Discover the Smoked Bodies of Papua New Guinea

The Anga mummify their dead sitting up and subject them to three months of smoking over a constantly roaring fire (the smoking helps to preserve the corpse in a tropical culture where it would normally decompose quickly). The mummification method follows a strict structure. The Anga people live in Papua New Guinea's Aseki District, a fringe highland region so detached from the modern world that even the regular passing of mist is considered an omen from the spirits. They’re also heirs to one of most bizarre rituals of the ancient world: the smoking of their ancestors’ corpses.

An extraordinary – and from an outsider's point-of-view, grotesque – form of enshrinement, the smoked corpses of Aseki have captured the imagination of anthropologists, writers and filmmakers for more than 100 years. But few have been able to tell fact from fiction. To find out when the practice began – and why the Anga began mummifying their dead in a land where cannibalism used to be the norm – I travelled to Lae, the second largest city in Papua New Guinea. There I met up with Malcolm Gauthier, a guide with off-road motorbike company Niugini Dirt.

Our journey took two days, with an overnight stopover at the former 1930s gold rush town of Bulolo. The further inland we rode, the worse the road got: a bone-jarring juxtaposition of washouts, muddy ruts and river crossings, some of which required dugout canoes to navigate.

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