Indonesian New Guinea Adventure Guide. David Pickell
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for purposes of affiliation. This contrasts with the unilineal societies of New Guinea and Melanesia which are mostly patrilineal, wherein descent, as in European societies, is recognized through the father. (Or sometimes the mother, but rarely both.)
Austronesian speakers appeared in the islands of Indonesia by about 3,000 B.C. and over the next two millennia, through superior technology and sheer weight of numbers, they gradually displaced the aboriginal populations who then lived here. This seemingly inexorable displacement process never took place in New Guinea. The Papuans were never displaced from New Guinea, it seems, because of the terrain and the existence of stable, well-established groups of agriculturally sophisticated Papuans.
The two groups intermingle
Although the Austronesians never penetrated to the interior of West Papua, they settled and intermixed with Papuans along the coast and on the nearby islands, mingling their genes, but imposing their languages. At about this same time—2,000 B.C.—a major expansion of the Trans-New Guinea phylum of Papuan language speakers also occurred, west from New Guinea to the islands of Timor, Alor and Pantar, where they replaced earlier West Papuan language speakers.
These islands had already been settled by Papuan speakers long before the Austronesian arrival, and there were probably two phases of Papuan settlement here: a first taking place many thousands of years earlier, and a second contemporaneous with the Austronesian arrival.
The second Papuan expansion was perhaps due to an agricultural "revolution" that included the domestication of pigs and tubers in New Guinea by at least 4,000 B.C. The Trans-New Guinea languages, strongly influenced by Austronesian loan words, also expanded into the island's central highlands by about 1500 B.C., wiping out traces of earlier diversity there.
A sweet potato revolution
The introduction of the sweet potato (Ipomoea batatas), ranks among the most crucial factors in New Guinea's evolution. The sweet potato is a New World plant, and it was once thought to have been introduced a few centuries ago by early Portuguese and Spanish navigators. Recently, however, some plant geneticists have said that the plant must have arrived at a much earlier date, perhaps A.D. 500. How it could have gotten there at this time remains a mystery.
Whenever it started, the Ipomoea revolution brought high yields at healthy elevations. Unlike taro, the sweet potato grows well up to 1,600 meters above sea level, allowing its cultivators to settle out of the range of the malarial Anopheles mosquito and exploit the fertile soils of the Central Highlands.
The sweet potato allowed for much more intensive agriculture, which together with healthier conditions, resulted in relatively higher population densities in the highlands. Crucial also was the development of a technically brilliant system of parallel or gridiron irrigation ditches, which allowed for fallow times equal to that of the cropping cycle. Older slash-and-burn techniques used elsewhere on the island require 10-20 years of fallow time between crops, resulting in much lower population densities.
In the southeast corner of West Papua, the Marind-Anim experienced their own agricultural revolution. Beds of earth, surrounded by drainage ditches, were here raised in the swamps and planted with yam and taro alternating with bananas, and areca and sugar palms. These efficient gardens provided food for similarly dense population settlements.
Prehistoric trade
Trade in the eastern islands of the archipelago began long before the common era. Fragrant Timorese sandalwood and Moluccan cloves are mentioned in early Han Chinese texts, and the latter have also been found in Egyptian mummies. In early times this trade was undoubtedly accomplished through many intermediaries, with east Indonesian products ending up in China and Rome only very indirectly via the powerful maritime kingdoms of western and central Indonesia. It is unlikely that ocean-going sailing ships from China, India and the Middle East, which relied upon the seasonal monsoon winds, made regular voyages to eastern Indonesian waters much before about A.D. 1000.
Large, elegant bronze kettledrums provide the earliest concrete evidence of contact between mainland Asia and the New Guinea area. A fragment of one of these drums, cast by the lost wax process, has been found in western West Papua. These drums—or more properly, metallophones, since they are more gongs than drums—were produced between about 400 B.C. and A.D. 100 in the area of Dongson, in what is now North Vietnam.
Although metals were widely worked in Southeast Asia by 1500 B.C., no earlier metal artifacts have been discovered in West Papua, and it is thought that these drums, which have been discovered elsewhere in the archipelago, were trade items brought from other areas of Southeast Asia.
Wet-rice agriculture, another import from the Asian mainland, was introduced in the archipelago between about 1000 B.C. and 500 B.C., albeit on a small scale. Because of the soils and climate of the island, and the local preference for tuber crops such as taro and yams, rice culture never developed on any large scale in West Papua.
Women tend their sweet potatoes in the Baliem Valley. The nutritious sweet potato offers a high yield and grows well at high elevations. Its introduction was a revolution.
THE WEST PAPUANS
The Province's
Diverse
Ethnicities
Even today, members of groups unknown to the outside world occasionally step out of the forests of West Papua. The most populous groups of the highlands and the coasts have become rather worldly, and their languages and customs have been recorded by western and Indonesian anthropologists. But a vast area between the coasts and the mountains remains concealed by a canopy of thick vegetation, and little is known even of the topography of these areas.
As recently as 1996, two previously unknown groups surfaced. Representatives of the first, apparently shocked by what they saw, disappeared again immediately. Those of the other took the first tentative steps into the outside world, accepting modern medicine and steel axes. These latter tribesmen, sartorially distinguished by long, quill-like ornaments jutting straight up from holes in their nostrils, spoke an unknown language.
The West Papuans speak a bewildering 250 different languages. Many, perhaps most, are barely known outside their own ranks, and only a handful have been thoroughly studied by ethnographers. The best known are the Ekari of the Paniai Lakes region, one of the first places where the Dutch colonial administration seriously established an outpost, the Dani of the Baliem Valley, and the Asmat of the South Coast. The economies and customs of several other groups have been systematically recorded, and at least the basics of the languages of many others are known.
Any attempt to properly describe such a diverse group of people and cultures in such a limited space is bound to fail, so we will try to mention just the better-known groups, and to fit them into a classification according to geography and agricultural practices.
People of the coastal swamps
Although malarial, uncomfortably hot, and often thick and impenetrable, West Papua's lowland swamps are blessed with an abundance of sago palms, and nutritious game such as birds and seafood: fish, turtles, crabs, prawns and shellfish. The trunk of the sago palm provides an easily harvested staple, and the game the necessary protein.
Sago is collected, not farmed, and in areas where stands of the palm are widely dispersed, people lead a semi-nomadic life, living in "portable" villages. Large stands of sago and the rich waters at the mouths of major rivers can support populous, more or less stable villages of up to 1,000 inhabitants.
Sago collecting is the most efficient way to obtain starch. Although the tough palm must be chopped down, the bark removed, and the pith tediously pounded and rinsed (the glutinous starch must be washed from the woody pith), sago gathering requires far fewer man-hours than those required to grow, for example, paddy rice.
A Biak islander wearing a mantle of cassowary feathers. The people of Biak are of Austronesian descent.
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