The mysterious stones of PNG
A discovery in the highlands
Abrooding power emanates from the ancient stone figures of Papua New Guinea’s highlands. Some are birds’ heads with powerful beaks and glaring eyes. Others depict strange, halfemerged creatures seemingly attempting to struggle from the stone. Still others are animal abstracts that could almost be contemporary works of art.
All are mysterious and compelling. You can feel their presence and their potency, even if you can’t discern their purpose.
These stone figures encapsulate almost all we know about the prehistory of PNG, though what we know is almost nothing. The stone figures and the culture – or cultures – that produced them remain enigmatic. Some are astonishingly old, with organic material found in the cracks of some stone objects carbon-dated to 1500 BC, which would make them the earliest sculptures in Oceania.
Some academics suggest they could be
far older, perhaps 8000 years old. We have no firm dating or chronology for any of these wonderful stone figures, since none have yet been excavated from an undisturbed archaeological site. Most are found, quite by accident, by gardeners or farmers or workmen at the controls of a bulldozer.
The stone sculptures discovered so far are of three types: mortars, pestles and free-standing figures. They change in shape and decoration from place to place, with designs possibly carried along ancient trade routes.
What they have in common are their zoomorphic shapes. They depict echidnas, birds, birds’ heads and cassowaries, the latter still considered a supernaturally powerful animal by highland people.
The animal figures typically lack lower limbs, except in the stone figures from the upper Lai and Maramuni rivers region, which are fullbody carvings.
Occasionally, stones come in the form of human heads or a truncated human figure but – compared to their abundance in Indonesian and Polynesian islands – very few of these have emerged in PNG.
Mortars are sometimes decorated with geometric motifs and may have had pigments applied as part of a ritual. Equally, they could have been used to grind pigments, for example to create body paint for warriors.
Certainly, these ancient mortars probably had some form of totemic power in hunting and warfare. Many display a slightly blueish hue that comes from the mineral vivianite, associated with cassowary hunting in the Eastern Highlands and used in rituals to decorate shields and other cult war objects in the Southern Highlands.
What else we know about these stone figures is also hypothesis, often drawn from our
knowledge of early 20th-century beliefs prior to widespread missionary influence in PNG. It’s far from certain that such beliefs were the same 3000 years earlier. Nevertheless, the stone figures were likely totemic objects that embodied supernatural power or ancestral spirits, and played an important role in religious ceremonies.
Such stones were thought to have the ability to move and reproduce, and were often buried at significant locations, smeared with pig blood and fat. For some groups, they were considered the petrified bones of ancestors, while others thought them powerful objects handed down from the same spirits in the sky that created humans. They might have been used in fertility or sickness rites, and were important enough to hand down from father to son.
The hypothesis that such mortar and pestles had a ceremonial use is reinforced by their relative fragility, making them inappropriate for preparing food on a daily basis. One theory is that they were specifically used for ceremonially grinding taro. If that’s the case, then they could be up to 9000 years old, from a time after the last Ice Age when PNG was one of just seven locations worldwide that saw the independent emergence of farming. The vast majority of stone figures have been found in areas suitable for agriculture, and particularly historical taro production. Hardly any have been discovered above 2100 metres, the limit of taro growth.
The mystery and potential age of the stone figures adds to their appeal. As figurative sculptures, they’re often exceedingly striking. Because of their appeal and rarity, such stone figures can reach huge sums of money at auction. In 2011, a pestle in the form of a bird was sold at Sotheby’s for nearly 1.2 million euros, far outstripping its estimated price of 130,000 euros.