Kuk Swamp agricultural chronology reassessment

Record summary

Kuk Swamp is a UNESCO-listed early agricultural landscape where drainage ditches, planting surfaces, and plant microfossils have been used to argue for highland cultivation by about 7,000–10,000 years ago. Later work has refined the sequence and questioned how directly individual features demonstrate domestication or intensive agriculture. Kuk is valuable for comparison with other independent food-production traditions and with later Pacific dispersals. Uncertainty concerns feature function, preservation, calibration, and the distinction between managed wetlands, cultivation, and domesticated crops.