Main headings: Social sciences and humanities, natural sciences. - Anthropology, demography, ethnohistory: from inland to coast. - Bird's Head anthropology and related areas: inland, coast, and beyond. - History. - Linguistics: Bird's Head, and beyond. - Geology, botany, archaeology.

The Bird's Head Peninsula of Irian Jaya has long been an area neglected by New Guinea Studies. Only in the late seventies, interest began to focus more intensively on this scientifically important border area between Austronesian and Papuan languages and cultures. In the early nineties, this led to the creation in The Netherlands of the Irian Jaya Studies programme ISIR, which organizes and coordinates multi-disciplinary research on the Bird's Head Peninsula. Within this framework, study of the peninsula has reached a peak, with research being conducted in the area by scientists from different disciplines: anthropology, archaeology, (ethno)botany, demography, development administration, geology and linguistics. The diverse perspectives of these disciplines are subject to constant internal debate. Through ISIR and other research initiatives, there is a growing body of data on and insights into the various disciplines concerned with this fascinating area, with each discipline developing its own specific perspectives on the Bird's Head. These perspectives were presented during the First International Conference Perspectives on the Bird's Head of Irian Jaya, Indonesia, organized by ISIR in cooperation with the Indonesian Institute of Sciences LIPI (Jakarta) and the International Institute for Asian Studies ILAS (Leiden) and held at Leiden University, 13-17 October 1997. Researchers were informed on current perspectives in many disciplines to facilitate integration of findings into wider, interdisciplinary frameworks and to stimulate international debate within and between disciplines. As a result of the Conference, the forty-two contributions in these Proceedings present a wealth of recent developments from various disciplines in New Guinea Studies.

Two prehistoric cave sites on the Bird's Head of western New Guinea provide a detailed narrative of 26,000 years of human occupation of this area. During Late Pleistocene times, lower temperatures allowed a suite of montane animal species to descend onto the lowland Ayamaru Plateau. When the montane fauna receded during the subsequent climatic amelioration, people switched their hunting focus to a forest wallaby, known locally as Djief. Detailed analysis of this species' remains, including the reconstruction of their age profile, provides insights into why prolonged hunting of this species did not lead to its extinction. The wallaby population evidently thrived at its demographic maximum throughout the early and mid-Holocene, suggesting that human population densities, and therefore hunting pressure, were low until c. 5000 BP. This volume of Modern Quaternary Research in Southeast Asia offers a unique perspective on sustainable hunting in prehistory and provides intriguing insights into hunter-gatherer subsistence, tool manufacturing and use, the changing intensity of occupation of the sites, and environmental exploitation from Late Pleistocene times onwards in a lowland tropical region. It forms an important contribution to the current debate on the possibilities of human occupation of tropical rainforest before the advent of agriculture.

To many people, the suggestion that a kangaroo could live up a tree is fantasy. Yet, in the rainforests of Far North Queensland and New Guinea, there are extraordinary kangaroos that do just that. Many aspects of these marsupials' anatomy and biology suggest a terrestrial kangaroo ancestor. Yet no one has, so far, come forward with a convincing explanation of how, why and when mammals that was so superbly adapted for life on the ground should end up back in the trees. This book reviews the natural history and biology of tree-kangaroos from the time of their first discovery by Europeans in the jungles of West Papua in 1826 right up to the present day, covering the latest research being conducted in Australian and New Guinea. Combining information from a number of disparate disciplines, the author sets forth the first explanation of this apparent evolutionary conundrum. Features * Provides a fascinating and readable account of an unusual evolutionary conundrum * Written by a field biologist with more than a decade's experience working with tree-kangaroos

The Bird's Head Peninsula of New Guinea covers some 30,000 square kilometres of enormously varied landscape. Although it is home to an indigenous population of just 114,000, these people share more than twenty languages. Wider knowledge of the peninsula was recently gained through an extensive interdisciplinary research project (ISIR) involving anthropologists, archaeologists, botanists, demographers, geologists, linguists, and specialists in public administration. In analysing the findings of the project, this book provides a systematic comparison with earlier studies, addressing the geological past, the latest archaeological evidence of early human habitation (dating back at least 26,000 years), and the region s diversity of languages and cultures. The peninsula is an important transitional area between Southeast Asia and Oceania, and this book provides valuable new insights for specialists in both the social and natural sciences into processes of state formation and globalization in the Asia Pacific zone. Jelle Miedema studied sociology and anthropology at Groningen University. Awarded his PhD at Nijmegen University, he became coordinator of the ISIR project at Leiden University. His research topics include ethnohistory, kinship, and religion.

The present volume includes papers that were presented at the conference Languages in Contact at the University of Groningen (25-26 November 1999). The conference was held to celebrate the University of St. Petersburg’s award of an honorary doctorate to Tjeerd de Graaf of Groningen. In general, the issues discussed in the articles involve pidgins and creoles, minorities and their languages, Diaspora situations, Sprachbund phenomena, extralinguistic correlates of variety in contact situations, problems of endangered languages and the typology of these languages. Special attention is paid to contact phenomena between languages of the Russian Empire / USSR / Russian Federation, their survival and the influence of Russian.

This volume presents five variants of the Imdeduya myth: two versions of the actual myth, a short story, a song and John Kasaipwalova’s English poem “Sail the Midnight Sun”. This poem draws heavily on the Trobriand myth which introduces the protagonists Imdeduya and Yolina and reports on Yolina’s intention to marry the girl so famous for her beauty, on his long journey to Imdeduya’s village and on their tragic love story. The texts are compared with each other with a final focus on the clash between orality and scripturality. Contrary to Kasaipwalova’s fixed poetic text, the oral Imdeduya versions reveal the variability characteristic for oral tradition. This variability opens up questions about traditional stability and destabilization of oral literature, especially questions about the changing role of myth – and magic – in the Trobriand Islanders' society which gets more and more integrated into the by now “literal” nation of Papua New Guinea.