A Place Against Time is an ethnographically focused environmental study of Montane, New Guinea, where people were among the world's first to cultivate crops some ten millennia ago, and where today an enduring agricultural condition continues. It arranges its account of climate, vegetation topography and geology according to their relationship with the soils of the region occupied by Wola speakers in the Southern Highlands Province of Papua New Guinea, in the Western Pacific. This book breaks new intellectual ground as an ethno-environmental investigation with a soils perspective, ethno-pedology being a little researched topic to date.
'Probably the most comprehensive, ethnographically rich environmental anthropology book ever written. It has the scope of classic works by Malinowski, with a much greater knowledge of ecology. I do not recall being as impressed by the ethnographic depth and the sophistication of environmental expertise in decades.' -
Emilio Moran, Indiana University in American Anthropologist
