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The Depository documents 7 techniques in Papua New Guinea; by risk level: 4 critically endangered, 2 endangered, 1 vulnerable. Each record opens with a public summary; the full research record is free to view once registered.
The carving of elaborate wooden funerary sculptures — among the most technically complex carvings documented anywhere in Oceanic art — created for malagan, a complex, months-or-years-in-preparation series of memorial ceremonies held in…
The haus tambaran (spirit house) of the Sepik River region of PNG is the most elaborately carved architectural structure in Melanesia — its facade, posts, and internal elements covered in carved and painted spirit figures (tambarans),…
The Abelam people of the East Sepik Province produce the nggwalndu — an extraordinary combination of woven fiber mask face and painted fiber conical superstructure that can reach 3-4 meters in height.
The bilum (string bag) of Papua New Guinea is the most widely used object in PNG culture — carried by women from the Highlands to the coast, used for babies, produce, possessions, and ceremony.
The Kula ring is the vast ceremonial exchange system of the Milne Bay islands (Trobriand Islands, Woodlark, Louisiade Archipelago) described by Bronisław Malinowski in his foundational anthropological study — a system where specific shell…
The making of two related but distinct Papua New Guinea wooden drum types: kundu, a portable, hourglass-shaped, membrane-headed hand drum made and used across most regions of the country; and garamut, a large, horizontal, hollow slit drum…
Tapa (beaten bark cloth) is made throughout the Pacific — but Papua New Guinea's Oro Province (formerly Northern Province) maintains a distinct PNG tapa tradition using the paper mulberry tree (Broussonetia papyrifera) with a specific…