The Raja Ampat Project

This interdisciplinary research, conservation, and outreach project is exploring the changing ecology of island rainforests in the Raja Ampat Archipelago of Southwest Papua. These islands lie at the heart of the Coral Triangle, host to the highest marine diversity on the planet and abundant endemic plant and animal life. By combining methods from biology, social anthropology, and archaeology, we are exploring how humans transformed these environments throughout deep time, including people’s capacity to extirpate, translocate, and conserve fauna and flora. Archaeological survey and excavation are documenting the chronology of human colonization in the islands and have produced zooarchaeological and artifactual records that currently attest to over 50,000 years of human interactions with marine and terrestrial environments. Palaeoecological analyses are providing deep sequences of vegetation change in the islands. To understand how these ecologies have changed over time, these time sequences are compared with ethnographic documentation of present-day fishing, hunting, cropping, and collecting strategies, as well as interviews about plant and animal life. Community participation in the fieldwork and outreach programs is being used to explore how local people perceive their place in these changing ecologies, which are at the forefront of existential risks like sea level rise, habitat loss, extinction, and environmental knowledge loss. Fundamentally, we are interested in using insights about how humans have transformed island rainforests in the past and the present to think about the possible futures for these ecologies.