Asmat Headrest West Papua 1962

Asmat Headrest West Papua  1962

109cm x 13cm  

This unusual object was described by Major Jim Campbell as an  Asmat head rest.  He collected it in 1962.   Major Jim Campbell was a 2nd Lieutenant in the 16th Army Light Aircraft Squadron. This was the same squadron who less than six months earlier was dispatched to the Asmat region to assist in the search for Michael Rockefeller who was a ethnographer and son of the prominent Rockefeller family in New York.
Many of the Asmat artifacts Rockefeller collected are part of the Michael C. Rockefeller collection at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City. The Peabody Museum has published the catalogue of an exhibition of pictures taken by Rockefeller during the New Guinea expedition.[12]
This large pillow or headrest has the classical Asmat geometric carving that covers the cylindrical bulk of the headrest.  Perched on top of the pillow is an ancestral figure

$2,300 AUD