Your article (How bronze age Britons dragged ancient dead into land disputes, 1 October), reminds me of Norman Lewis, in An Empire of the East, describing his encounter with the stone age culture of the Dani people of Irian Jaya in the early 1990s. “Persons of great power and influence … were not cremated in the usual way but smoked over a slow fire for several months and thereafter hung from the eaves of their houses.
There they continued to keep a benevolent eye on the community for decades, even centuries.” Although the Indonesian authorities attempted to wipe out this “barbarous practice”, Lewis’s taxi-driver took him to see his own smoked ancestor who had been successfully concealed and who “could be discreetly produced for the admiration of visitors with access to cigarettes from the United States, which the ancestor had let it be known through a shaman was the offering he most appreciated”.
Peter Bevington
Leeds
