This book began as a ‘straightforward’ comparison of the societies and cultures of highland Papua New Guinea. I believed, perhaps naively, that a thorough reading of the ethnography would automatically reveal patterns and configurations which would make sense of the rich literature published over the past five decades by generations of anthropological fieldworkers and other observers. While the final product retains an explicitly comparative focus, the process by which it was achieved has been anything but straightforward.

The ethnography of highland New Guinea is vast, excessively detailed and theoretically eclectic, and any notion of proceeding inductively was doomed, at the outset, to fail. Clear-cut patterns continually evaporated in a mass of complex variations. It became clear to me, very early, that comparison could not advance by using a synchronic idiom, and that a perspective on the past was necessary to understand the present. I began to look afresh at the prehistoric material from the highlands, even to dabble in its ecology, to broaden my essentially social anthropological viewpoint. In the end, it was these sources which led me to the conclusion that the highlands could not be treated as homogeneous – socially, culturally or environmentally. A reading of prehistory convinced me that areas of the highlands had followed markedly different paths in the development of agricultural production and pig husbandry, and especially in the timing of transformations and rate of intensification.