Word: skullful
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...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...
...Last year's excavation yielded 13 skeletons, all of them headless. This find, the first of many mysteries, was followed by the discovery of three skulls resting on the chest of the skeleton of an elderly man. None of the skulls was his, and one contained a jawbone from another skull, which hasn't been found. In the past few weeks, another 10 individuals have been found, interred in a range of unusual positions - some lying on their side, others with their legs apart or face down, a fate sometimes associated in ancient burials with those guilty of awful crimes...
...More clues, and more questions, have come in recent weeks, with the discovery of a pot containing a skull - another enigma in a region with no record of similar mortuary rituals. It all adds up not only to the most exciting site Spriggs has worked on in 30 years of Pacific fieldwork, "but one of the weirdest, too. Every day we're scratching our heads, wondering what this is. Every day is like a new chapter in a book...