A book addressing the long-term engagement of hominins and humans with tropical rainforests is long overdue. Despite the prominence of tropical rainforests in the popular imagination, the archaeology of this biome is still peripheral to mainstream disciplinary discourse. Perhaps the marginality of the wet tropics within archaeology is not surprising, it may simply reflect the colonial history of the discipline and its neo-colonial legacies. In this book, Patrick Roberts indicates how research from the wet tropics is making a fundamental contribution to global archaeology in several fields: hominin and early human origins, the adaptability of modern humans, early agriculture, early forms of tropical urbanism and encounters with Indigenous peoples.
Initial chapters frame the line of argumentation within the book (Chapter 1) and provide ecological background (Chapter 2). These chapters seek to position tropical rainforests as key to understanding long-term human evolution, as well as contemporary cultural diversity. They also serve to disabuse the reader of several common misconceptions. Tropical rainforests are not ‘green deserts’; they enable human subsistence. Tropical rainforests are not one static environment; they are ecologically diverse, both geographically and temporally. Further, tropical rainforests should not be considered as pristine, timeless or ‘virgin’ ecosystems; most have undergone dramatic transformations through time in response to climatic, environmental and anthropic processes, as well as more regular, small-scale perturbations in response to ecosystem dynamics.
In Chapter 3 and the beginning of Chapter 4, Roberts develops an argument to show how tropical rainforests are important for understanding hominin and early modern human evolution. Although much evolutionary debate has focused on savannahs as the originating biome, tropical rainforests were also probably significant habitats for many of the hominin species involved. Here, Roberts's argument is somewhat speculative, but he does convincingly argue for tropical rainforests being part of the ecological mosaic for situating hominin and early human evolution in Africa.
Certainly early modern humans successfully colonised tropical rainforest environments in Africa, South Asia, Southeast Asia and Sahul (New Guinea-Australia), with later colonisation of the Americas (remainder of Chapter 4). Although the precise timings of the earliest human presence in these places are still debated, a clear impression emerges that humans were able to inhabit tropical rainforest environments wherever they encountered them. Tropical rainforests were certainly not barriers to human colonisation, even if occupation required technological innovations for hunting and food processing, as well as mobility and landscape exploitation strategies encompassing forest edges and gaps, riparian corridors and wetlands. Roberts characterises humans as “plastic pioneers”, given our ability to adapt to “change and variability” (p. 118).
The next chapter (Chapter 5) reviews the emergence of different types of agriculture in tropical forests. The reviews of substantive data on early agricultural practices in New Guinea, as well as Southeast Asia to Australasia, South Asia, Africa and the Neotropics are variable, reflecting partly the quality of available data and in part the expertise of the author. I am personally gratified that the New Guinea record is discussed in detail, yet the Neotropics is underdone—especially in terms of the long-term histories of environmental transformation and plant domestication. Roberts also discusses how research in tropical rainforests is informing conceptualisations of early agriculture elsewhere in the world in terms of: a transition rather than revolution from pre-existing practices; a diffuse rather than ‘all-or-nothing’ demarcation between foraging and farming; a focus on cultivation practices rather than solely a focus on morphological measures of domestication; and considerations of sustainability. An omission here concerns the different character of domestication for vegetatively reproduced crops—including bananas, cane grasses and root crops, as well as some trees, palms and pandanus—in the tropics compared to archaeobotanical norms derived from sexually reproduced crops—including cereals, legumes and some tree fruits—in temperate and semi-arid climates.
For me, the most fascinating chapter concerns early forms of tropical urbanism (Chapter 6). These agrarian-based, low-density cities seem to have a different character than the classic ‘urban centre-agricultural hinterland’ model. Roberts draws upon the Maya (Central America), Angkor (Cambodia) and Anuradhapura (Sri Lanka), among others, to show that the edges between the urban and rural were less clear-cut, more diffuse and interdigitated. Economic, political and ritual activities drew people inward, whereas agrarian practices and residential areas extended outward. Perhaps most intriguing are new remote-sensing applications and archaeobotanical evidence indicating horticultural plots and arboricultural groves within some low-density urban areas, effectively documenting early forms of garden city.
In Chapter 7, Roberts grapples with the cultural survival of Indigenous groups within tropical rainforests globally. He seeks to show how: “Eurocentric concerns with ‘exploration’, developments in literature, modern conservation movements, and the ‘pristine’ hunter-gatherer debate have contributed to the removal of tropical forest societies from history and their placement into isolated, primeval conceptions of tropical forest societies” (p. 186). Even though there is considerable national variation in the ways that Indigenous groups within rainforests have been treated, there are lingering negative perceptions of rainforest inhabitants—particularly foraging groups and swidden cultivators—among urban elites in many countries.
The last two chapters (Chapters 8–9) bring Roberts's long-term historical narrative into the present with a view to the future. In short, how can people maintain a long-term and sustainable engagement with tropical rainforest ecosystems, while also enabling the survival of the biota and societies who inhabit them? Although Roberts offers a glimmer of hope, over the last 30 years I have become increasingly pessimistic following extensive deforestation of all major rainforests globally and increased marginalisation, forced assimilation, displacement or ‘cleansing’ of Indigenous groups. Nonetheless, and despite almost certain failure, we have to hope for, and work towards, a better future.
Although Roberts provides an excellent overview, I would have liked a greater emphasis on how people have been able to live in rainforests through time, with less focus on putative developmental markers such as agriculture and urbanism. Are these the most relevant concepts to understand how people have successfully inhabited tropical rainforests for tens of millennia? If we are to reorient our thinking and truly learn from the human experience of living within rainforests then perhaps individual chapters should have focused on sustainability and resilience, residential mobility with dispersed settlement patterns and the domestication of landscapes.
The above are only minor comments and quibbles for a book of this breadth and scope. Roberts could not include everything; instead, he chose to highlight key themes of general interest and significance. Overall, the book is well written, generously illustrated and provides an excellent introduction to the long-term human occupation of tropical rainforests.
