Through over sixty works, this book explores traditional, or kastom, beliefs in ancestral ghosts, the world of spirit beings, ocean-bound raiding expeditions and the indigenous aesthetics of the self - the use of adornments to express identity and status from the mid nineteenth to the mid twentieth centuries.--From back cover.

Near where the sunken warships of the Battle of Guadalcanal lie, glowing UFOs rise out of the Pacific, fly into the mountains and disappear into jungle lakes. Here, a tropical paradise exists with inexplicable, ancient ruins and puzzling writings of an unknown culture. Steamy, rugged mountain ranges are inhabited by strange Sasquatch-like creatures. They have come down to the villages to kidnap the locals for generations. Terrifying stories of abduction and cannibalism are passed on by the villagers to their children. These are some of the incredible tales that the Solomon Islanders have lived with for decades and you will read about in this spellbinding book. Author Marius Boirayon is the son of the World War II central France maquis (resistance) leader, and grew up in Mount Hagen in the Papua New Guinea Highlands. Following a career in the Royal Australian Air Force and as an aircraft/helicopter engineer working in outback Australia, he decided in 1995 to go to the Solomon Islands to live.

The Conru Collection encompasses a broad range of artworks made between the eighteenth and early twentieth centuries. Most of the objects were collected in the early period of Pacific exploration. The collection is representative of the artistic output of the region and includes masks from Nissan and Bougainville, war canoe ornaments from New Georgia and Choisel, and numerous figural sculptures from throughout the island chain, as well as weaponry, jewellery and articles for daily life.

Archaeology of the Solomon Islands presents the outcome of 20 years research in the Solomon Islands undertaken jointly by Richard Walter and Peter Sheppard, both leaders in the eld of Pacific archaeology. At the time of first European encounter, the peoples of Melanesia exhibited some of the greatest diversity in language, socio-political organisation and culture expression of any region on earth. This extraordinary diversity attracted scholars and resulted in coastal Melanesia becoming the birthplace of modern anthropology, and yet the area remains one of the least well-documented regions of the Pacific in archaeological terms. This synthesis of Solomon Island archaeology draws together all the research that has taken place in the field over the past 50 years. It takes a multidisciplinary theoretical and methodological approach and considers the work of archaeologists, environmental scientists, anthropologists and historians. At the same time this volume highlights the results of the authors own considerable field research. Until recently, much Pacific archaeological research focused primarily on colonisation events and cultural-ecological interactions. Walter and Sheppard are interested too in the long-term development of diversity in coastal Melanesia and in the evolution of traditional Melanesian societies. As a case study they focus on the Roviana Chiefdom, an aggressive but highly successful polity based around headhunting, slave raiding and ritual violence that dominated the political economy of the Western Province into the early twentieth century. They also integrate the Solomon Islands into ongoing models and debates around Pacific culture - history, including in such key areas as human expansion during the Pleistocene, the spread of Austronesians, Lapita colonisation, the development of food production, the role of exchange systems, the concept and meaning of culture areas, and human impact on landscapes and ecosystems. This fascinating and very readable book is written for an archaeological audience but is also designed to be accessible to all readers interested in Pacific archaeology, anthropology and history. Featuring more than a hundred maps and figures, Archaeology of the Solomon Islands represents a ground-breaking contribution to Pacific archaeology.

Politics and State Building in Solomon Islands examines a crisis moment in recent Solomon Islands history. Contributors examine what happened when unrest engulfed the capital of the small Melanesian country in the aftermath of the 2006 national elections, and consider what these events show about the Solomon Islands political system, the influence of Asian interests in business and politics, and why the crisis is best understood in the context of the country's volatile blend of traditional and modern politics. Until the disturbances of April 2006 and subsequent deterioration in bilateral relations between Australia and Solomon Islands under the Sogavare government, experts had hailed the Regional Assistance Mission to Solomon Islands (RAMSI) as an unqualified success. Some saw it as a model for 'cooperative intervention' in 'failing states' worldwide. Following these developments success seems less certain and aspects of the RAMSI model appear flawed. Using the case of Solomon Islands, this book raises fundamental questions about the nature of 'cooperative intervention' as a vehicle for state building, asking whether it should be construed as a mainly technical endeavour or whether it is unavoidably a political undertaking with political consequences. Providing a critical but balanced analysis, Politics and State Building in Solomon Islands has important implications for the wider debate about international state-building interventions in 'failed' and 'failing' states.

More than 80 years ago, Caroline Mytinger, a portrait artist, and her childhood friend Margaret Warner set out by freighter from San Francisco with little more than $400 in their pocket and a tin of paints to their name. Their objective was to paint portraits of the tribal people of Papua New Guinea and the Solomon Islands before the encroachment of modern, European-style culture changed their lives forever. This gripping book tells of the two women’s experiences whilst travelling through Melanesia between 1926 and 1930.

The civil conflict in Solomon Islands (1998-2003) is often blamed on the failure of the nation-state to encompass culturally diverse and politically fragmented communities. Writing of Ranongga Island, the author tracks engagements with strangers across many realms of life—pre-colonial warfare, Christian conversion, logging and conservation, even post-conflict state building. She describes startling reversals in which strangers become attached to local places, even as kinspeople are estranged from one another and from their homes. Against stereotypes of rural insularity, she argues that a distinctive cosmopolitan openness to others is evident in the rural Solomons in times of war and peace.