In its 10,000 square miles, there is but one airstrip, and outside of the main “city” of Agats, there isn’t a single cell tower. There’s still not a single road or automobile.

Until 50 years ago, there were no wheels here. Hornbills with five-inch beaks and blue necks.Īnd secrets, spirits, laws and customs, born of men and women who have been walled off by ocean, mountains, mud and jungle for longer than anyone knows. There are flocks of brilliant red-and-green parrots. Crocodiles 15 feet long prowl their banks, and jet-black iguanas sun on uprooted trees. And sago palm, whose pith can be pounded into a white starch and which hosts the larvae of the Capricorn beetle, both key sources of nutrition. In the jungle there are wild pig, the furry, opossumlike cuscus, and the ostrichlike cassowary. It’s teeming with shrimp and crabs and fish and clams. Everything you could possibly need is here. President and Fellows of Harvard University Peabody Museum of Archeology and Ethnology Īsmat is, in its way, a perfect place. The Baliem Valley was a “magnificent vastness” in Rockefeller’s eyes, and its people were “emotionallly expressive.” But Asmat proved to be “more remote country than what I have ever seen.”