Note 5 — The Big Feast

They then further decorate the posts with human skulls and bones, which are hung round in circles below the yams and taro, but not reaching to the ground. These are the skulls and bones of chiefs and members of their families and sub-chiefs and important personages only of the community, and the bones used are only the larger bones of the arms and legs; skulls will, so far as possible, be used for the purpose in preference to the other bones. These skulls and bones are taken from wherever they may then happen to be; some of them will be in burial boxes on trees,5 some may be in graves underground, and some may be hung up in the village emone; though it may here be mentioned that those underground and in the emone are not, as I shall show later, in their original places of sepulture.