PROJECTS: CAVE ARTS OF THE KARAWARI
In Memory of Fredddie Casi
Download Book Proposal
Download "Cave Arts of Karawari" Article
from Paradise Magazine
Cave Arts of the Karawari is a project developed and managed by Nancy Sullivan & Associates (NSA), a small consulting company based in Papua New Guinea (PNG) and comprised of an American anthropologist and twelve Papua new Guinean ethnographers. Most of these are former students of hers from the local Diviner Word University, and the rest are her adopted adult Sepik River children. The company has been in operation for ten years, conducting all manner of ethnographic research for development, from Rapid Rural Appraisals to Social Impact Assessments, Monitoring and Evaluations, Social Mapping, and Situational Analyses, all of which are critically important to the sustainability of donor projects and government initiatives in rural PNG. This is a private company for some important reasons: they are small and need to be free from bureaucratic burdens that come with being non-profit, and more importantly, they wish to have a broad mandate and choose the kinds of projects they prefer (be they, for examples, Gender, Health, or Environment-oriented), without donor interference. This also means they are constantly struggling financially, but also present to the public an image of indigenous social research as a viable profession—something that can replace the expensive international consultants that eat up so much donor funding.
In the past two years they have been dedicated to a major project based in the Karawari River region of the East Sepik Province, titled Cave Arts of the Karawari. Initially sponsored by a Guggenheim, then by National Geographic Society exploration grants, it is entering the third year of what has become a far more ambitious, far more important effort than they had ever imagined. The original prospectus was to map, record, and represent the stories from possibly twentyfive cave sites in the Upper Arafundi and Upper Karawari Rivers—just where the backside of the country’s major mountain cordillera spills down to the Sepik floodplains. These caves are filled with hand and foot stencils, some painted images, and material relics from the hunter-gatherer communities that sheltered and initiated their young men in them until the 1970’s. Fascinating, little explored, and potentially important to the archaeology of Melanesia, NSA is keen to publish a book for these (now) riverside communities, with which they can generate conservation interest and challenge the government into providing long-overdue health and education services.
As recently as 1987 archaeologists Paul Gorecki and Rhys Jones conducted the first survey of these abandoned rock shelters. They describe panels of stencilled and painted images --in some cases “more than 60 metres of cave wall or roof are decorated with continuous panels of art,” they say (Gorecki and Jones 1987:3), constituting “the greatest example of rock art in the whole of Melanesia” (Ibid). Few Europeans have seen any of the Karawari-Arafundi caves, and much of the portable artifacts from them were pillaged for sale by locals to missionaries and art collector prior to Independence. (Indeed, many of these pieces form the basis of the multi-million-dollar Jolika Oceanic Art Collection now based at the San Francisco De Young Museum).
There is not question that these communities are amongst the most neglected and historically exploited in Papua New Guinea.
Still, the NSA team never could have imagined that the project would blossom into a long-term intensive ethno-archaeological project with serious political and social implications. They have established that there are now more than 250 caves filled with art and relics, owned by three major tribes, one of which still includes cave-dwellers, and that the entire rainforest that surrounds these caves has been slated for logging and mining by the government.
The most important objective NSA now faces is to create a wide enough consensus in these communities and convince them that conservation of their environment is a better form of development than logging and mining. NSDA has brought materials for 3 base camps, with thee aim of creating permanent camps for future graduate students, scientists and other cave visitors, whose care will provide an income stream for these villages. These camps are already provisioned with bedding, mosquito nets, kitchen equipment and pit toilets, and we hope to bring in solar and hydro power sources in the future. Combined with the canoes and the outboard motor we purchased for the project, they are sufficient infrastructure for visitors, and can even function as short-term housing for volunteer teachers or medical staff, should the opportunity arise.
To date, the NSA team has walked and climbed the area extensively, and held countless meetings with landowners and their elected officials, describing the project and the possible benefits of being involved. Having a physical presence in the field has somehow demonstrated our commitment, and makes no small difference in areas where no government or private services have ever been introduced.
Much more than holding meetings or spending little bits of money in these sites, the camps are raising morale in the region. This subtle change of outlook, from a general despair, to a frenzy of interest in the caves and their histories, has been the most significant impact of the project by far. And it is this optimism that has helped establish affiliation with the National Museum and include their staff anthropologist, Sebastine Haraha, in the project. He has begun the important process of establishing National Cultural Heritage status for the collective cave site.
The extent to which NSA can maintain a presence in the field remains critical: First, for convincing local villagers that there are options to selling their bark their trees and their minerals to extraction companies; second by building consensus on the need to record and conserve these caves; third for training local people and our skilled PNG ethnographers in the vicissitudes of cave recording, story collecting, and ethnographic research over a long period.
Some of the caves are little more than rough ledges, with a bare minimum of marks, while others are vast panorama of stencils, paintings and petroglyphs. We have photos of more than seventy caves and their owners now, and expect to collect materials for roughly thirty more. These represent the most culturally significant and/or oldest settlement sites, and so provide a good survey of the dispersal and functions of these caves are their art. The data also allows us to reconstruct some of the migration histories of the people in these three separate tributary regions, and in this way establish some of the land tenure precepts that can help them conserve their rainforest.
Dating the cave hand stencils and images is important to understanding the geographic and chronological distribution of art in human history, and in particular for the Melanesian population. Similar hand stencils in Australia and Borneo date from 10 to 20,000 years ago, but even if the Karawari examples are more recent, they are of interest for providing evidence of a continuing tradition. Indeed, this site is the only one in the world today where we can actually talk to the people who lived in the caves and made these images: we can ask them all the why and how questions that normally elude archaeologists.
In May 2008 the NSA team was joined by Edmundo Edwards (Archaeologist, Instituto de Estudios isla de Pascua, Universidad de Chile ) and his colleagues, as well as Dr Bassam Ghaleb (Center of Geochemistry and Geochronology [GEOTO], University of Quebec, Canada) whose radium extraction from environmental samples shall help us establish dates for some of the oldest stencils. But rock art can be difficult to date. The most convincing dated art sequences are those based on a range of data and the complementary use of relative and absolute dating methods. Ultimately, our own ethnographic material (regarding the people and their culture) will be combined with the laboratory data and presented in a comprehensive ethnography of the cave region.
PhD abd anthropologist Nancy Sullivan has been living and working in Papua New Guinea for the past 22 years, and has had a long continuous relationship with the area of study, having adopted two sons from the Karawari Village of Yimas, and having briefly managed the nearby Karawari Lodge. She is the Managing Director of Nancy Sullivan & Associates (see www.nancysullivan.net) based in Madang, where Papua New Guinean ethnographers conduct virtually all of the company fieldwork. As an anthropologist deeply involved with development issues in Papua New Guinea, Nancy Sullivan is convinced that no better investment in the remote communities can be made than in their traditional culture. Supporting and preserving the integrity of these remote cultures allows them to remain on their land as guardians of biodiversity and the archaeological record. The Cave Arts project has thus far provided some purpose and excitement for villagers (especially the young), and underscored the general determination of these communities to remain on their land. In Awim village, for example, a small painting atelier has been established, and more than one hundred acrylic versions of their traditional initiation cult’s sago bark paintings have been painted for future sale to collectors in Port Moresby.
Sometimes conservation work is a simple as getting there first, before a competing interest takes hold. The importance of the team’s presence in these remote communities cannot be overestimated, as they are the first outsiders (albiet Papua New Guinea) to establish themselves in these villages and engage the imagination of their hosts. They have enlisted scores of local assistants and planted the seeds for their continued stewardship of these caves.
What makes this project unique is that virtually all the work is being conducted by Papua New Guineans. The team has trained a total of 20 indigenous field assistants in genealogical record-keeping, social mapping, GPS use, cave map-making, cave measuring, photography, and computer basics. A core group has also been trained in social science qualitative research software, and budget-keeping.
The Meakambut people who still live in their caves have agreed to work with NSA on recording their caves, if only because they see imminent threats from legal and illegal logging and mining companies in their surrounding forest. Only a handful of these ledges are accessible to Europeans, and the vast majority have been and can only be reached by the experienced toe-holds of local climbers. Thus, whatever success the project accomplishes is based entirely upon the NSA team member’s endurance and commitment.
Rural development is important to Papua New Guineans, who have long campaigned for services and better access to markets from their traditional homesteads. But because the government has failed to provide services, rural populations have increasingly felt the need to capitulate to large-scale resource projects, for fear of being left behind, and simply to get the small amounts of cash they may need for medicines or education. These communities we are working with yearn for very basic services, and so their ambitions have become an integral part of the project’s own.
Download Book Proposal
Download "Cave Arts of Karawari" Article
from Paradise Magazine |
|
)
)
)
)
)
)
)
)
)
)
)
)
)
)
)
)
)
)
)
)
)
)
)
)
)
)
)
)
)
)
)
)
)
)
)
)
)
)
)
)
)
)