Under the Mountain Wall: A Chronicle of Two Seasons in the Stone Age

In 1961 Peter Matthiessen traveled to the Baliem Valley of New Guinea with the Harvard-Peabody Expedition — one of the last field studies of a people living entirely outside contact with the modern world. The Kurelu, who would become the subject of this book, had never encountered outsiders. Matthiessen recorded two seasons of their life: the gardening and the warfare, the ceremonies and the pig feasts, the daily rhythms of a culture that had existed unchanged for thousands of years.

Also on that expedition: Michael Rockefeller, son of Nelson Rockefeller, who disappeared on a subsequent New Guinea journey in 1961 and was never found. The photographs in this book are partly his.

First edition, Viking Press, 1962 — Matthiessen's third work of nonfiction. The dust jacket is present and worn, with chipping at edges consistent with age. The black cloth boards are sound. A significant piece of twentieth-century travel and anthropological writing.