Why Bananas Matter: An introduction to the history of banana domestication

www.ethnobotanyjournal.org/vol7/i1547-3465-07-165.pdf Ethnobotany Research & Applications 7:165-177 (2009) Edmond De Langhe, Laboratory of Tropical Crop Improvement, Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, Kasteelpark Arenberg 13 –3001 Heverlee, BELGIUM. [email protected] Luc Vrydaghs, Research Team in Archaeoand Palaeo-Sciences, av. H. de Brouckèe, 82. B 1160 Brussels, BELGIUM. [email protected] Pierre de Maret, Secrétariat, Centre d’Anthropologie Culturelle, Université Libre de Bruxelles, avenue Jeanne, 44 CP 124, 1050 Bruxelles, BELGIUM. Xavier Perrier, CIRAD (Centre de cooperation internationale en recherche agronomique pour le développement), Avenue Agropolis TA A-75 / 02 34398 Montpellier Cedex 5, FRANCE. [email protected] Tim Denham, School of Geography and Environmental Science, Monash University, Clayton VIC 3800, AUSTRALIA. Secondly, the ways people began to use, transplant and cultivate bananas are a window on a broader set of poorly-defined human-environment relationships, namely, how people began to increasingly manage and alter plant resources for food and other uses in tropical rainforests. Plant exploitation practices in tropical rainforests led to the emergence and dispersal of distinctive forms of agriculture in several regions of the world, including the lowland neotropics (Piperno & Pearsall 1998) and New Guinea (Denham et al. 2003, Golson 1991). However, the development of plant exploitation practices into agriculture and the attendant social, environmental and morphogenetic transformations are only beginning to be understood for tropical agriculture, particularly for those forms dependent upon vegetative forms of propagation.