Under the Mountain Wall: A Chronicle of Two Seasons in the Stone Age was published by Viking Press in 1962 and records Matthiessen’s participation in the Harvard-Peabody Expedition to the Baliem Valley in the interior highlands of Netherlands New Guinea (now Papua, Indonesia) in 1961. The expedition — led by filmmaker Robert Gardner, who produced the documentary Dead Birds from the same material — encountered the Dani people, who were then living in a state of perpetual ritualized warfare, without metal tools, and with almost no previous contact with the outside world.
The Book
Matthiessen spent several months among the Dani, observing their daily life, their agriculture, their pig feasts, their elaborate system of ritual warfare, and the complex social structures that governed everything from marriage to garden plots. The result is a work that operates simultaneously as:
Ethnography — detailed observation of a Neolithic people: their tools, their shelters, their food production, their religious beliefs, their social organization.
Narrative — the book follows specific individuals through specific events: a raid, a funeral, a pig feast, an ambush. Characters emerge — warriors, children, women — whose lives acquire genuine dramatic weight.
Elegy — Matthiessen knows, and the reader knows, that the world he describes is about to be destroyed. Dutch colonial administration, then Indonesian annexation, then missionaries, then mining companies will transform the Baliem Valley beyond recognition within a generation.
The Expedition
The Harvard-Peabody Expedition of 1961 was one of the last major anthropological expeditions to an essentially uncontacted people. The team included Robert Gardner (filmmaker), Karl Heider (anthropologist), Michael Rockefeller (researcher, who disappeared later that year in the Asmat region), and Matthiessen (writer).
The expedition’s ethics are debatable by modern standards — the researchers observed warfare without intervening, filmed violent encounters, and their very presence began the process of cultural change they documented. Matthiessen is aware of these tensions but does not resolve them.
The Dani
The Dani practiced a form of ritualized warfare in which opposing groups met on designated battlefields, exchanged arrows and spear thrusts, and retreated after casualties. The wars served social functions — maintaining alliances, providing young men with status, and expressing grief (each death required vengeance). Matthiessen describes this system with anthropological precision and moral neutrality that was rare for its time.
He also describes the non-violent life: agriculture (sweet potato cultivation), pig husbandry, tool making, the elaborate mourning rituals (women cut off finger joints for each relative killed), and the daily rhythms of a society organized around relationships rather than possessions.
Collecting Under the Mountain Wall
First edition (Viking Press, New York, 1962): Green cloth binding. Dust jacket with photographs of Dani people. Map endpapers.
Identification points:
- Viking Press imprint
- “First published in 1962” stated
- Photographs throughout
- Map of Baliem Valley
- 256 pages
Market values: Fine copies in dust jacket bring $100–$250. The book’s anthropological significance and its connection to the broader expedition (Gardner’s Dead Birds, Rockefeller’s disappearance) give it crossover appeal.
Signed copies: $200–$500.
The book is collected both as early Matthiessen and as a document of first contact — one of the last such accounts produced by a major literary writer, recording a world that ceased to exist within years of his departure.