Saltwater and bush in New Georgia, Solomon Islands: Exchange relations, agricultural intensification and limits to social complexity

Before European contact and its various effects, the cultivation of taro (Colocasia esculenta) was widespread in Island Melanesia. Taro was grown alongside yams, bananas and vegetables in dryland swiddens, and also in irrigated or wetland sites (Rivers 1926:264). Matthew Spriggs (1990:175) divided the ecological contexts for wetland cultivation into (1) swampland cultivation, where water tables were lowered by digging drainage ditches, which enabled taro to be cultivated in ‘island beds’; (2) pit cultivation to tap ground water, a practice developed mainly on coral islands and atolls; and (3) true irrigation in which water was diverted to fields by canals or pipes, being delivered to the crop by simple flooding, in furrows, within pondfields or by flowing around island beds.