In 1965, Carl A. Schmitz, at that time Director of the Frobenius Institute and of the then Museum für Völkerkunde in Frankfurt am Main, purchased a collection of prehistoric stone artefacts with the assistance of the Stiftung Volkswagenwerk. The collection consisted of 223 tools from Papua New Guinea – chisels, mallets, club stones, pestles and mortars. Artefacts of that kind constantly turn up all over the Central Highlands of New Guinea as the local population dig and harvest their crops, yet to this day it has proved impossible to say with any certainty when or by whom they were made. Whereas stone chisels were used to work wood and stone mallets were used in the production of bark cloth in highland villages until at least the 1970s, stone mortars and club stones do not commonly seem to have been used in the distant past. The highlanders seemed to have no knowledge either of the function of these tools or of the stone-working techniques needed to make them, for they interpreted these stones not as tools from earlier populations but as sacred objects made by their own ancestors.[1] In highland villages, stones of this kind were kept in the central cult houses as bringers of special powers and magic, although from the time when missionaries arrived they increasingly lost their sacred aura. Between 1930 and 1970 many of the keepers of these cult houses allowed these ancestral stones to go to missionaries, anthropologists and collectors of ethnographica. All the pieces in the holdings of the Weltkulturen Museum in Frankfurt were collected by Ottmar Maier, who worked as a handyman for Catholic mission stations in New Guinea between 1960 and 1964. Being in close contact with the locals, he was able to seek additional information from the finders of these stones. His records contain the names of the finders or witnesses of the finds, the location and the recent use of the stone tools; thus the extraordinary cultural importance of this collection arises not least from the detailed accompanying documentation.
Speculation
In the 1960s other leading ethnographic museums, in Leipzig and Basel for instance, already had interesting collections of a similar kind and had published articles on them in their own specialist journals.[2] The fact that Frankfurt so far had nothing of this kind was certainly one reason for Carl A. Schmitz’s interest in acquiring the pieces offered for sale by Ottmar Maier. His decision will no doubt also have been influenced by the fact that he himself had a particular interest in historical anthropology, whose exponents used the spread of certain cultural features as a means to identify connections between different cultural zones and to reconstruct their historical sequence. The hope was to discover more about the history of the settlement of those areas. Schmitz made a field trip to Wantoat Valley in Northeast New Guinea as early as 1955/56, where he observed the used of sacred stones and their function as bearers of special powers.[3] Their preservation in specially constructed cult houses, their identification with male and female ancestors and the belief in their healing powers were largely similar to what other anthropologists reported in connection with finds of stone artefacts in the Central Highlands of New Guinea in the 1950s and 1960s.[4] Schmitz must have seen Ottmar Maier’s collection as confirmation of the existence of a ‘complex’ of stone artefacts and hence as a promising source of information for his historical reconstruction of the settlement of Northeast New Guinea.[5] Immediately after the arrival of the new acquisition, he published an article in the anthropological journal Baessler-Archiv in which he endeavoured to assign the pieces in the collection to a particular cultural stratum in New Guinea. This led him to the conclusion that the stone artefacts of New Guinea can probably be dated to the first millennium CE. He considered it likely that the club stones were copies of bronze prototypes and that the mortars were stone copies of ceramic wares that were being produced in Southeast Asia at the time. This in turn led him to conclude that the mortar at least was an alien cultural form that had been adopted from other regions and that the stone bowls and pestles had never been used as tools in inner New Guinea but had always been sacred objects.[6] This conclusion was partly based on the theories of English-speaking social anthropologists, who attributed these stone artefacts to otherwise unidentifiable sea-faring populations with highly developed stone-working skills, who had settled in New Guinea during one of the various waves of migration.[7] However, later on archaeologist Pamela Swadling[8] showed that the ability to work stone and the use of mortars in various materials were documented in Melanesia, which in turn suggested that there was no reason why the tools could not have been developed in New Guinea itself.
From the 1960s onwards, archaeology increasingly played a part in these discussions, along with its sister sciences, above all ethnobotany and palaeobotany. Scientific excavations showed that New Guinea had first been settled around 30,000 years ago and that food crops were already being systematically grown in the interior of the island at least 5,000 years ago.[9] Nonetheless, to this day archaeological excavation has not satisfactorily explained the origins of these stone mortars and club stones. Moreover, since most of these were surface finds, that is to say, not made in the context of an excavation, in general it has been impossible to date them with any certainty – although the presence of individual mortars amongst the remains of chronologically identifiable settlements has shown that stone artefacts of this kind were already used around 3,500 years ago in the eastern Highlands.[10] Since similarly worked stones have also been found in other regions of New Guinea, closer to the coast, and on the islands of the Bismarck Archipelago, it seems highly likely that artefacts of this kind were already in use at an earlier date in the rest of Melanesia. There are many pointers as to possible uses of the pestles and mortars. Palaeobotanic research has shown that in prehistoric settlements in the Highlands, before sweet potatoes became the main food crop, a wide variety of nuts and fruits were also consumed. And ethnobotanists have shown that in many valleys of the Central Highlands today, fruit and nut trees still play an important part in the local economies. Thus the mortars could well have been used to crush seeds and nuts (Bulmer, 1964:147). And even today, in certain regions wooden pestles and mortars are used to prepare special ceremonial dishes. In the Highlands, before the introduction of sweet potatoes around 400 years ago, taro was the main food crop. Hence it is perfectly possible that taro was pounded in the mortars, but that this use was soon forgotten when sweet potatoes replaced taro as the main source of nutrition.[11]
Healing Powers
Whereas European anthropologists and archaeologists have so far been unable to determine the exact origins and functions of these artefacts, the local population of the Highlands of New Guinea had their own interpretations for these strange stones hidden in the ground. In their eyes, these were energised traces of their ancestors’ presence, the ‘bones of their forefathers’, which were used in special rituals to increase the fertility of people, animals and gardens.[12]
Reports by anthropologists and missionaries show that the ritual use of stone artefacts is particularly associated with the Enga and neighbouring peoples in the western Central Highlands. The stone pieces found in the ground were regarded as the remains of their ancestors’ bones, but also as anonymous personas, who would wander hither and thither on a clan’s lands. As representatives of the clan’s ancestors, these would be symbolically ‘fed’, that is to say, they would be rubbed with the blood and fat of hunted prey and buried near to the place where the clan conducted its ceremonies.[13] With the cyclical cult, kepele, being practised throughout the Enga region, all the Enga-speaking groups were interconnected. For in order to celebrate the different moments in this cycle, the ritual leaders from different groups would all come together. In this context of ceremony and ritual, the sacred stones were used in conjunction with yupini, woven male cult figures. These yupini represented important clan founders and provided a means of ritual communication with the ancestors. In order to increase the fertility of people, swine and gardens and to ward off misfortune, the participants in the ritual would dance with the yupini. A separate cult house was built for them, sacrifices were made to them and they were united with female ancestors in the form of sacred club stones and mortars.[14]
The artefacts in the collection in Frankfurt are predominantly from the regions of Chimbu and Mount Hagen, but not from the Enga region. From the records left by the collector, it is clear that the Frankfurt stones – like similar items described elsewhere – were believed to have the power to increase fertility. At least in the cases of the club stones, pestles and mortars, the indigenous finders almost always reported to Ottmar Maier, when the items changed hands, that up until Christianisation these artefacts had been valued for their special powers – which could bring success in warfare, rich harvests, fertile swine and strong male children. They were also often used to prevent or cure illnesses. Swine would be sacrificed to these sacred stones, which would then be smeared with fat from the swine. The men of the clan would eat the liver of the slaughtered animals from the mortars, in order to become strong and brave. In other cases, hollows in the artefacts would be used to store salt, which was used for healing.[15]
In most cases the local owners cited the main clan cult house as the place where these artefacts were kept. Typically, a mortar – used for its magical powers in times of warfare and to increase fertility – might be hung in a net bag in the centre of the cult house on a structure connected to the central column of the conical roof. The bag would also contain the jawbones of a large snake and some cuscuses (Australasian possum), which were believed to be inhabited by venerated ancestors. Some of the club stones in the collection were evidently used as grave goods for important warriors. Their descendants would make offerings of swine to the soul of the deceased and to the stone, in order to ensure health and prosperity for themselves and their families.[16] In both instances, this proximity to the clan’s ancestors was used as a means to sustain and nourish the powers of the stones.
The Frankfurt collection contains examples of an extraordinary variety of forms. Not only did these artefacts originally serve a wide range of functions, they are also very different in their artistic design. Broadly speaking, these stone artefacts can be associated with four main uses: there are pestles and mortars for crushing foodstuffs, club stones for weapons, mallets for making bark cloth and chisels for working wood. Whereas the shapes and sizes of the bark mallets and the chisels scarcely differ, the designs of the club stones and the mortars are widely varied. Amongst the club stones, while some are discs and spheres with smooth surfaces, others are more like stars or even pineapples. And amongst the mostly spherical or hemispherical mortars, there are both smoothly polished specimens and others with a beaded or serrated edge. Many of the pestles have the expected form of a smooth, solid grip and a rounded end for crushing items of food. In many cases, only fragments of pestles were found, with the result that it is no longer possible to fully make out the form. However, in some cases it is clear that pestles could also be figurative. This is evident not only from two particularly attractive pestle ‘handles’ in Frankfurt, in the shape of birds, but also from numerous intact comparable pieces in other collections, formed as birds and marsupials.[17]
However, it was the shapes – rather than their figurative designs or decorations – that crucially contributed to their being interpreted by later generations as sacred objects. The mortars and pestles were taken to represent the two different genders, with the round, bowl-like mortars being regarded as female and the straight pestles as male. Similarly, the round club stones, with a hole bored through them, were regarded as female.[18] And a pestle in the form of a double sphere – testicular in appearance if laid on its side – was used when a woman went into labour if a son was desired.[19] It is not clear from the collector’s records if the more elongated, straight chisels and the mallets were associated with a particular gender, but it seems reasonable to assume that, if they were indeed used in rituals, they would have been viewed as male.
Yet it appears that it was mainly the mortars, pestles and club stones – whose original use had long been forgotten – that were believed to have special powers and magic properties. In the case of the chisels and mallets, which were still commonplace tools, their practical use was still uppermost in people’s minds. In early anthropological reports,[20] mallets with one serrated end are mentioned as tools that were still in use at the time and that had been made by male clan members in the past. They were used to beat damp tree bark, to make thin bark cloth for loin cloths and headwear; indentations at the end of the mallet created patterns in the bark cloth. In his documentation of the mallets in the Frankfurt collection, Ottmar Maier makes no mention of any use other than making bark cloth. However, it is not clear if the bark mallets in his collection are in fact archaeological finds. Most of the locals bringing mallets claimed that these had belonged to their parents or had been found in their homes. Since stone mallets for beating bark were widely traded, it is perfectly possible that they were not always made by those using them. It does seem, however, that – as tools – they were passed down from parents and grandparents to children and grandchildren, who then continued to use them as they had seen their elders do. Only one of the mallets in the Frankfurt collection is listed as also having been used for its magic properties. The person who brought this stone to Maier recounted that stone mallets of this kind used to be given by the ritual experts to young, unmarried men when they were looking for a wife, so that the power of the stone could help them to find a good woman.[21] By the same token, the few chisels in the collection also seem primarily to have been regarded as tools. Only one of these pieces was found in a cult house – in a net bag, together with other stones, bones and leaves – which suggests that it was believed to have special powers. At the same time, its original non-sacred use as a tool for working wood was also known, since the main guardian of the cult house recounted that this stone had been used by his ancestors for making wooden bowls and battle shields.[22]
With the increasing Christianisation of the population, these stone finds lost their importance as sacred objects. Under the influence of the missionaries, clan members ceased to follow their old cults and many cult houses were abandoned. Many of the owners of these stones brought them to Maier with comments to the effect that, as Christians now, they no longer had need of these items. Maier frequently received stones from young men who had been brought up as Christians and who only knew of the old rituals what others had told them. Evidently the generations of the fathers and grandfathers were not always in agreement that these stone artefacts should be given to the collector. This repeatedly comes to light in Maier’s records. In his notes on a pestle shaft, hollowed out at the top end,[23] there is a verbatim account of the words of the person who brought it:
‘William Kuipa reported: My father is one of the three wardens of our tamberan house (war-magic house). My grandfather also was a warden. They built the tamberan house. When my father was a big boy my grandfather told him about that house and his wonderful stones, leaves and bones in the netbag in the house. My father also told me about these things. He said: “Those stones are powerful; they help us when we fight. They also help us to get plenty food. They help the vegetables in our garden to grow well and our pigs to become big and fat. These stones also help us to get plenty of paradise bird feathers, goldlip shells and axes.” My father didn’t want the stones to be brought here (Kondiu, mission station); but we don’t need them anymore; we don’t believe in the ancestor cult of our forebearers because we are almost all Catholics. [This stone] was found by my father in the bush not too far from our village. He was going toward the village when he saw a beam of light. In the darkness my father couldn’t see very well, but he marked the spot with a stick. The next morning he returned to the place and looked around. Nearby he found a little heap of earth; dug it away and found that stone… packed in a few leaves. He later killed a small pig on that place and took the stone home with him. He put it in the stringbag of the tamberan house and called it ‘bale’ (cup). Afterward they always kept a small amount of salt in the stone cup. If one of the warriors was wounded in a fight they brought him to the magic-hut to eat a little bit of the salt from the cup. My father and all the other men of our clan seriously believed that that stone offered protection against death, injury, or sickness. By tasting that salt many of our injured warriors returned to good health’.[24]
A Utopia
The novel Roadside Picnic is a utopian tale by the brothers Arkady and Boris Strugatzky, the outstanding, best-selling authors of Russian fantasy fiction. Between 1958 and 1991 the brothers collaborated on numerous stories, novels and film scripts that could basically be described as science fiction, but which also have numerous links to fantasy and fairytale worlds.[25] Roadside Picnic concerns the consequences of a visit by extraterrestrials to Planet Earth. No-one has ever seen these beings, and no-one knows who they were, where they came from, where they went and why they chose to come to Earth. Unexpected phenomena such as unfamiliar gases, steam, fluids and plants have destroyed the environment in the areas they visited and cause serious injury to anyone who comes into contact with them. The affected Zone is guarded by military personnel and can only be entered by those with special passes. The items left by the alien visitors are governed by very different physical laws to those that operate on Earth. Various parties are now searching for these items – not only an International Institute of Extraterrestrial Cultures, but also numerous private collectors – for these mysterious objects have by now become highly prized, costly collectors’ items. Scientists and private collectors have to rely on local ‘stalkers’ who are prepared – for a price – to break the law and to enter the Zone in search of these sought-after objects.
During the course of the narrative, it never becomes clear whether the extraterrestrial visitors intentionally left these strange objects on Earth or whether they left them behind, like bits of rubbish, on a short stopover – a Roadside Picnic – on a longer journey. Scientists engage in various fruitless experiments, trying to find the key to these alien objects, but their purpose remains a mystery to human beings. In the meantime, however, the human owners of such objects have long since found new uses for them. Regardless of the confusion spread by the scientists, these finds are now thought by many to have the potential to bring happiness and good health. Because of their astonishing physical characteristics, they are believed to have supernatural, life-extending powers. There are ‘empties’, for instance, pairs of copper discs suspended by some invisible force about 18 inches apart from one another. Although it is possible to put your hands between them, no-one has ever yet managed to force them apart or press them together.[26] Rings from some unidentifiable material and produced in some equally baffling way are worn as ‘bracelets’, to stimulate life processes in human beings.[27] There are dark beads, which the scientists regard as having ‘absolutely no applications to human life today’, although the wider population, who call them ‘black sprays’, like to wear them as jewellery. Any unit of light that strikes them is delayed and comes out smaller than it went in – a physical phenomenon that is completely inexplicable to human beings.[28] However, the ultimate charm – that outshines all the other baubles – is only known to the human population through rumours. Deep in the Zone there is a Golden Ball that will fulfil its finder’s every wish. When one of the stalkers, Redrick Schuhart, comes face to face with the Golden Ball at the end of the narrative, he is overcome. No longer able to think clearly, all he comes out with is a wholly utopian wish and plea: ‘Happiness for everybody, free, and no one will go away unsatisfied’.[29] These words bring the novel to an end. We never find out if his wish was fulfilled nor do we ever discover the secret of the supernatural powers of these alien objects.
Fictions
Although ethnographic objects may not be beholden to unknown laws of physics, nevertheless their alien functions and unfamiliar materials and forms often make them appear mysterious and faintly unreal to the European observer. And this is doubly true of the surface finds from the Highlands of New Guinea. The circumstances of their making were known neither to their New Guinean finders nor to their European collectors. Since we can do no more than speculate as to their purpose and the era when they were made, there is always something a little mystifying about them. This may also be the reason why Antje Majewski immediately felt drawn to precisely these objects in the repository of the Weltkulturen Museum, when she went there on the lookout for items with undecipherable meanings that might be open to an entirely new interpretation. She took her lead from the movie Stalker and the novel it was adapted from, Roadside Picnic. The similarities between the plot of the novel and the context of the artefacts are immediately apparent. One very striking parallel is the way that the stone artefacts in New Guinea were put to a quite different use by their later owners and endowed with new meaning as objects embodying special powers. Like the oval ‘empties’, the ‘bracelets’ and the beads now known as ‘black sprays’ in the Strugatzkys’ novel, in her selection of objects from the collection Antje Majewski concentrated on certain basic forms such as spheres, semi-spheres and rods. As it happens, this is very much in keeping with the response of New Guinean finders of the stone artefacts, who placed far less importance on the figurative design of their finds than on the basic forms, from which they drew analogies with the male or the female gender.
The novel by the Strugatzky brothers is about human beings who have a sense of helplessness, of being at the mercy of some higher power. They find themselves faced with a conundrum that no scientific process in their repertoire can solve. In their ensuing emotional destabilisation, their only comfort is their trust in the possible healing effect of extraterrestrial forces. The aim of the narrative is not to reveal the secret of the extraterrestrial visitors to Earth that no human has ever seen with his or her own eyes. The main focus is on the emotional responses of human beings to the things left behind by the aliens. Similarly, in many reports on the stone artefacts, attention is paid to their significance for people today rather than to their historical interpretation. And even if there is no way of reliably reconstructing their history going back to prehistoric times, there have been occasions in the recent past, during the 20th century, when it was possible for anthropologists visiting New Guinea to observe and report on their use during rituals. Antje Majewski felt particularly drawn to reports such as that concerning the kepele ritual of the Ipili and the Enga,[30] which describes in detail the emotional value of these objects to the members of a religious community. Like the authors of Roadside Picnic, her interest was in emotional responses to the inexplicable rather than in a bland listing of facts.
The extraterrestrial objects in the novel are interpreted by two different groups of people: the detached, neutral investigators from the International Institute of Extraterrestrial Cultures and the ordinary people living near the Zone, who value and use the ‘empties’, ‘bracelets’ and ‘sprays’ for their special powers – in just the same way as the real stone artefacts from New Guinea were used by the highland peoples for healing purposes, whereas European anthropologists and archaeologists scrutinise them in the spirit of scientific enquiry. Neither the fictional nor the real scientists prove able to discover the true origins of their specimens. The suggestion that any explanation of these stone artefacts is no less a fiction than the plot of a novel may seem provocative, yet it does cast a sharp light on the limits of cultural research. From the point of view of European scientists, the interpretation of the stone artefacts as male and female ancestors or as having magic powers has to be a highly questionable fiction. But those same scientists’ assumptions regarding the origins, age and cultural provenance of the stones are in fact largely speculative. Few hard facts have been gleaned from the many examinations of these tools and as yet there have been no archaeological excavations that have enabled scientists to date the mortars and club stones and to determine their function. Thus the scientists’ suggested outline of the objects’ history is itself no more than speculative fiction.
In his essay About the Strugatzkys’ Roadside Picnic, Stanislaw Lem criticises what he regards as the too fairytale-like, mystic end to the utopia: ‘A theologian would have had no difficulty preserving the mystery in Roadside Picnic, for he can employ contradictions. But since science does not have such a recourse, it is not an exaggeration for me to say that the difficulties of a fantasy writer who sides with science are generally greater than those of a theologian who acknowledges the perfection of God…’.[31]
Even if one may not agree with Lem’s critique or share his view of science, his commentary does highlight two fundamentally opposing responses to uncertainty. In the moment when the novel’s main protagonist encounters the Golden Ball, with its capacity to fulfil all his wishes, he overcomes the potential for both greed and selfishness in himself. His desire for the well-being of all of humankind fills the reader with a sense of satisfaction, despite the fact that the ominous secret of the extraterrestrial detritus has never been exposed. And in the same spirit, the highlanders in New Guinea can feel a sense of satisfaction with their interpretation of the prehistoric stone finds by identifying these artefacts as beneficial to their own society. With her own, special creative energy, the artist Antje Majewski has drawn inspiration from the contradictions between scientific interpretation and magical implementation. If, as Lem suggests, the ultimate aim of science is to resolve all contradictions and to explain the inexplicable, then it will only be scientists who will remain unsatisfied with the hitherto fruitless search for evidence of the age and meaning of these various stone artefacts.
Eva Raabe: Bibliography
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