Sepik Spear Thrower Ornaments from Anthony Forge Collection

Two old Sepik spear thrower ornaments, [2], one in the form of a bird and the other a crocodile, both with incised designs and old patina. Provenance: Anthony Forge collection. Forge (1929-1991) was born in London. He studied archaeology and anthropology under prominent anthropologist Edmund Leach at Cambridge University, graduating in 1953. As a student, Forge had examined the extensive collection from the Sepik region of Papua New Guinea, housed at the Haddon Museum at Cambridge, now the Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology. Study of this collection, assembled by anthropologist Gregory Bateson, probably influenced Forge's future interests. He later photographed part of the Bateson collection. His photographs are now held in the Goldwater library at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York / Todd Barlin collection. Between 1958 and 1963 Forge undertook research on Abelam people of the Sepik region of Papua New Guinea, focusing on social organisation, aesthetics and ritual. By the early 1970s Forge was recognised as an authority in the field of visual anthropology. His two periods of fieldwork in Papua New Guinea resulted in a number of essays about Sepik Art as well as extensive documentations and collections of artefacts from the Abelam culture. These collections are kept, predominantly, at the Museum of Ethnography in Basel, Switzerland, and the Museum of Archaeology & Anthropology at the University of Cambridge, UK. In 1974 Forge was appointed Professor of Anthropology at the Australian National University in Canberra, where he remained until his death in 1991. 22 cm to 25 cm