Decorated and Sculptured Skulls from New Guinea

Abstract

The ten skulls to which I would direct attention this evening were collected in the island of New Guinea. The first to come into my possession was given to me in 1895 by one of my pupils, Mr F. N. Johnston, the nine others have been recently purchased from dealers. I am not able to name the tribe or tribes by whom the skulls had been sculptured, neither can I state the precise locality at which they were obtained; but the dealer from whom I bought eight specimens told me that they came from the Purari River district. This river rises in the range of the Albert Victor Mountains, and after a known course of 130 miles, it discharges its waters by several mouths into the head of the great gulf of Papua. It is said to be the largest river in the British territory, next to the Fly River.In a valuable memoir by Messrs Dorsey and Holmes, on a collection of sixteen decorated skulls from New Guinea, published in 1897, the authors state that although they cannot give the locality from which the specimens came, it is probable that they were collected on the northern shore of the Papuan Gulf, in the British Protectorate. Mantegazza and Regalia have figured a skull from Canoe Island in the Fly River, where the frontal bone was sculptured with four concentric circles. Professor Haddon, in his elaborate memoir on the Decorative Art of New Guinea, says that in the museum at Florence are seven skulls, collected by D'Albertis in the Fly River district, which have designs carved on the frontal bone.