The highlands of Papua New Guinea offered anthropologists a unique opportunity and a stirring challenge. When the first generation of fieldworkers arrived there in the early 1950s, they encountered often large, dense populations that had only recently been subject to a colonial presence, whose technology belonged predominantly to another age, and who, despite many indigenous, longrange contacts, had little knowledge of, or direct communication with a wider world. Here was the chance to study the social, economic and political life of people relatively ‘untouched’ by the influences which made analyses of Australian Aborigines or the Neuer, for instance, seem, by comparison, more like reconstructions of the past than accounts based on first-hand observation. When missionaries and government agents preceded anthropologists, reliable information could still be obtained from people who had lived most of their lives unaffected by outside contact. In addition, the missionaries and governmental representatives themselves, a highly literate and prolific group in the highlands, provided much material of benefit to anthropological investigation.