Word: skulled
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...more than a thousand years their unblinking eyes have watched over the tribes that live along Papua New Guinea's vast rivers. Hacked from the necks of enemies or retrieved from the graves of ancestors, the skulls were a central part of tribal culture. No youth could call himself a man until he had defeated an enemy warrior in battle, beheaded the corpse with a cassowary-bone dagger, and displayed the head on his clan's wooden slit drum. And few family houses were complete without the skull of an ancestor, decorated with clay features, shell eyes and real hair...
...These unique, macabre artifacts were retained in villages for decades - the heads of enemies decorated and stored in the men's house or spirit house; those of ancestors often kept in special beds in their descendants' huts. But now many of the slit drums and skull cradles are empty, for new European head-hunters have been prowling the river regions, ethnic art dealers armed with dollars and euros more deadly to native culture than any dagger. "These items are going to private homes," says p.n.g. National Museum director Soroi Eoe, the man responsible for thwarting the theft of cultural artifacts...
...were ferocious warriors and enthusiastic gatherers and keepers of heads, which held special significance for them. According to French anthropologist Nicolas Garnier, who has spent lengthy periods living among the tribes, the head was a sacred trophy. Some time after a dead ancestor had been buried, the now-fleshless skull would be exhumed. A relative, guided by apparitions of the dead person, would then overmodel the original features onto the bones...
...Sepik heads might have fetched thousands of dollars apiece from collectors in the U.S. or Europe. Exporting the skulls without the rarely given special permit carries a maximum six-month jail sentence, Eoe says: it breaches not only the Cultural Property Preservation Act but part of the criminal code related to interfering with human remains. Yet in p.n.g., where corruption is pervasive and police are so poorly resourced they struggle to obtain fuel for mobile patrols, investigating non-violent crime is not a priority. Time has learned that none of the people involved in the apparent attempt to export...
...Tambanum village, about 65 km south of Wewak, more than 1,000 people from the Iatmul tribe live along the banks of the Sepik, and on the tiny creeks and tributaries that carve up the district. They know the power of the skulls. One of their people, they believe, paid a terrible price for selling a head. The man, Toni Kawa, "went into the bush and when he came back he started vomiting; and just from vomiting he died," says a fellow villager who preferred not to be named. "Then his wife died. The only way (to stop...