Stone and Fiber

A portrait of life in a remote region of Papua, shortly after first contact with the modern world, describing its stone tools, sacred objects, secret rituals, and war.The Baliem valley lies in Papua, a remote eastern region of Indonesia and home to some of the last peoples on earth to come into contact with modern civilization. When anthropologist O.W. Hampton visited in the 1980s he found isolated peoples using stone tools, spears, and bows and arrows. Over the following ten years he documented life in the valley, including the making of stone axes and adzes—the last such tools to be in daily use on our planet. He collected sacred stones wrapped in orchid fiber and feathers, tools, net bags, and many other objects, and documented their uses in rituals of war and healing. In this book, author Christopher Buckley presents Hampton’s fieldwork alongside new studio photographs of his collection, with detailed explanations. The book will be of value to archaeologists, anthropologists, students, collectors and curators of Papuan art, and anyone with an interest in how mankind lived in millennia past.