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.
The long, wide swamps of the South Coast support the Mimikans of the coastal area south of Puncak Jaya, the Asmat of the broad coastal plain centered around Agats, the Jaqai inland of Kimaam Island around Kepi, and the Marind-Anim around Merauke in the far southeast. Along the North Coast, the Waropen groups of the coastal swamps around the edge of Cenderawasih Bay and the mouth of the great Mamberamo River, live a similar lifestyle.
Of all these coastal people, the Asmat are the best known. Their fierce head-hunting culture, powerful art, and the unfortunate disappearance of Michael Rockefeller in the region in 1961 have succeeded in making them infamous. (See "The Asmat" page 146.)
Many of these coastal peoples were at least semi-nomadic, and their cultures revolved around a ritual cycle of headhunting. Nomadism and headhunting are, of course, high on the list of established governments' most loathed practices, and both have been banned and discouraged in West Papua.
The Mimikans, the Asmat and the Marind-Anim have all suffered from the loss of spiritual life that came about with the ban on headhunting. None of these groups is particularly suited culturally to organized education, business or any of the other limited opportunities that have come to them with modernization.
The Austronesians
Some of West Papua's coastal areas have been settled by Austronesians, and here garden and tree crops replace sago as staple foods. Particularly on the North Coast and the neighboring islands, many ethnic groups speak Austronesian languages that are very different from the Papuan languages found throughout the rest of the island.
The Austronesians have historically been involved in trade with the sultanate of Tidore, the Chinese, the Bugis and other groups from islands to the west. Bird of paradise skins and slaves were the principal exports, along with whatever nutmeg could be taken from the Fakfak area.
Austronesian influences can be seen in the raja leadership system practiced among these groups, perhaps adopted from the sultanates of Ternate, Tidore and Jailolo. With their political power cemented by control of trade, some rajas ruled wide areas embracing several ethnic groups, from seats of power in the Raja Empat Islands, in the Sorong area, around Fakfak or in the Kaimana region.
A somewhat different system was found in the Austronesian areas around Biak, Yapen, Wandaman Bay and east of Manokwari. Here some villagers practiced a system of hereditary rule, and others were ruled by self-made, charismatic leaders or great war heroes.
The inland groups
Inland from the coastal areas, in the foothills and valleys of West Papua, scattered groups live in small communities that subsist on small farms, pig raising and hunting and gathering. They usually grow taro and yams, with sweet potatoes being of secondary importance. Since they were intermediaries between the highland groups and the coastal people, some groups in this zone were important intermediaries in the trade in pigs and cowrie shells, both, until fairly recently, serving as "money" in the highlands.
