropical southeast Asia compared to semi-arid southwest Asia. Scholars debate whether settlement involved seasonal occupations rather than year-round sedentism at the large base-camp sites during the Natufian Period, some 12500 to 12000 years ago. In southeast Asia, sedentism is b...

A recent publication on the phytolith assemblage at Fahien rockshelter, Sri Lanka (Premathilake and Hunt) is argued to represent: the exploitation of wild Musa acuminata and M. balbisiana during the Late Pleistocene; the introduction of edible diploid cultivars from the Southeast Asia–New Guinea region during the early to mid‐Holocene; the generati...

Archaeological parenchyma is analysed using microCT to enable virtual histological examination and taxonomic identification to species level. MicroCT images are compared with reflected light microscopy (RLM) and scanning electron microscopy (SEM) images of fresh, desiccated and charred reference specimens. These results reveal differences in cell d...

In tropical, arid and semi-arid environments, archaeobotanical preservation is often relatively poor and, historically, archaeobotanical extraction techniques have been inconsistently applied. As a result, the surface impressions of plants in organic-tempered pottery sherds have been relied upon to explore questions of past human-plant relationship...

The archaeobotanical evidence for a putative third centre of early agriculture and plant domestication in southern subtropical China, based primarily on use-wear and residue analyses of artefacts from the sites of Zengpiyan, Niulandong and Xincun, is here reviewed. The available data are not diagnostic of early cultivation or plant domestication ba...

Cambridge Core - Prehistory - Globalization in Prehistory - edited by Nicole Boivin

Developed botanical knowledge is argued to have been an important part of the colonising repertoire for all human migration movements, including the journey through Wallacea to Sahul. In the ethnographic present, in most parts of the world, plants make up a major component of human dietary and material resources, while also assuming essential socio...

The painted and beeswax rock art of Ingaanjalwurr rockshelter in western Arnhem Land is a unique assemblage of art within an unassuming rockshelter. By combining a variety of approaches and methods to the study of Ingaanjalwurr, we were able to draw together an important archaeological context for inferring the antiquity of the painted rock art, as...

This study explores the application of soil micromorphological and automated scanning electron microscopy mineralogical analysis to characterise lithological boundaries and site formation history from an archaeological cave site on Barrow Island, northwestern Australia. The high-resolution characterisation is used to document the changing depositio...

Rice (Oryza sativa) was domesticated in the Yangtze Valley region at least 6000–8000 years ago, yet the timing of dispersal of domesticated rice to Southeast Asia is contentious. Often rice is not well-preserved in archaeobotanical assemblages at early Neolithic sites in the wet tropics of Southeast Asia and consequently rice impressions in pottery...

Multi-scalar geoarchaeological investigations were conducted on several samples of sediment (dolomite cave sediments, ferricrete ridge, speleothem, tufa and tufa cave sediments) from four early hominin fossil-bearing sites (Taung Type Site, Haasgat, Drimolen Main Quarry, Elandsfontein) in different South African karst environments. The study was de...

This study explores the application of soil micromorphological and automated scanning electron microscopy mineralogical analysis to characterise lithological boundaries and site formation history from an archaeological cave site on Barrow Island, northwestern Australia. The high-resolution characterisation is used to document the changing depositio...

en House sites located on the wetland margin at Kuk Swamp in the Upper Wahgi Valley of Papua New Guinea were excavated in 1972 and 1973. Macrobotanical remains collected during excavation of domestic contexts were collected and subject to preliminary identification. Renewed macrobotanical analysis of these remains provides a more reliable foundatio...

en New AMS radiocarbon dating at Nombe rock shelter in Simbu Province, Papua New Guinea confirms human use from c.25500–19600 calBP and corroborates previous chronostratigraphic interpretations for four major periods of cultural deposition. The original conventional radiocarbon dating program was largely undertaken on bone and flowstones, due to th...

We are pleased Ellis et al. (1) found value in our recent synthesis of the deep history of human impacts on global ecosystems (2) and agree that our paper should influence the current debate on if and how an Anthropocene epoch is defined. We also agree that the ecological consequences of human niche construction have profound and growing effects on...

Erlandson, J.M., M.A. Zeder, N.L. Boivin, A Crowther, T. Denham, D.Q. Fuller, G. Larson & M.D. Petraglia *2016 Reply to Ellis et al.: Human niche construction and evolutionary theory. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA (doi/10.1073/pnas.1609617113).

The social entanglements of vegetative reproduction are considered for three neighbouring tropical regions that are often considered to exhibit very different histories of plant exploitation during the Holocene: early and independent agricultural development on New Guinea; introduction of agriculture to Island Southeast Asia during the last 3000–40...

Kuk Swamp is a globally significant archaeological site of early agriculture in the highlands of Papua New Guinea. Mixed-method and multi-scalar investigations of the stratigraphy and selected feature fills at Kuk were instrumental in determining the character of plant exploitation and agricultural practices there during the early and mid Holocene....

The exhibition of increasingly intensive and complex niche construction behaviors through time is a key feature of human evolution, culminating in the advanced capacity for ecosystem engineering exhibited by Homo sapiens. A crucial outcome of such behaviors has been the dramatic reshaping of the global biosphere, a transformation whose early origin...

Archaeological excavations at Ingaanjalwurr rockshelter in western Arnhem Land, Northern Territory, have revealed evidence of human settlement on the East Alligator River floodplain from approximately 1900 years ago through to the twentieth-century. This short report summarises the results of archaeological excavations at the site, focusing on date...

Traditional starchy banana cultivation in the humid tropics is dominated by two widespread, but geographically discrete, groups of AAB cultivars: plantains in Africa and maoli-popo`ulu in the Pacific. Both AAB subgroups exhibit exceptionally high cultivar diversity due to multiple somatic mutations, and yet both subgroups have relatively similar ge...

No abstract is available for this article.

Austronesian speaking peoples left Southeast Asia and entered the Western Pacific c.4000-3000 years ago, continuing on to colonise Remote Oceania for the first time, where they became the ancestral populations of Polynesians. Understanding the impact of these peoples on the mainland of New Guinea before they entered Remote Oceania has eluded archae...

Did the banana, yam and taro arrive in Australia at the hands of Europeans or come across the Torres Strait 2000 years before? Reviewing the evidence from herbaria histories and anthropology, the authors propose a 'hierarchy of hypotheses' and consider a still earlier option, that these food plants were potentially grown in Australia at least 8000...

Early fig domestication, or gathering of wild parthenocarpic figs? - Volume 81 Issue 312 - Tim Denham

Archaeological excavations at Bindjarran rockshelter in Kakadu National Park, Northern Territory, have revealed evidence of human settlement on the East Alligator River floodplain from the terminal Pleistocene through to the twentieth century. This excavation report summarises the archaeological, ethnographic and rock art research from the site, fo...

Several recent articles in Antiqui (Barker et al. 201 la; Hung et al. 2011; Spriggs 2011), discuss the validity of, and revise, portrayals of an Austronesian farming-language dispersal across Island Southeast Asia (ISEA) during the mid-Holocene (approximately 4000-3000 years ago) . In conventional portrayals of the Austronesian dispersal hypothesis...

Environmental histories of plant exchanges have largely centred on their economic importance in international trade and on their ecological and social impacts in the places where they were introduced. Yet few studies have attempted to examine how plants brought from elsewhere become incorporated over time into the regional cultures of material life...

None of the letters in response to Thomson et al. (1) undermine our conclusions. However, several issues have been raised, which we address in this reply. Beavan (2) dismisses some of the concerns that have been raised about the accuracy of the radiocarbon dates of the El Arenal-1 chicken bones, which are immediately pre-Columbian. Although procedu...