were handed down from the “sky people,” who came to earth and created mankind, while others thought they were the petrified bones of the ancestors. Stored in ritual houses or buried at sacred sites, such stones were “fed” the blood or fat of pigs on ritual occasions. Sacred stones included oddly shaped river rocks as well as unearthed objects such as mortars, pestles, club heads, and zoomorphic figurines created by ancient highlands cultures. Archaeologists believe prehistoric stone mortars were used to grind seeds and nuts for nourishment and pigments for ceremony. A stone mortar collected by Moriarty at Pangia in the southern highlands contains residues of the blue mineral vivianite, used ritually to color shields, arrowheads, cult figures such as timbu wara, and other objects across the southern highlands region. Vivianite is also associated with cassowary hunting in the eastern highlands. Wiru settlements of the southern highlands are surrounded by forests and grasslands believed to be filled with spirit beings. The timbu cult was, until the 1960s, a fertility ritual held every five to eight years to restore fertility and ecological balance. This exclusively male cult involved the construction of a house with a central post (tungi) festooned with the bones of sacrificed pigs, cassowaries, and marsupials. Woven fertility emblems, timbu wara, said to represent the timbu spirit, ali, were made and worn by male dancers at the climactic phase of the ritual, attached to wigs known as alipo. A great feast involving clans from allied neighboring groups was then held to reinforce exchange relations. The ritual concluded with the burial of the tungi, timbu wara, and other ritual paraphernalia, thereby preserving their power. Moriarty also noted that Wiru shields were also adorned with human-shaped figures representing timbu wara, which protected the warrior. The timbu wara collected by Moriarty in 1967 is unique among those in museum and private collections, with its carved low-relief panel depicting the breasts and torso of a woman and its distinctive coloring of yellow and red ocher and blue vivianite stripes across the figure.4 Gleaming, iridescent gold-lipped pearlshells (Pinctada maxima) were once the most prestigious objects highlanders could possess, together with a large and healthy stock of pigs. Pearlshells were objects of enormous rarity and important items of wealth, traded up from southern coastal communities through complex systems of exchange. However, the unprecedented influx of the shells in the 1930s, used by kiaps and missionaries to pay highlanders for food and labor, significantly diminished their value. Nevertheless, pearlshells continued to hold reli-
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