The New Head Hunters

For 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 to create a lifelike image of the deceased.

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. "They are being lost not just to Papua New Guinea, but to the world. Under the law, these human remains are a prohibited export.''

The collectors' latest hunting ground is along the Sepik River. Dubbed the Amazon of the Pacific, the river writhes and loops 1,100 km from the country's heart through some of the wildest and most inaccessible terrain on earth. Cutting through mountain ranges, international borders, steamy jungles, swamps, lakes and flood plains, the Sepik monster nurtures some of p.n.g.'s most ancient tribes, who still live in tiny stilt huts and brave the river's treacherous currents, and large saltwater crocodiles, in their slender carved canoes.

Before the arrival of missionaries and magistrates, the Sepik people 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.