Tor - History and Cultural Relations

Nothing is known of the prehistory of the Tor peoples apart from oral traditions that indicate that many of the people have immigrated there during the twentieth century from the Lake Plains area of the Idenburg River to the southeast. The combination of a very difficult physical environment and depredations by the Wares and other groups to the east and south have resulted in continual fissioning, extinctions, and migrations. The Tor groups had almost no contact with the Western world until the Dutch administration and missionaries began development and conversion attempts after World War II. Since Irian Jaya became a province of Indonesia, almost no new information about the Tor has become available; the description provided here is based almost entirely on the situation in the late 1950s.