Although Europeans has been aware of the existence of the islands of New Guinea since the mid 1500s, knowledge was confined to the coastal fringes.
In 1938, Richard Archbold, an American pilot and also adventurer was circling the world on a flying boat. As he flew over the Baliem area, he spotted from the air the valley’s tracts of symmetrical gardens and circular dwellings.
From the point of view of the outside world Archbold had ‘discovered’ a group of tens of thousands of people called the Dani. Excitement over this New Guinea discovery was intense and the press dubbed the valley “Shangri La.” In the early 1960s, Harvard University organized a large expedition to the region.
The outside world may not have known of the Baliem valley, but people have settled there and cultivated gardens for at least 7,000 years.
Often describe as a Stone Age culture, the people today live much as they did thousands of years ago. Their expert gardening skills are now helped by steel rather than stone tools, but their daily behavior, families and villages carry on almost as they always have.
For food staple, the Dani rely on root crops such as the sweet potato, introduced about 300 years ago, and the indigenous taro, which women cultivate in gardens in the valley floor and mountainsides.
Women also raise pig, which men strategically exchange to promote their status, and to strengthen their political alliance. People identify themselves by membership in a totemic clan. In the past, clans groups into multi layered political units, and large scale pre contact war dominated political activities.
Dani people of New Guinea
