Arrows of Melanesia: a Neglected Art Form on Tribalarts.com

Yet these tall, reed-shafted, and often elaborately headed, pointed objects are indeed arrows meant to be shot from bows.

To me, the arrows of Melanesia are the most beautiful of all the tribal world, surpassing those of Africa and the Americas in their aesthetic qualities, and are worthy of collection and study. Perhaps the care that other peoples lavished on fletching (the often-elaborate featherwork at the base), the Melanesian devoted to carving and decorating the arrowhead. My being an archer also enhances my appreciation of the Melanesian arrow as a practical artifact.

The bow is used across Melanesia from the Bird's Head of Irian Jaya to Fiji, although not by all peoples, and there are many different families of arrow styles within this large area. But the Melanesian arrow in the main shares a number of characteristics-it has a shaft of dried reed into which is inserted a long head or foreshaft of palmwood or hardwood.

A single-piece head may be just a round thirty-plus centimeter spool of hardwood or palmwood tapering to a point, the most common fighting or impromptu hunting or target arrow, or it may be carved and painted in ways that are distinctive enough to suggest the provenance. Those arrows with a foreshaft inserted into the shaft may have the foreshaft tipped with bone, bamboo or other hard substances, except stone. I have seen a reference to stone points being found in Papua (Beaver, 1920) but have never seen any.

Almost invariably, the Melanesian arrow will be unfletched. Fletching does occur in the Aru and Kei Islands south of Irian Jaya and in one part of the Santo Islands in Vanuatu, the former New Hebrides (Speiser, 1923; Skinner, 1967), but a different method of attaching the feathers to the shaft is used in these two widely separated areas. It is also possible that fletching was occasionally used in the Santa Cruz group of the Solomon Islands (Skinner, 1967).

The Melanesian arrow may lack fletching but, contrary to many printed assertions that this lack detracts from accuracy, the well-made arrow flies straight because the combination of the light reed shaft and the relatively heavy arrowhead brings the center of gravity of the arrow sufficiently towards the point to keep it on course.

There are two broad subdivisions of Melanesia and its arrow: island Melanesia and the great island of New Guinea. Identifying the two types is simple: most island Melanesia arrows, from the Solomon Islands to Fiji, have nocks (notches) at the tail of the shaft, and New Guinea arrows do not. The reed is simply cut off flat. The reason is that island Melanesia bows have strings of twisted plant fiber cord which fit into the arrow nocks in shooting.

The New Guinea bowstring is a flat strip of the skin of a climbing bamboo or rattan knotted at each end and shaved to about a centimeter in width and a millimeter or two in thickness. The flat end of the arrow shaft is held on the inner side of it. The skin side of the strip is towards the archer. There are occasional exceptions to this generalization. Twisted fiber strings, for example, are found in parts of the west of Irian Jaya (van der Sande, 1907). The island Melanesia arrows have bast binding or plaiting at the shaft end to protect the reed from being split longitudinally by the bowstring. Those without a nock also have this binding-the flat end of the arrow is held firmly against the probably waxed string to prevent it sliding off when shot. And makers of more recent Bougainville "tourist" arrows often do not bother with a nock or a binding.

The island Melanesia arrows east of the Solomons are generally lighter and shorter than those of New Guinea, which is probably a function of their being shot from lighter draw-weight bows. Some Vanuatu arrows are under a meter in length and commensurately light (von Wittinsburg, 1968).

On the other hand, von Wittinsburg records New Guinea arrows that are 2.6 meters long and some weighing nearly 200 grams. If two arrows are traveling at the same velocity, the heavier one will have the better penetration and be more deadly.

There are many families of arrow type within Melanesia and many different designs of the arrow head, ranging from the simple tapered spool of the basic fighting and hunting arrow to elaborately carved and painted designs such as the well-known stylized man and crocodile carvings on the arrows of the Torres Strait and the Fly River delta of Papua New Guinea.

Function also distinguishes the Melanesian arrow. There are arrows for fighting, for hunting game such as pigs and wallabies, for hunting birds, and shooting fish. Within an arrow family, there are in general more, and in some areas, many more varieties of war arrows than any other type, and these include the most ornate designs.

However, there are parts of New Guinea where men do not use the most ornamental arrows in warfare but carry them, with bows, at dances or ceremonies, or use them in formal and informal exchanges (van der Leeden, 1962). In other parts, such as the Eastern Highlands of Papua New Guinea referred to below, elaborately barbed arrows were used for the above purposes but were also used in close-range action such as ambushes, assassinations of important warriors, or finishing off enemies brought down by other arrows.

Carving on arrowheads can be simply decorative (as on the foreshaft of the Amanab arrows illustrated) or be both decorative and functional (as in the barbs of the illustrated Eastern Highlands arrows). Other embellishments include the use of paint and orchid fiber on arrowheads and markings cut into the skin of the reed shafts (van der Leeden, 1962).

For those readers who would like to delve further into the scattered literature on Melanesian arrows, I would recommend Peter Valentin von Wittinsburg's Ph.D. dissertation published in 1968 as Die Melanesischen Pfeile und Bogen im Basler Museum für Völkerkunde. It has line drawing of 333 arrows from many parts of Melanesia ranging from Irian Jaya to Vanuatu, which illustrates the great variety found in this area. He classified the Museum's arrows by design and function and published a comprehensive bibliography. It is interesting to note that the first attempt to classify New Guinea arrows was made as early as 1888 by Dr. L. Serrurier of the National Museum of Ethnology at Leyden (van der Leeden, 1962).

In the Eastern Province of Papua New Guinea, arrow making was brought to a degree of artistry that to my mind had no equal anywhere in the tribal world. Warfare was intense in the Eastern Highlands and much time and effort were devoted to making arrows, in many different named designs. Writing of the varieties of artifacts of the Tairora linguistic group south of the township of Kainantu, James B. Watson (1983) said: "Arrows are perhaps the most notable example in Northern Tairora, running to somewhere in the vicinity of eighty to one hundred distinct, named varieties, some differentiated by use as well as by material, pattern, or manner of construction. A Bogenkultur indeed-to revive that Melanesian cachet of the Kulturkreislehre."

In this region, arrows were arguably the major art form: "... in general the decorative or pictorial arts are not highly developed," Kenneth Read (1954) wrote. "If one excepts the intricate and beautiful arrows (and in Chimbu some ceremonial spears), there is very little carving and there are practically no specialized crafts."

Most Eastern Highlands arrow types are intended as war arrows, the exceptions being multipronged bird arrows and various bamboo-bladed hunting arrows. The most elaborately barbed arrows are used only in close-range fighting, and lightly barbed and unbarbed types are used in fighting at medium to long ranges. Within the Eastern Highlands, there are regional variations (see below) in the style of the arrows, but all share readily identifiable characteristics. Because most have no more shaft length than is necessary, they are in general not as long as many New Guinea arrows, averaging around 1.2-1.3 meters in overall length. When the arrows are being shot, most are drawn to the bast whipping around the shaft where the head is inserted. They all have this whipping, covering some ten centimeters of shaft length, in single or double layers.

In the double layers, a tight whipping around the shaft is covered with a piece of maize cob sheath or similar plant material and another whipping is put around it. Over the whipping at the top of the shaft where it joins the head there is a collar of plaited bast or decorative yellow or yellow and black orchid fiber. A short decorative whipping of yellow orchid fiber is often wrapped around the base of the head where it is inserted into the shaft.

The construction of the pleasingly symmetrical arrow head is also distinctive. From its point, the head is left plain for some fifteen to twenty centimeters before the barbing commences, which ranges from small teeth to long trailing barbs. Where the barbs end at the base of the head, is another plain section some seven to ten centimeters in length that I call the hilt, because it resembles the hilt of a knife. As can be seen from the plates, the barbing is enclosed within the external lines of the head. The cross section of the head can be square, rectangular, triangular, cruciform, or round. A plaited collar, usually of orchid fiber, is normally woven between or under each set of teeth or barbs and where the barbed section joins the hilt.

Another feature of the Eastern Highlands arrow is that the naturally shiny golden skin of the reed shaft is almost invariably scraped off, leaving a dull brown color. "It's no good if you don't" was the only reason I could elicit for this practice, but it could have originally been intended to reduce the visibility of the shafts in ambush.

I grew up in Papua New Guinea, and the first place I lived at was Kainantu, in the Eastern Highlands, where my late father was Assistant District Officer in Australia's PNG Administration in 1946-48. The people of the Kainantu region did not readily acquiesce to Australian pacification, and my father, and other Administration officers from the late 1920s onwards, were treated to displays of Eastern Highlands archery.

"They could keep you skipping at eighty yards," he would say of Kamano bowmen and recount other tales of skillful archery. In two trips in 1968 and 1969, I traveled around Eastern Highlands villages collecting arrows and the names of the different designs in different language groups. The names refer to the designs of the arrowhead rather than the treatment of the shaft. I discovered that there seems to be four subfamilies of the Eastern Highland arrow family, namely the Kainantu (northeastern), Asaro (northwestern), Lufa (southwestern), and southeastern, distinguished by variations in barbing, shaft length and thickness, painting, the plaited collar at the junction of shaft, and indeed, the overall "look" of the arrows. Space prohibits detailing these variations, but see Plate 6 for comparative examples of the Kainantu and Asaro "looks." There seemed to be a positive correlation between population density and the variety and complexity of the arrow designs. For example, in two small language groups of the thinly populated southeast, I recorded only thirteen and fourteen designs, and none had the long trailing barbs common to the more spectacular arrows in the other subfamilies, only small "teeth" barbs. Elsewhere, in the more thickly populated Asaro and Lufa areas, there were more than seventy named designs in the Bene Bene and Gimi languages.

But perhaps the most interesting discovery was that many arrow names cross linguistic and language family barriers. The twenty or so related languages spoken by the 200,000 people of the main Eastern Highlands culture belong to two families-the Eastern and East-Central Families-of the East New Guinea Highlands language phylum. In these languages, the generic names for "bow" and "arrow" usually bear no relationship to one another, but the names of many arrow designs are cognate with one another across several languages, even though those languages might belong to the Eastern Family mainly spoken around Kainantu or the East-Central Family spoken in most of the rest of the province. This would indicate that an Eastern Highlands group will readily adopt what it sees as a good design along with its name from another group-or that the design names are so old they pre-date the split of the families into the modern languages, which I doubt.

I learned that most men could make their own common fighting and hunting arrows but that the more elaborately carved arrowheads were made by specialists, usually older retired warriors who enjoyed a reputation for their skill. "The old men would give us good arrows and tell us to bring back man for them to eat," one man in the Auyana linguistic group southwest of Kainantu told me. Nearly all the older men that I met proudly bore the scars of arrow wounds and knew the name of the design of each arrow that caused each wound. One old Bena Bena warrior had scars on his chest and back from an arrow that had gone right through him. Bows and arrows were traded widely, presented as part of bride-price, given as gifts, and used ceremonially. They were carried at ceremonies, such as initiations of young boys and weddings, and at dances and feasts. Indeed, in the late 1960s in the Upper Bena Bena Valley it was rare to see a man walking the roads and tracks without a long blackpalm bow and a handful of arrows in his left hand.

My two trips to the Eastern Highlands added considerably to my collection of arrows, but, many years later, there occurred one of those moments of serendipity that color a collector's life. In 1986, I was on a reporting assignment in the Western Australian capital of Perth and, in a spare moment, called an artifacts dealer I had met in Sydney. I asked if he had any arrows, and he replied that he had a pre-war collection of artifacts that had been left on loan to the Australian Museum in Sydney at the start of World War II by an Administration Patrol Officer who was killed in action when the Japanese sank the Australian cruiser HMAS Perth off Java in early 1942. "Oh, yes, David McWilliam-I was named after him," I replied, to the dealer's astonishment. Soon after, I was the proud owner of seventy-six arrows, many very beautiful, and two long blackpalm bows collected from around Kainantu in the 1930s by McWilliam, who was a close friend of my father's when both were Cadet Patrol Officers in New Guinea before the war. Several arrows from the McWilliam Collection are illustrated in the accompanying plates.

© Plates 1 to 8, D. Skinner Collection.
© Plates A and B, Private Collection, photos H. Dubois.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

BEAVER, Wilfred N. Unexplored New Guinea. London: Selley Service & Co, 1920: p. 262.
FRIZZI, E. "Ein Beitrag zur Ethnologie von Bougainville und Buka mit spezieller Berucksichtigung der Nasioi." Baessler Archiv, Beiheft 6, Leipzig und Berlin, 1914.
EDGE-PARTINGTON, J., and C. HEAPE. Ethnographical Album of the Pacific Islands. First Series, 1890.
READ, Kenneth E. "Cultures of the Central Highlands, New Guinea." Southwestern Journal of Anthropology, vol. 10, no. 1, Albuquerque, 1954: pp. 1-43.
SERRURIER, L. "Versuch einer Systematik der Neu-Guinea-Pfeile." Internationales Archiv für Ethnographie, 1, 1888: pp. 1-22.
SKINNER, David. "Archery of Melanesia, Part 1 (Southeast Papua New Guinea)." Journal of the Society of Archer-Antiquaries, U.K., vol. 8, 1965: pp. 14-19.
----. "Archery in the New Hebrides." Journal of the Society of Archer-Antiquaries, U.K., vol. 10, 1967:
pp. 31-39.
SPEISER, F. Ethnographische Materialien aus den Neuen Hebriden und Banks-Inseln. Berlin, 1923: pp. 210-213 & 221-222.
van der LEEDEN, A. C. "The Arrows of Sarmi." The Wonder of Man's Ingenuity. Leiden: National Museum of Ethnology, 1962: pp. 81-101.
van der SANDE, G. A. J. "Résultats de l'expédition scientifique néderlandaise à la Nouvelle-Guinée en 1903." Nova Guinea, vol. III, Ethnography and Anthropology, Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1907: pp. 242-252 (text in English).
von WITTINSBURG, Peter Valentin. Die Melanesischen Pfeile und Bogen im Basler Museum für Völkerkunde. München: Mikrokopie GmbH, 1968.
WATSON, James, B. Tairora Culture: Contingency and Pragmatism. Seattle: Univ. of Washington Press, 1983: p. 27.
WILLIAMS, F. E. Papuans of the Trans-Fly. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1936: pp. 411-415.

Other reading:

von Wittinsburg (1968) contains a wide-ranging bibliography (pp. 265-272) for those interested in further study, much of it from the early days of ethnology in the late nineteenth century and in German. The bibliography reflects the long period from around the 1930s until relatively recent years, during which anthropology virtually lost interest in material culture. Some more recent writings are outlined below.

Bush, Thelma. "Form and Decoration of Arrows from the Highlands of Papua New Guinea." Records of the Australian Museum, vol. 37, nos. 5-6, Sydney, 1985: pp. 255-293. This is a study and classification of the design elements of decorative carving on Highland arrows, which means that the forms of the elaborate functional barbing carved into Eastern Highland arrows are not examined.

du TOIT, Brian, M. Akuna-A New Guinea Village Community. Rotterdam: A. A. Balkema, 1975. An ethnological study of a Gadsup-speaking village in the Eastern Highlands that contains more information about bows and arrows and their variations than other anthropological studies but without plates or drawings of the various types. See index for many references.

SHERET, B. "A Collection of Highland Arrows-J. K. McCARTHY Museum, Goroka, E.H.P." Oral History, vol. 4, no. 9, Port Moresby, 1976: pp. 2-23b. An illustrated overview of a collection of 195 arrows made in 1972, mainly from the Eastern Highlands, of which Goroka is the capital.

SILLITOE, Paul. Made in Niugini-Technology in the Highlands of Papua New Guinea. London: British Museum Publications, 1988: pp. 105-156. This handsome volume on the technology of the Wola people of the Southern Highlands contains the most detailed account I have ever seen on the manufacture of New Guinea arrows.

WATANABE, Hitoshi. "Bow and Arrow Census in a West Papuan Lowland Community: A New Field for Functional-Ecological Study." Occasional Papers in Anthropology, no. 5, University of Queensland, Brisbane, 1975: pp. 1-116. A study of the place of bows and arrows in a community west of the Fly River mouth where hunting pig, wallaby, and cassowary is still significant.