The first major publication on the art of the New Guinea Highlands, this extraordinary volume is destined to become the definitive resource on this little-known region. The Jolika Collection of New Guinea Art of the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco consists of thousands of objects and represents hundreds of clans and villages throughout New Guinea. The first book in a projected ten-volume series, this lavishly illustrated volume focuses on the Highlands-a region of rugged mountains, fertile valleys, and a civilization that dates back more than forty thousand years. Here, in more than six hundred pages of rich color, are beautifully crafted masks, shields, headdresses, and ceremonial and personal objects, the majority of which have never before been published or exhibited. Archival and reference photographs, maps of key locations, and authoritative essays by more than a dozen preeminent scholars covering a wide range of subjects, from prehistoric agriculture to body art, make this book a collector's dream.

Life on the frontier suggests excitement, danger, and backbreaking labour. In this book the frontier is the Highlands region of what is now Papua New Guinea - a part of the world largely unexplored by Westerners as late as 1950. In the next five years a dozen pioneering anthropologists followed closely on the heels of "first contact" patrols. Their innovative fieldwork is well documented, and now, in an autobiographical collection that is intimate and richly detailed, we learn what being on the frontier was like for the ethnographers themselves. Featured are Catherine H. Berndt, Ronald M. Berndt, Reo Fortune (by Ann McLean), Robert M. Glasse, Marie Reay, D'Arcy Ryan, and James B. Watson, and the seven new essays are put in historical contect by Terence Hays. A concluding essay by Andrew Stathem points out that this early work among the peoples of the Central Highlands not only influenced all subsequent understanding of Highland cultures but also had a profound impact on the field of anthropology.