Heart of the Baliem Valley — Dani warriors, highland markets, and Papua's last Stone Age culture
Wamena is the only significant town in the remote Baliem Valley of Indonesian Papua — a highland valley at 1,600m that was unknown to the outside world until 1938, when a US ornithologist spotted it from a plane and found 50,000 people farming terraced fields with Stone Age tools. The Dani people have maintained aspects of their traditional culture more intact than almost anywhere on Earth: men still wear traditional koteka (gourd penis sheaths) in the villages, women cultivate sweet potato gardens with stone adzes, and tribal pig feasts mark alliances and deaths. The weekly market is the mos…
The Baliem Valley remained completely unknown to the outside world until June 1938, when Richard Archbold's Fly-Over Expedition spotted it from a float plane and discovered what the team called a 'Shangri-La' — tens of thousands of people in a valley the size of the Netherlands, farming in neat irrigated terraces with no knowledge of the outside world. The first ground contact was made in 1938; missionaries arrived in the 1950s and Christian conversion began to change traditional practices. Indonesian sovereignty over Dutch New Guinea (Irian Jaya/Papua) was formalized in 1969 in a disputed UN…