Faces of Papua New Guinea/Faces of Papua New Guinea by Wm. C. Clarke, Ph.D. (Wayzata Technology)(3211)(1995).bin/winnqt/faces.txt

Text File | 1994-10-11 | 39KB | 850 lines

texts Faces of Papua New Guinea

INTRODUCTION

Brief historical overview

This land is one of the most ancient known locations of plant domestication
and the beginnings of agriculture. Evidence for the presence of human beings
in the interior dates back at least 40,000 years.
New Guinean peoples first saw Europeans when Spanish, Portuguese and
Dutch explorers reached the New Guinea coast during the 16th and 17th
centuries.
A European colony was established in 1884, when Germany annexed the
north coast as a protectorate and Britain did the same on the south coast.
The western half of New Guinea was part of the Netherlands East Indies.
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Indigenous peoples

The country of Papua New Guinea is a rugged land with a great diversity of
cultures and languages.
Although the great central basins of highland New Guinea were densely
settled by a million or more people practising a sophisticated agriculture,
the people were not known to the outside world until the 1930s when
Australian gold prospectors and explorers began to penetrate their world.
The broad, forested mountain fringes around the highlands remained
inaccessible to outsiders for even longer, so that some indigenous groups
were not contacted until well into the 1960s. Hence, they retained many of
their traditional ways of life.
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After Western contact

In 1975 Papua New Guinea became an independent nation with a rapidly
growing population. It began seeking economic development through its
rich mineral resources and by cultivation of export crops such as coffee,
coconuts, cacao, and tea. As a result, the diversity of native agricultural
systems became threatened.
Export crops replaced subsistance gardens and high-yield crops such as the
tuber-bearing manioc, which came originally from tropical America, were
substituted for the original variety of other native, starchy staples.
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Children learned Western ways in school rather than learning the
indigenous ways of their parents.
In towns the people's diet changed for the worse from native greens,
nuts, fruits, and complex starchy root crops to refined sugar, tea,
flour, cheap fat, and soft drinks.
As a consequence, new patterns of disease,  like those found in the
West, spread.
On the hopeful side, there are local and national programs to encourage
home gardens and to protect the remaining natural areas of the forest and
the coast, which still supply many important foods.

About the research

In 1964 and 1965 when these photographs were made, the Bomagai-
Angoiang people had been contacted for the first time by an
administrative patrol only six years before.
Because the influence of modern civilization on their agriculture and
material culture remained minimal for several years after that initial
contact, the Bomagai-Angoiang people provided a rare opportunity to
learn much about how a real Stone Age people lived.
The emphasis of this project is on the Bomagai-Angoiang's indigenous
agricultural methods and on what we can learn from people whose lives
were so closely interwoven with their natural environment.
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The researcher/photographer
William C. Clarke made these photographs and carried out the research
described here. He is best defined as a cultural ecologist, which means that
he is a combination of anthropologist and geographer.
He first studied anthropology as an undergraduate student at the
University of California in Berkeley and later received a Ph.D. in geography
for his work with the Bomagai-Angoiang people, who are described and
pictured in this volume. Since then Dr. Clarke has continued to work on
issues of tropical agriculture and environmental conservation in the Pacific
Islands.

Dr. Clarke has taught at the University of Papua New Guinea and the
University of the South Pacific in Fiji.
He is presently writing reports on environmental issues for various
international agencies.
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The project director

Josepha Haveman, who designed this product, can best be defined as a
media artist and cultural anthropologist. Her special interest is in the
relationship of media to culture from pre-historic times into the future.

She first studied art in Amsterdam, then art and anthropology as an under-
graduate student in San Francisco and subsequently did graduate work in
anthropology at the University of California at Berkeley while working as a
staff member at the (then) UC Museum of Anthropology.
Since then Ms. Haveman has also received an MA. in art and taught
photography as fine art at colleges and universities in California, Oregon,
Israel, and Europe.

She has been exploring the potentials of digital media in art, design, and
education using personal computers, since 1981. Ms. Haveman is presently
producing CD ROMs for art and environmental education.




The programmer/ editor

Dee Elling  scripted this project, digitized the sound, and edited the texts. She is an
artist and writer who has been involved with digital media since 1985. Since
receiving a BFA from the Academy of Art College in 1983 she has worked as a
graphic designer, typographer, and technical writer.
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The digital rescue mission: the restoration of these unique
photographs

Recent advances in computer graphics technologies have been a critical
factor enabling us to produce this volume of unique photographs.
As is common with all field work materials, original notes and color
transparencies are only used once, for publication, reports, or research
papers, and then allowed to languish in file cases, shoe boxes, or  worse. If
the research is done in the tropics, and the scientist continues to live  in
such a humid climate, the slidesƒmore than anything elseƒundergo an
accelerated aging process and become discolored, faded, moldy, and dirty.

Our challenge was to restore these images to their former brilliance by
using the latest digital technologies available for our personal computers.
We scanned each slide, regardless of condition, onto digital media. From
there we used graphics applications, primarily Adobe's PhotoShopr
versions 2.1/2.5, to extract all remaining information from each image. In
most cases this allowed us to restore the original color information or
substitute acceptable approximations, and more.
This task would have been impossible only a few  years  ago!
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Uses and applications of this project

Education:  This project can be used as educational material in the fields
of anthropology, environmental studies, ethnic studies, geography, related
sciences, and humanities.

Reference:  Since these pictures and accompanying texts  are from
published academic research materials, they may be referred to
accordingly. The sole author of both the research texts and pictures is
Dr. William C. Clarke.

Illustration:  The images on this CD ROM may be used to illustrate any
appropriate subjects in school projects and research papers. Permission to
publish these pictures is granted to registered purchasers of this volume.

Print production and publication:  Permission to use the pictures on
this disc as "clip-art" is granted to registered purchasers. Please credit the
author when using the pictures and/or quoting from any of the texts.
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How we put this together

Browser design
Most people like to browse through a project like this, enjoying the
pictures and reading only a bit of text here and there. For them we've
made it as easy as possible, allowing many people to simply enjoy this disc.
From the main menu, click on a topic you wish to read about. You can click
the red arrow/dot on the lower corners of each page to browse forward
and backward through the pages of the topic sections. You can return to
the main menu from the first page of each topic section.

The text has been broken down into small coherent segments and enhanced
with pictures that illustrate the points  being made. The images used to
illustrate the texts are either miniature versions of the whole pictures or
poignant fragments, whichever best illustrates the points made in the texts.

Where the complete picture slide shows are located
All the pictures available on this CD ROM can be viewed in the slide shows.
Choose a the topic in the main menu and then click on the slide show
button on the first page of each topic section. The slide show will play all
available pictures that are filed under that subject heading and then stop.

The text files
The complete text is also available in standard word processor file formats
from which they can be printed out to hard copy.


GEOGRAPHY

The island of New Guinea

The great island of New Guinea lies just north of Australia and south of
the equator on the eastern side of Indonesia.
It is the second largest island in the world after Greenland, with a total
area of about 315,700 square miles (817,700 square kilometers). It  is
roughly divided between the Indonesian province of Irian Jaya on the
west and the independent parliamentary nation of Papua New Guinea to
the east.
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Papua New Guinea includes the islands of Manus, New Britain, New
Ireland, and Bougainville. With 14 active and 22 dormant volcanoes, Papua
New Guinea has a mountainous terrain. Thick forests cover most of the
central area of the country, with swamps along the coasts. The southwest is
crossed by two large rivers, the Sepik and the Fly.
With over 85 percent of the country under forest cover and still largely
unexplored, Papua New Guinea has a wealth of flora and fauna. It has the
world's largest and smallest parrots, as well as the largest lizards, doves,
and butterflies, and over 11,000 plant species. Destruction of the forests by
logging interests is a problem yet to be faced by the government.
>

Vital statistics 1993-94

Ethnicity:  Papuans, Melanesian, Pygmies, minorities of Chinese,
Australians, Polynesians
Languages:  English (official), Melanesian & Papuan languages
Religion:  Protestant (63%), Roman Catholic (31%), local religions
Geography:  The eastern half of the island of New Guinea, Papua New
Guinea consists of thickly forested mountains in the center of the country
with lowlands along the coasts.
Government: Parliamentary democracy Area: 178,260 square miles
Gross National Product:  US$2.700 billion; GNP per capita:  US$725
Literacy:  52%  Birth Rate per thousand:  34.0
Infant Mortality  per thousand:  66.0

ENVIRONMENT

Rugged high mountain country

The photographs of the Bomagai-Angoiang environment show that their
country was wet, forested, and rugged; a humid, tropical, mountain land.
Rains fell frequently and heavily, streams abounded, and clouds covered
the mountain tops and ridges much of the time. Agriculture was impossible
at the higher elevations, which were covered with a mossy forest.
Although such wet tropical environments support a rich natural forest, the
underlying soils were generally poor unless derived from young volcanic
material or recent alluvial deposits. However, as outlined in the dis-
cussion on agriculture, the Bomagai-Angoiang method of shifting gardens
(land rotation instead of crop rotation) maintained a level of soil fertility
sufficient to produce good yields from crop plants.
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Habitat

Aside from a habitat and sites for gardens, their environment provided the
Bomagai-Angoiang with materials for building houses and making artifacts,
food from wild plants and animals, and  firewood.

From plants the people obtained a variety of medicines, as well as
perfumes and oils to adorn their bodies. Further adornment came from the
dramatic feathers of birds-of-paradise, colorful leaves, and even a species
of iridescent green beetle which people wove into headdresses.
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Houses and shelters

The traditional houses were low to the
ground and smoky inside from the hearth fires. The smoke had the
advantage of keeping out mosquitoes and preserving the grass and
leaf roofs from decay and insect infestation.
Houses were often partitioned into separate compartments, one at
the back for the man of the house and older boys, another for
women, girls, and younger children, and still another
for the household pigs.

There were also men's houses, which were solely for men and boys, and
women's houses, which were used by women and children but could be
visited by men. Usually, several houses were grouped together into
hamlets.
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Outdoor living

Between and among the houses were a mixture of household plantings,
areas of swept, packed earth for socializing and dancing, and earth ovens
under flimsy shelters of poles and leaves.
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Cooking was done in an earth oven, a hole in the ground where rocks
heated in an open fire were placed amongst packages of food
wrapped in leaves. The top of the hole was sealed with banana
leaves and covered with soil until the steamed food was ready.
The evening meal was a social time in the hamlets, with food jointly
prepared and cooked while people sat about talking and appreciating
the fragrant smells coming from the earth oven.

Their agriculture, hunting, and gathering provided the Bomagai- Angoiang
with generally good nutrition. They ate a lot of fiber, carbohydrates, and
leafy greens. However, there is evidence that some people may have
suffered from protein deficiency.
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PEOPLE

Stone Age people

The words "Stone Age" makes many people think of those human beings
who lived thousands of years ago, before the use of metal had been
developed anywhere on Earth.
However, there are several places on the planet where the Stone Age
reached well into the twentieth century. In these areas, people had no
metal until quite recently. They made all their tools and containers from
wood, stone, shell, bone, bamboo, woven plant fibers, or other naturally
occurring, more easily worked materials.

These recent stone age peoples lived in tropical South America, in a few
isolated parts of Southeast Asia, and north of Australia, on the giant,
rugged island of New Guinea.
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Many of the photographs on this disc show a twentieth-century stone age
people. They can be called the Bomagai-Angoiang, a name made by joining
the names of two clans.

The Bomagai-Angoiang were a "clan cluster"; that is, two separate
small clans, each with their own territory. Their territories were
contiguous, and the people in the two clans recognized each other as
friends and to some extent shared land and operated as a unit.
The significant groupings in Papua New Guinea were the clans. Most
clans were patrilineal, related via the father's clan.
The men held the territory and always married women from outside
the clan who usually moved to their husband's territor-yƒthus
residence was patrilocal. Traditionally all the clans had allies and
enemies among the other clans, the enemies usually being neighbors
on one side and the allies often being the neighbors on the other side.

What connected these clan groupings is their common language, Maring.
These clans, friends and enemies, spoke this language and are referred to
in this project as "the Maring."

The Bomagai-Angoiang clans lived closely together in an isolated, rugged
valley in that part of Papua New Guinea known as the "highland fringe."
The highland fringe occupies the mountainous slopes to the north and
south of the broad, open valleys and basins of the highlands proper.

They had no metal of any sort until they began to acquire some steel axes
along local trade routes in the 1950s, shortly before these photographs
were taken in the mid-1960s. Papua New Guinea was then still a colony of
Australia. It became an independent country  in 1975.
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Bride payment

In this photograph men are sitting around a small display of wealth (on
the leaf) and a young pig, all of which are being paid as part of a bride
price.
The clans were exogamous; an Angoiang woman could not marry an
Angoiang man and had to marry a man from another clan. Formal
payments were made by the men of one clan to the men of another when
one clan received a bride from another clan.

Payments for a bride extended over the life of the woman. There was an
initial payment before the marriage, another at the time of the birth of a
child, and other payments later.
Pigs were an important part of these payments. Some of the other forms of
traditional wealth, such as shell valuables and feathers, were increasingly
replaced by money.
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Delousing

Head lice were common among the Bomagai-Angoiang. Picking lice off
another person's head provided a valuable way of socializing, as the
photograph shows. The women's headdresses of brightly colored cloth
were a relatively recent addition to the dress of the Bomagai-Angoiang.
Previously, they would have worn string nets colored with plant dyes.
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Medical treatment

Like most peoples with intimate knowledge of a forest environment,
the Bomagai-Angoiang used many plant substances for medicine.
For example, they chewed various leaves for a variety of ailments,
and they squeezed the juices of leaves and fruits on sores.

The photo illustrates the use of the leaves of a stinging nettle.
Rubbed on the skin to the accompaniment of a chant, this was said to
relieve a variety of pains. Undoubtedly the nettle acted as a counter-
irritant and may have released antihistamines that  provided relief.
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Women making string

Women socialized while making string by rolling plant fibers together on
their thighs. A woman skilled in this task could make a string of great
strength and of any desired length. From the string, they wove net bags for
carrying produce and pubic aprons for both men and women to wear.
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Women walking

In this photograph women were on their way to their gardens in the
morning.
Note the digging stick, or dibble, held by the woman on the left; such a
stick was her major garden tool. The dibble was used for  planting and
harvesting as well as for loosening weeds.
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Carrying sugar cane

In a society whose food supply depended on daily harvesting of bulky,
starchy crops from gardens scattered in rough terrain, strong, flexible
containers like net bags were of great significance. New bags, such as the
one shown on this woman's back, could easily hold sixty pounds of sweet
potatoes and taro.
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Men preparing Pandanus fruit

Men cored Pandanus fruit after harvesting it in an orchard.

Making Pandanus sauce

Men prepared the sauce  after cooking the Pandanus fruit in an earth oven.
The sauce, which the Bomagai-Angoiang call komba , was usually mixed
with the leafy greens to make a nutritious as well as tasty food.
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Man with a camera

Kabang, a lively, humorous Bomagai-Angoiang man, seized one of the
researcher's cameras and made a joke about the researcher's constant
observations and questions about people's lives and activities.

>




CEREMONIAL

Ceremony and ritual

Ceremonies and rituals played a very significant role in the lives of the
Bomagai-Angoiang and all other New Guinean groups (as do ceremonies
and rituals in the lives of all peoples, whether or not they believe
themselves to be particular ceremonial or ritualistic). The beliefs behind
Bomagai-Angoiang ceremonies and rituals and their ideas about the
function and purpose of magic cannot be described here in any detail.

The best source of information on these topics is the widely known book
by anthropologist Roy Rappaport, Pigs for the Ancestors: Ritual in the
Ecology of a New Guinean People .

Rappaport described the ritual life  of the Tsembaga, who lived only a few
miles from the Bomagai-Angoiang and spoke the same Maring language.
Rappaport argued in his book that Tsembaga ritual, rather than being
wholly concerned with immaterial aspects of life, played an important role
in the people's relation with their environment. Among other functions,
Tsembaga ritual may have helped to regulate relationships between
people, pigs, and gardens and may have acted to conserve marsupial fauna.
>

For more pictures of ceremonial decoration in Papua New Guinea see
the book by
Strathern, A. and Strathern, M. titled
Self-decoration in Mt. Hagen,  which contains beautiful photographs
of people's self-decoration in the Mt Hagen area, which is in the
Central Highlands, not far from the mountains where the Maring live.
>

Everywhere in the highlands and highland fringe of New Guinea, pigs were
extremely significant in ceremonies. The animals embodied wealth that
could be accumulated and then distributed widely, as pork, to meet
obligations and enhance status.  Thus men made gardens in an attempt to
increase the size of their pig herds. An important reason for marriage was
to have at least one wife who would harvest sweet potatoes every day to
feed the pigs.

When a community's pigs became sufficiently abundantƒor overly
abundant, in that every extra pig meant more work in the gardens and a
greater threat of depredation by pigs breaking down the garden fencesƒ
elaborate pig-killing ceremonies were held. The pigs were butchered and
cooked in earth ovens. The pork was distributed in formal presentations
within the community and, usually, to other nearby communities as well.
Dramatic dancing and rhetorical speeches were always a part of these
ceremonies, and all the people carefully adorned themselves with paint,
feathers, leaves, fur, and other finery.
>

Magic and ritual

Magic, known as kunda , and a belief in different kinds of spirits who
inhabit different parts of the people's environment, pervaded daily life as
well as more formal ceremonies. Spells were uttered relating to good
weather, healthy pigs, productive crops, success in hunting, and so forth.
Ritually important plants, most notably the cordyline  shrub, were widely
planted.
This photograph shows cordyline  planted at a magic gateway along a path.
Such gateways prevented the advance of bad spirits and ensured that any
person passing through them would not fall sick.


AGRICULTURE

Indigenous scientific methods

Papua New Guinea offers a particularly good laboratory for discovering
indigenous knowledge about agriculture because there were so many small
groups of people, mostly isolated from each other, each practicing their own
style of agriculture.
Because of the size and mountainous topography of the country, each group
faced its own unique natural constraints on the growth of crop plants,
ranging from drought to flooding to frost to plant diseases.

The indigenous scientists, through their own experimentation and trial and
error, managed to solve all these problems.
By generations of careful observation and planting, they also developed
many different varieties of many of their crops ƒa situation very different
from the dangerous modern restriction to a few high-yielding varieties.
This great agricultural reservoir of genetic characteristics can be of
immense value to the modern world. For example, Papua New Guinean
strains of sugar cane have been used b y experimenters in Hawaii to
improve the sugar cane cultivated there.
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Choosing a site in a mature forest where they believed the soil would be
good, men cut down large trees to clear a garden plot.
The photographs titled man cutting tree and man felling a tree show the
first step in preparing a Bomagai- Angoiang garden.
Steel axes made this a much easier task than it was when the Bomagai-
Angoiang had only stone axes earlier this century.
>

In the photograph titled man with stone axe a man called Ngirapo, who
grew up using stone axes, demonstrates how grass was cleared with a stone
axe.  He cut the grass slowly along a piece of wood held beneath   the axe. A
bush knife, or machete, made this job much faster and easier.

The biggest trees would have been very difficult to cut down with stone
axes (see the photo- graph on the right titled cutting with stone axe). Large
trees were usually girdled so that the leaves above would die and admit
sunlight down to the crop plants.
>

After the debris from felling the trees and clearing the undergrowth dried,
the gardeners burned at least some of the waste to make planting easier
and to provide an ashy fertilizer for the crops.
The photographs titled making hill garden and woman burning debris show
people clearing a garden plot.
>

Both men and woman worked at establishing gardens. Women planted most
of the crops while men did the heavier work of building fences to keep out
marauding pigs.
The photographs manioc planting, digging woman, and woman planting
crops show women planting a garden.
>

Because the gardens contained so many different crops mixed together,
they look messy to eyes accustomed to modern monoculture with its large
single-crop fields.
However, polycultural shifting gardens were very productive and provided
a valuable variety of foods for two years or more.

Planting began with cucumbers and leafy greens, followed by  maize, then
sweet potatoes, taro, then yams, manioc, sugar cane, and bananas. The
gardens  included a host of supplementary foods as well.
The photographs titled young garden and planted garden show this type of
agriculture.
>

Shifting cultivation

The kind of agriculture practiced by the Bomagai-Angoiang is best
described as shifting cultivation but is also known as swidden cultivation or
slash-and-burn agriculture.

Many anthropologists believe that shifting cultivation is one of the earliest
kinds of agriculture developed in the humid tropics, where it is still very
common in regions with small populations and extensive forests.

To carry out shifting cultivation, men cleared a plot in the forest by felling
many of the trees and burning at least some of the debris. Then the men or
the women or both together planted a variety of crops (often as many as 30
or more species of crop plants) in the cleared forest soil. After a year or two
of using the plot, the gardeners allowed it to be taken over by weeds and
the seedlings of forest trees, which gradually grew to dominate the lower
weeds until the plot was again covered by young forest.

After a number of yearsƒit could be 10 or 20 or moreƒthe plot was cleared
again for gardening. By that time, all the weeds had been suppressed and
the soil under the forest had regained fertility and would again produce
good crops.
>

The Bomagai-Angoiang's particular system of shifting cultivation included
over 50 species of cultivated plants.
The major foods from the gardens were sweet potatoes, five species of
yams, the American taro as well as the Southeast Asian species, manioc
(also known as cassava), and bananas.
There were also many plants that produce greens to enrich the staple diet
of starchy root crops and bananas.
Detailed information on Bomagai- Angoiang gardens, crops, and food is
available in the book Place and People: An Ecology of a New Guinean
Community  by William Clarke.

(See the reading list in the References section.)
>

Sustainable agriculture

Shifting cultivation is a sustainable kind of agriculture.  There is a low labor
input so long as the population density of the cultivators remains low.

When population starts to rise within the territory of a group of shifting
cultivators, then the forest-fallow period must be shortened. As a result,
grasses and other weeds begin to replace the forest, the soils become less
fertile, and the people must change their style of agriculture and work
harder to produce each unit of food.

They also lose the many materials, medicines, wild plant foods (such as the
very important leaves from tree ferns), and animals that can be taken from
the forest.
The growth of human population brings some benefits to such a human
society but it also brings some kinds of impoverishment and most certainly
lessens natural biodiversity.
>

Agricultural intensification
Although the Bomagai-Angoiang system of shifting cultivation was well
adapted to the forested habitat in which the people lived, the system's
health was dependent on the continued presence of the forest. In such a
situation, if the human population grows and needs an increased food
supply, more gardens are cultivated and the fallow period is shortened. The
forest, which no longer has enough time to regenerate fully, turns to scrub
and grassland.

In consequence, weeds become more of a problem to  the gardener, and soil
fertility begins to decline. Faced with a need for greater production of food
but a declining productive capacity, the gardeners have the choice of
migrating to new lands (if any are available), going hungry where they are,
or intensifying their agricultural practices.

Evidence from all across the world shows that the third choiceƒagricultural
intensificationƒ has been and continues to be widely applied.
>

The purpose of intensification is to produce more food from a unit of land
than was produced before.
Almost always the increase in production is achieved by increasing the
inputs into the agricultural system.
In the modern industrial world, the increased input takes the form of
artificial fertilizer, machinery, fuel, pesticides, irrigation pumps, and other
products of industry.

Among pre-industrial peoples, intensification means a greater input
of labor. That is, people have to work harder to produce their food, which is
why they seldom take up agricultural intensification until they are forced
into it by a growing need for more production.
>
Several of the photographs illustrate the process of agricultural
intensification among pre-industrial peoples.

Starting with a low density of population, the forest covers most land and
acts to keep the soil fertile and the weeds suppressed.
The diverse, polycultural gardens  require little labor and provide a varied
diet. As population grows and fallow periods shorten, the forest is gradually
replaced by grassland.

The photograph on the top left shows Imperata grass, one of the best
known weedy grasses that take over gardens and require a great deal of
labor to eradicate or control. Heavy grass infestation requires that the soil
be turned and tilled in preparation for gardening. Although this is possible
without machinery, it requires hard work with simple tools.
>

These photographs  show some of the varying forms of agricultural
intensification practiced in different places in Papua New Guinea. Mounds
were built, some little, some big, and various kinds of plots were made,
with the soil turned and worked.

As intensification advances there is a shift toward monoculture, with a
concentration on the few crops that produce the highest yields.
In Papua New Guinea, effort focused particularly on the sweet potato,
which produced more food in poorer soils than either taro or yams.
As intensification advances more and more of the land is taken up with
gardening, as shown in the aerial photograph of the densely populated
Papua New Guinean highlands.
>

Women carried on the steady day-to-day work in the gardens, weeding and
bringing the daily supply of food home to the hamlets for cooking.
Men also worked in the gardens, helping with weeding and harvesting.
>





Domestic animals

The domestic animals of the Bomagai-Angoiang included pigs and chickens,
both of which were eaten. Dogs, which were pets and were very useful in
hunting, were not eaten. Some of the pigs went feral and were then hunted.
The meat belonged to anyone who could bring down the pig.
>

Tamed animals

The giant flightless cassowary, a wild bird of the forest, was hunted. The
cassowary chicks were often tamed and kept in the hamlets to mature and
eventually be eaten at a feast.
>

Hunted animals

All sorts of other birds as well as marsupials, rodents, eels, reptiles, and
insects were hunted or collected and eaten.
>

Orchards

Another important and productive part of their agriculture was the
establishment of orchards.
While gardens were used for crop plants, many men also planted seedlings
or cuttings of four kinds of trees. One was breadfruit; another was a species
of fig that produced edible leaves. A tree with the scientific name of
Gnetum gnemon  produced edible leaves and nuts as well as provided good
fiber for making string bags.  Most importantly, they planted a species of
Pandanus  that produced a giant red fruit. The  cooked pulp provided a
delicious red sauce rich in vegetable oil and pro-vitamin A.
>

These photographs  show the agriculture of the Baliem Valley in Irian Jaya
in western New Guinea (now part of Indonesia).
This system was close to being the most intensive agricultural system
practiced on the island of New Guinea. A whole valley floor has been
drained and turned into large sweet-potato gardens.
The photograph fertilizing fields shows how spoil from the ditches was
tossed onto the surface of the plots to enrich the soil.

Slopes were terraced with stone walls to slow erosion, and the soil worked
to keep it productive. These terraces were not as widely known as those in
Indonesia or the island of Luzon in the Philippines, but they are equally
impressive modifications of the landscape.
>

Population density

When these photographs were taken in 1964-65, the Bomagai-Angoiang
had a low population density of about 68 persons per square mile (about
26 persons per square kilometer) of cultivable land.
Most scholars believe this density is well below the figure where serious
land degradation would begin under a system of shifting cultivation. As the
photos show, the territory of the Bomagai-Angoiang was mostly covered
with well-developed forests, which were very useful to the people as a
source of many valuable products.

REFERENCES

Among the many books and papers now published on the
peoples of Papua New Guinea, there are four major works
on the Maring, the language group that includes the Bomagai-
Angoiang clan-cluster, who are featured in the photographs on this
disc.

These  four books on the Maring are listed here as well as another four
related books on Papua New Guinea, chosen for their wide general interest
or particular relevance to the photographs and topics discussed in this
project.



Books on Maring-speaking clans:
Clarke, W. C. 1971. Place and People: An Ecology of a New Guinean
Community.  University of California Press, Berkeley.

Healey, C. 1990. Maring Hunters and Traders: Production and Exchange in
the Papua New Guinea Highlands.  University of California Press, Berkeley.

LiPuma, E. 1988. The Gift of Kinship: Structure and Practices in Maring
Social Organization. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge.

Rappaport, R. 1984. Pigs for the Ancestors: Ritual in the Ecology of a New
Guinea People.  (A new, enlarged edition of the 1964 publication.) Yale
University Press, New Haven.

Other books of particular interest:
Morauta, L., Pernetta, J., and Heaney, W. (editors) 1982. Traditional
Conservation in Papua New Guinea: Implications for Today.  Monograph 16.
Institute of Applied Social and Economic Research, Boroko, Papua New
Guinea.

Read, K. E. 1986. Return to High Valley: Coming Full Circle.
University of California Press, Berkeley.

Steensberg, A. 1980. New Guinea Gardens: A Study of Husbandry with
Parallels in Prehistoric Europe. Academic Press, London.

Strathern, A. and Strathern, M. 1971. Self-decoration in Mt. Hagen.
Backworth, London.

General references on Melanesia
Brookfield, H. C. 1971. Melanesia:  A  Geographical Interpretation of an
Island World. Methuen, London.

Chowning, M. A. 1977.  An Introduction to the Peoples and Cultures of
Melanesia.  Cummings Publishing Co., Menlo Park, CA.


Traditional music of the neighboring Enga people
The Enga are the largest ethno-linguistic group in Papua New Guinea.
Numbering more than 160,000 people, they live in the Enga Province,
which lies  50 miles or so to the  south and west of the territory of the
Bomagai-Angoiang.

We wish to thank the National Research Institute, Papua New Guinea for
generously allowing us to use some of the music from recordings they
made during the production of the filmTighten the Drums , produced by
the Institute of Papua New Guinea Studies.

From them we learn that: "The most common instruments of the Enga are
the jew's harp, the pan pipe, the musical mouth bow and a single
membrane, open, hour-glass shaped drum."
"Most of the recordings are of vocal music, because vocal music is the most
common... As examples of  instrumental music we have included the
musical bow and the pan pipe."

Maps:  Line drawing  provided by William C. Clarke

NOAA Global Shaded Relief map, Small Blue Planet CD ROM, 12 October 92
This image was generated from a digital data base of land and sea floor
elevations on a 5-minute latitude/longitude grid. Assumed illumination is
from the west; shading is computed as a function of the east-west slope of
the surface with a nonlinear exaggeration favoring low-relief areas.  A
Mercator projection was used for the world image.  The resolution of the
gridded data varies from true 5-minute for the ocean floors, the U.S.A.,
Europe, Japan, and Australia to 1 degree in data-deficient parts of Asia,
South America, northern Canada, and Africa.  Data sources are as follows:
Ocean Areas: U.S. Naval Oceanographic Office; U.S.A., W. Europe, Japan &
Korea: U.S. Defense Mapping Agency; Australia: Bureau of Mineral
Resources, Australia; New Zealand: Department of Industrial and Scientific
Research, New Zealand; Balance of world land masses: U.S.Navy Fleet
Numerical Oceanographic Center.  Computerized Digital Image and
associated data base are available from the National Geophysical Data
Center, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, U.S. Department
of commerce, Code E/GC3, Boulder, Colorado 80303.
Digital image by Dr. Peter W. Sloss, NOAA/NGDC.