War shield

A war shield from the vicinity of the town of Lumi lying at the foot of the southern slopes of the Torricelli Mountains, on the territory of Papua–New Guinea is a gift from Father Timothy Elliott of the Catholic Mission in the nearby town of Aitape. Thanks to the cooperation with the ethnologist and anthropologist who lived and conducted research in New Guinea in the years 1981–1992, Dr. Maria Wrońska-Friend and her husband Anthony Friend, the shield found its way into the collection of the National Museum in Szczecin.

The presented object can owe its dark colour to tanning or being covered with soot mixed with natural pigment – perhaps ochre – and other substances. However, attention is drawn to a centrally engraved, abstract motif, the meaning of which is unknown. However, New Guinean war shields were often decorated with images of ancestors, often in the form of heavily schematized and geometric symbols. With the end of tribal wars, large shields, whose role was to cover the entire warrior, were significantly reduced. They were given a purely ritual and symbolic meaning. Some began to be made exclusively for the commercial market. In one of her letters from 1984, Wrońska-Friend reported difficulties in obtaining combat shields, resulting from the ban on inter-tribal wars, introduced in the 1930s. It was founded in the 1930s by the Australians who ruled the island at the time. Most of these traditional weapons were simply destroyed and the researcher managed to find only a few examples of them in the 1980s.

Tribal conflicts have never completely died out in Papua New Guinea. Currently, they are reviving especially in the area of the Central Mountains, where the number of brutal fights between neighbouring villages is also increasing due to access to modern weapons. On a smaller scale, however, this problem applies to lowland areas, such as the wetlands in the north of the island inhabited by the Lumi community.

The traditional economy of the Lumi group is based on gathering, fishing and the production of sago meal, made from the inside of the sago palm and some cycads. During the research conducted by Wrońska-Friend, the mining industry in this region was still quite underdeveloped.

Katarzyna Findlik-Gawron