ABSTRACT
People in the interior of New Guinea traditionally lived the majority of their lives within a relatively circumscribed territory. Their world was a densely structured landscape imbued with meaning (e.g. Weiner 1991). This textual richness was polyvalent and multilayered; overlapping and interweaving senses bound people to place. However, in trying to understand what people were doing in these landscapes in the past, we are limited by the physical evidence of former practices. Try as we might, we are unable to recover the specific realms of meaning that structured their lives; such attempts are fraught and liable either to fall into overinterpretation (Eco 1991) or rely too heavily on ethnographic analogy (Wylie 1985). As a result, we are left trying to document ‘how,’ rather than ‘why,’ people interacted with their world.
