Scope and content:

SERIES 3) FIELDWORK RESEARCH, PAPUA NEW GUINEA 1958-1963. Arranged in five subseries: A) Fieldwork Journals, B) Notes, C) Note Card Indexes, D) Abelam Artwork, and E) Maps of Papua New Guinea.

A) Fieldwork Journals: Arranged by date. Contains Forge's daily handwritten entries, including information dealing with village events, conversations, formal interview sessions with informants, financial accounts, and photograph captions for selected rolls of black-and-white and color film in Series 5. The journals document both of Forge's fieldwork sessions in Papua New Guinea, 1958-1959 and 1962-1963.

B) Notes: Loose-leaf notes arranged in alphabetical order by subject. This subseries also contains three notebooks that document the original Abelam artwork that Forge commissioned in 1962-1963 (see the Abelam Artwork subseries described below). Information in the notebooks includes a sketch of each painting, notes on design elements, the artist's name, and the date that the art was produced.

C) Note Card Indexes: Contains an Arapesh dictionary, a fieldwork journal subject index for 1958-1959 and a Sepik village index. The fieldwork journal subject index locates occurences of subject terms in the fieldwork journals found in the first subseries. The Sepik village index contains village names with information regarding their inhabitancy, location, whether the village has been mentioned in print, and if so, the citation.

D) Abelam Artwork: Includes 363 original paintings and drawings by Abelam artists, commissioned by Forge on his second trip to Papua New Guinea, 1962-1963. The majority of the paintings are arranged numerically according to assigned numbers on the verso of each piece, 1-262 (missing numbers include 53, 231, 234, 237, 239, 242, 243). The production of this group of paintings was documented by Forge in notebooks contained in series 3B and photographs located in subseries 5A and 5D. Forge also analyzed this Abelam artwork in chapter 10 of Primitive Art and Society. Miscellaneous numbered paintings follow the first numbered sequence. These paintings were created in a group of villages in the North Wosera area and are said to represent all of the traditional designs known to every artist in the area at that time. The designs were executed on black or dark gray paper corresponding to the two colors of mud surfaces used by the Abelam and corresponding size to the sago-spathe panels traditionally used. The artists used black, white, red, and yellow ochre tempera colors corresponding to the earth pigments traditionally used. The paint was applied using traditional brushes. Also included in this series are color charcoal drawings and ink drawings.

E) Maps of Papua New Guinea: Maps of the areas in which Forge carried out his field studies. Along with regional maps, which date back to 1908, this subseries also contains a language map (1958-59), census and council maps, patrol report maps, and a Catholic missions map (1935).

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