Secret Mummy Culture on show

(Post Courier, Friday September 2, 2002 )




Motorbike adventurer frank Butler stumbled on one of Morobe Province's closely guarded cultural phenomena - the Aseki Mummies. Mr Butler had set out from Lae to find the caves where Aseki's kept their smoked and mummified dead. He stumbled upon a village where a man kept the mummified skeletons of his father, grandfather and an uncle a movable stand in his "shed", smoking them to maintain them. "I could not believe what I found - three generations, all in the same household," Mr Butler said. In Aseki, it is a practice to smoke bodies to preserve them. "If you are in Lae for the weekend and at loss for something to do, may I be so bold as to suggest a mini adventure up to the smoked bodies at Aseki", Mr Butler said.

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