What Everyone Should Know About Kuk Swamp

I often have a bit of a hard time explaining the multilinear nature of history to my students, who have been brought up with an ingrained notion of "progress". The master narrative goes like this:  Several thousand years ago, people invented agriculture in a few places, which caused them to settle down, and eventually they developed the first state societies. From those you get the first civilizations, eventually leading to us. The examples of such places (and the staples they relied on) are Mesopotamia (wheat, barley, lentils, cattle, sheep/goat), the Andes and Pacific Coast of South America (potatoes, cotton), Mesoamerica (maize, beans, squash), and the Yangtze and Yellow River valleys in China (rice, millet, pigs, chickens).

We were dealing with the question of origin narratives, why people are so obsessed with "the first" this or that while discussing evidence for the earliest agriculture in highland New Guinea. Around 8,000 years ago, there were agricultural people living in the Wahgi Valley (evidence for this comes from various archaeological sites, notably Kuk Swamp, Tim Denham's chapter in the edited volume Archaeology in Oceania provides a good critical review). It looks like this was an independent innovation in the region, before the incursion of Austronesian speakers who had another suite of domesticated plants and animals. What is important to me, though, is that these people did not then develop urbanism, hierarchical social structure, and all of the other things that lead to what get called "states". Rather, they developed very unique ways of living in the tropical highlands.

Some might suggest that there were no states in the prehistoric Wahgi Valley because the ancestors of contemporary highland New Guinea peoples were somehow too primitive, or limited by their environment, to develop all the things we associate with modernity. This is a misinterpretation at its core. People simply happened to follow a different route. There is no single developmental trajectory for human societies. The broad evidence of many histories shows this, people follow too many different paths. Stories focused on origins tend to reify the present. We look back, see what happened, and think, of course, that must be the way it was. Development and progress were inevitable. But if we take into account all of the historical trajectories that don't follow the usual story, we see that all of history is essentially random. Not that there aren't certain processes that structured the past, but that people didn't plan things for the long-term. History follows many paths, shaped by people interacting with certain phenomena, which are unpredictable to lesser and greater extents.

The reason I'm compelled by this idea is that it calls into question what trajectory human societies might follow in the future. There is no inevitable, unilinear march of progress that we are caught up in. We are not "doomed" in the literal sense of the word, as many people may believe. Quite the opposite, we have an almost infinite kind of creativity to draw upon in deciding what direction to take our world. This is not meant to be a new age-y sermon about positive energy, harmony, or the holistic. Rather, it is a suggestion that we should think carefully about the choices we make on an everyday basis, and the kinds of long-term social structures we create that will shape the next centuries and perhaps millenia of human social change. Whatever happens, social evolution will be somewhat unpredictable, and history certainly won't follow a single steady stream.

Why 500 years?

I have never written a blog before.  And for a long time, I didn't think that I would.  I had a journal for writing down personal observations, and did plenty of writing for my academic work.  But then, during the last class of a freshman seminar about environmental anthropology, I had an idea that I wished I had come up with much sooner. 

We were discussing the historical short-sightedness necessitated by contemporary capitalism, which has basically crippled any efforts at passing, let alone implementing international environmental legislation.  Personally, I always think "grassroots" or "bottom-up" solutions by small groups of thoughtful people with deep local knowledge are preferable anyway.  So I brought up the idea that really long-term planning was necessary.  In fact, we probably need projects that last longer than a single human life.  This led to the question, what would a 500-year project look like?  What kinds of institutions do we already have that could sustain such a project?

I chose 500 years as a somewhat arbitrary number, but it is also a useful one.  It has been roughly 500 years since Columbus' arrival in the new world.  That is where we could trace the origins of a globalized world system driven by capitalism.  Many of the major environmental and social problems we face today are a legacy of these last five centuries.  Now I don't believe people thought, "hmm, what can we do that would really mess the world up?"  Nor have I found anything in my academic research, which is concerned with the archaeology of globalization in some parts of the Pacific Islands, that suggests this was the case.  Rather, I think it was the distinct lack of planning that was the problem, and there is plenty of evidence for the ad hoc, improvised nature of colonialism.

So I wanted to explore the possibilities of what we could do if we did plan for the long term in the next 500 years.  I see this blog as a place to do this in a format that is publicly accessible, and where there might be some public discussion.  That said, I can't promise that every entry will be brilliant, focused, or even related to this topic.  Sometimes, I might write about random things that I think are thought provoking, funny, or absurd.  I have plenty of writing to do elsewhere, and that is my main focus.  But, once in a while if the inspiration hits me and I have a free moment, I will try to add a few lines to this.