Life on the upper Watut, New Guinea
1939; Wiley; Volume: 94; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês
10.2307/1788585
ISSN1475-4959
Autores Tópico(s)Pleistocene-Era Hominins and Archaeology
ResumoTO set out to study a Stone Age people by aeroplane sounds rather a paradoxical proceeding. But it can be done in New Guinea, so rapid has been the progress of air travel owing to the finding of gold in the interior and the enterprise of a few men who realized the possibilities of the aeroplane in solving the transport problems of the miners. I left Salamaua (on the Huon Gulf) at the end of July 1936 in a Gypsy Moth, and after half an hour's flight over mountain ranges was set down at the little landing-ground called Surprise Creek, on the Upper Watut river, within some six hours' walk of villages whose inhabitants only a very short while before had been entirely ignorant of metal, and who were actually still living at a stage of culture fairly comparable with that of the people of Britain in the neolithic period. My journey was undertaken on behalf of the Pitt-Rivers Museum, on the suggestion of Professor Henry Balfour, with the object of learning what I could of the life of a modern Stone Age people, and in particular of their material culture and their methods of making and using stone tools, for in this way an ethnologist can sometimes fill up some of the gaps in the archaeological record. I am not here concerned with details of technique, but I shall try to give some account of the use a primitive people makes of the natural resources that are available.
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