Category: Indigenous knowledge systems

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Documenting threatened languages in PNG

This project is recording and transcribing indigenous languages of Papua New Guinea, using voice recorders donated by Olympus. Papua New Guinea is home to over 800 languages, many with few remaining speakers, and many with minimal linguistic documentation. The work is being done by university staff and students who speak the local languages.

We hope to collect narratives, dialogues and songs for 100 languages, using the technique of “Basic Oral Language Documentation” (BOLD). Materials will be freely available for non-commercial use. The project runs for one year, from 21 February 2010 (UNESCO International Mother Language Day).

Such a cool idea. Wouldn’t it be great if they included in their documentation the local names of varieties of such crops as banana, taro, sugarcane, yams and sweet potato? These show incredible diversity in PNG, and are so central to the culture. Via.

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Ancient Egyptian toffs were wine snobs

An article in The Independent a few days ago on daily life in ancient Egypt included this intriguing snippet of information.

Similarly to today perhaps, wine was the booze of choice for high society individuals. Fine wines were labelled with the date, vineyard and variety as the tax assessors requested, such as the ones found in Tutankhamun’s tomb.

I don’t know about you, but I’d love to see a list of ancient Egyptian grape variety names…

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Unique peanuts in Peruvian protected area

The Peruvian National Protected Areas Service has decided to allocate funds to help protect a large swath of the Amazon this year, which is home to several endangered species and indigenous groups.

The Protected Areas Service pledged to allocate USD 280,000 for surveillance activities in the massive area – encompassing a region larger than El Salvador – formed by the Alto Purus National Park and the Purus Communal Reserve. The protected area was officially created in 2004 in part through the support of WWF.

Interesting enough, but when we ran the WWF announcement by our resident expert on the agrobiodiversity of Amazonia, he had this to say:

Lots of unique peanut landraces are known to be cultivated by the Yaminahua — and surely other native groups — that live up in there on the Upper Purus.

It would be interesting to know if the Peruvian National Protected Areas Service’s surveillance activities extend to crop diversity. Maybe someone out there knows?