Rate My Professor Tim Denham

Denham's research centers on the exploitation, cultivation, and domestication of vegetatively reproducing plants such as bananas in New Guinea, Island Southeast Asia, northern Australia, and southern China; geoarchaeology and environmental change; microCT applications in archaeobotany for identifying domestication traits in pottery sherds and parenchyma; and revising Holocene histories of these regions, including Austronesian dispersal and the Lapita phenomenon. Notable publications include 'Origins of agriculture at Kuk Swamp in the Highlands of New Guinea' (Science, 2003), editor of Rethinking Agriculture: Archaeological and Ethnoarchaeological Perspectives (Left Coast Press, 2007), 'Early agriculture and plant domestication in New Guinea and Island Southeast Asia' (Current Anthropology, 2011), 'Multidisciplinary perspectives on banana (Musa spp.) domestication' (PNAS, 2011), 'Convergent evolution and parallelism in plant domestication' (PNAS, 2014), Tracing Early Agriculture in the Highlands of New Guinea: Plot, Mound and Ditch (Routledge, 2018), and editor of Ten Thousand Years of Cultivation at Kuk Swamp in the Highlands of Papua New Guinea (ANU Press, 2017). As primary author and coordinator, he contributed to Papua New Guinea’s successful UNESCO World Heritage nomination of the Kuk Early Agricultural Site (2008). His scholarship, cited over 11,000 times, advances understandings of early agriculture, human-environment interactions, and multidisciplinary archaeobotany.