[4] The sticks are seen in the plates, having been placed on the grave before the photographs were taken.
[5] I am not aware of any ground for believing that the community invited is one with which intermarriage is specially common. Indeed, as stated above, I do not think that there are special matrimonial relationships between communities.
[6] Melanesians of British New Guinea, p. 13.
[7] I was told that in the Mekeo mourning-removal ceremony each of the persons wearing the insignia of mourning has to go through the ceremony, which consists of the cutting of his necklace or something else with a shell.
[8] Compare Dr. Seligmann’s references in Melanesians of British New Guinea to the mourning removal ceremonies of the Koita (p. 165), the Roro (p. 277), and the Mekeo (p. 359).
[9] I recognise that, though the terms “grave,” “bury,” and “burial” are correctly applied to the mode of interment underground of an ordinary person, the term “grave” is clearly an incorrect one for the overground platform box and tree box in one or other of which a chiefs body is placed; and the use with reference to this mode of disposal of the dead of the terms “bury” and “burial” is, I think, at least unsuitable. But with this apology, and for lack of a short and convenient, but more accurate, substitute adapted to the three methods, I use these terms throughout with reference to all of them.
[10] This Mafulu practice of tree burial is referred to in the Annual Report for June, 1900, p. 63.
[11] Platform burial in one form or another is not peculiar to the Mafulu district. It is perhaps common among many of the mountain people. Sir William Macgregor found it in the mountains of the Vanapa watershed (Annual Report, 1897–8, pp. 22 and 23), and Dr. Seligmann regards it, I think, as a custom among the general class of what he calls “Kama-weka” (Melanesians of British New Guinea, p. 32). Mr. J. P. Thomson records its occurrence even in the lower waters of the Kemp Welch river (British New Guinea, p. 53, and see also his further references to the matter on pp. 59 and 67). In view of a suggestion which I make in my concluding chapter as to the possible origin of the Mafulu people, it is also interesting to note that platform or tree burial is, or used to be, adopted, for important people only, by the Semang of the Malay Peninsula and the Andamanese. As regards the Semang, though they now employ a simple form of interment, their more honourable practice was to expose the dead in trees (Skeat and Blagden, Pagan Races of the Malay Peninsula, Vol. II., p. 89); and, though the bodies of the Pangan (East Coast Semang) lay members were buried in the ground, those of their great magicians were deposited in trees (Ibid., Vol. II., p. 91); and apparently this was the case among the Semang as regards the bodies of chiefs (Ibid., Vol. I., p. 587). And concerning the Andamanese it is recorded that the skeleton of a man who, for reasons given, was believed to have been a chief was found lying on a platform of sticks placed across forks of a tree about 12 feet from the ground, a mode which was compared with the method of underground burial which had previously been met with (Transactions of the Ethnological Society, New Series, Vol. V. p. 42). Mr. Portman records (History of our Relations with the Andamanese, Vol. II., p. 547) similar tree burial of two chiefs and the wife of a chief, and refers to the practice of burying underground “or, what is more honourable,” on a platform up in a tree (Ibid., Vol. I., p. 43). The practice is also mentioned by Mr. Man, who, after referring (The Andaman Islanders, p. 76) to underground interment and platform burial, of which “the latter is considered the more complimentary,” states (pp. 76 and 77) that a small stage is constructed of sticks and boughs about 8 to 12 feet above the ground, generally (the italics are mine) between the forked branches of some large tree, and to it the body is lashed.