THE SEPIK HILL LANGUAGES: A PRELIMINARY REPORT

Most of the languages dealt with here are spoken by people who have traditionally lived in hilltop villages and hamlets. Hence we have called them the Sepik Hill languages. In the last generation, the desire for contact and the encouragement of the Administration have led many of these people to leave the hills for new sites on the rivers, a process which is still under way. Because most recent cultural influences have moved up the Sepik and its tributaries, the acculturative gradient runs both east to west and north to south. At the northeastern extreme, the Kapriman and Kaningra area has had extensive Administration and Mission contact ; at the southwestern extreme, many of the people of the April-Leonard Schultze headwaters are now being contacted by Administration patrols for the first time. Another example of the east-west gradient is the change from stone adzes to steel axes, which occurred perhaps thirty years ago for the Sumariup speakers, the most remote of the eastern groups, while to the west in parts of the Sanio and Seriali area the change is occurring only now. Most of the Sepik Hill peoples subsist on sago, supplemented with game, fish and wild greens. Gardening is minimal among the sago groups and domestic pigs are few. Only in the southernmost groups, Setiali to Hewa, is horticulture important. In the west, people still live in one-house hamlets, though in some groups they also have intermittently-occupied villages housing fifty or more people. Traditional houses are rectangular with many small supporting poles, sago-leaf thatch roofs, bark walls, and palm bark floors from three to thirty feet off the ground, the height depending partly on the need for defence. A few families, each with its own fireplace, share such a house. The Sepik Hill peoples are noted for their carved designs on arrows and shields. Net bags are manufactured, but not pots or baskets. The Sepik Hill cultures have a certain unity and contrast markedly with the river cultures and mountain cultures on their borders, although the eastern groups have borrowed from the cultures of the Sepik, as discussed by Haberland (1966 : 37).