New Guinea (Other Keyword)
1-2 (2 Records)
Although commonly thought of as a land of horticulturalists, contact-era New Guinea was home to a number of ‘simple’ hunter-gatherer and complex fisher-forager groups. This paper surveys what we know of how these communities treated the human head in mortuary and other rituals and the cosmological contexts in which these rites were embedded. The fisher-forager cases are of special interest because at contact they were all head-hunters, an activity that generated elaborate ritual complexes...
The Perplexing Complexity of Some New Guinea Communities (2017)
At contact, a number of New Guinea communities boasted considerable ‘horizontal’ complexity – very large populations (up to 2,500 people) and ceremonial arenas that engaged even more. Many also constructed monumental architectures of organic material and staggering size. These communities included complex fisher-foragers and Big-man horticulturalists, organizations that are commonly identified as only minimally hierarchical. Certainly, their hierarchical institutions were insufficiently...