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For more than a thousand years their unblinking eyes have watched over the tribes that live along Papua New Guinea's vast rivers. Hacked from the necks of enemies or retrieved from the graves of ancestors, the skulls were a central part of tribal culture. No youth could call himself a man until he had defeated an enemy warrior in battle, beheaded the corpse with a cassowary-bone dagger, and displayed the head on his clan's wooden slit drum. And few family houses were complete without the skull of an ancestor, decorated with clay features, shell eyes and real hair to create a lifelike image of the deceased.

These unique, macabre artifacts were retained in villages for decades - the heads of enemies decorated and stored in the men's house or spirit house; those of ancestors often kept in special beds in their descendants' huts. But now many of the slit drums and skull cradles are empty, for new European head-hunters have been prowling the river regions, ethnic art dealers armed with dollars and euros more deadly to native culture than any dagger. "These items are going to private homes," says p.n.g. National Museum director Soroi Eoe, the man responsible for thwarting the theft of cultural artifacts. "They are being lost not just to Papua New Guinea, but to the world. Under the law, these human remains are a prohibited export.''

The collectors' latest hunting ground is along the Sepik River. Dubbed the Amazon of the Pacific, the river writhes and loops 1,100 km from the country's heart through some of the wildest and most inaccessible terrain on earth. Cutting through mountain ranges, international borders, steamy jungles, swamps, lakes and flood plains, the Sepik monster nurtures some of p.n.g.'s most ancient tribes, who still live in tiny stilt huts and brave the river's treacherous currents, and large saltwater crocodiles, in their slender carved canoes.

Before the arrival of missionaries and magistrates, the Sepik people were ferocious warriors and enthusiastic gatherers and keepers of heads, which held special significance for them. According to French anthropologist Nicolas Garnier, who has spent lengthy periods living among the tribes, the head was a sacred trophy. Some time after a dead ancestor had been buried, the now-fleshless skull would be exhumed. A relative, guided by apparitions of the dead person, would then overmodel the original features onto the bones. "Those heads, considered as the living presence of powerful ancestors, could have been used for magical purposes, in warfare in particular,'' says Garnier. When a warrior had taken a head he would now be "a respected man, able to cover his body in black paint, a sign of homicide." The victim's head was boiled in a special pot to release the flesh and tendons. Then, after it had been appropriately adorned, it would be displayed alongside the heads of ancestors. Head-hunting is no longer practiced - it was firmly discouraged by the first Christian missionaries - so the remaining skulls have particular significance as a record of a vanished era. While the rituals and ceremonies associated with the ancestor and warrior cults are still performed in secret, says Garnier, "the skulls have not been well protected."

Nowadays the once feared tribes of the upper Sepik live peacefully among their fruit and vegetable gardens, catching fish in gossamer-fine nets stretched across creek beds or floated out into the river. Their remoteness has protected them from many of civilization's problems, but it has also brought them few modern comforts. They have no electricity, purified water supply or hospitals; there are few working schools or telephones, and the only communication is via radios at the handful of mission stations dotted across the region.

Some money is generated by their internationally famed skills as wood carvers, but trade is sporadic. "The need for cash for school fees is so urgent," says p.n.g.-based anthropologist Nancy Sullivan, who has consulted on aid projects in the region. "There's no development. Boat fuel is so expensive. They are not poor the way people in Africa are. They have their gardens and the river, but they do not have cash." Exploiting this cash vacuum are some unscrupulous artifact dealers who travel up and down the river, taking advantage of its people's poverty to mine a rich vein of cultural treasure.

The problem is not, of course, isolated to p.n.g. Developing countries across the globe are suffering from the rich nations' fascination with their exotic ways of life. From Nigerian terracotta busts and Malay skulls to Iraqi statues and Afghan coins, an enthusiastic trade has developed in selling off the icons of exotic cultures to grace the living rooms and galleries of Europe, America and Asia. "Trafficking in cultural property has become not only a lucrative business for certain traders, but also an extremely tempting source of additional income for populations living in poverty, above all in the country of origin of the cultural goods," notes a 2004 United Nations report. It estimates the international trade in "looted, stolen or smuggled art" at $4.5 billion to $6 billion a year. In p.n.g., says museum director Eoe, the trade in illegal artifacts is probably "a multi-million-dollar business, but we don't really have any idea of the true extent.'' With toothless laws and scant resources, Eoe and the National Museum are fighting an unequal battle against well-organized collectors who slip into the country across unmarked borders and ship out containers full of historic pieces, which are highly prized on the international market. In December last year, p.n.g. police were tipped off about two small boxes left at a DHL courier's office in the sleepy port town of Wewak, near the mouth of the Sepik. Both were to be shipped to private addresses in Germany and appeared to have been given security checks by the shipping agent. But when detectives carefully opened the lids and parted the plastic bags filled with sawdust, they found two skulls complete with human hair, clay facial features and eyes made of shells.

The Sepik heads might have fetched thousands of dollars apiece from collectors in the U.S. or Europe. Exporting the skulls without the rarely given special permit carries a maximum six-month jail sentence, Eoe says: it breaches not only the Cultural Property Preservation Act but part of the criminal code related to interfering with human remains. Yet in p.n.g., where corruption is pervasive and police are so poorly resourced they struggle to obtain fuel for mobile patrols, investigating non-violent crime is not a priority. Time has learned that none of the people involved in the apparent attempt to export the two skulls has yet been charged. "I don't know why it's taken so long," says Wewak police detective Kila Tali, who took part in the original seizure. He says the prime suspect, local artifacts trader Ralf Stuttgen, has admitted some involvement in packing the boxes containing the heads and delivering them to the courier's office. A police raid on Stuttgen's home later uncovered a third skull in a box.

In person, 66-year-old Stuttgen, a former Berliner, looks more like the Catholic missionary he aspired to be when he arrived in the country in the 1960s. But the interior of his wooden cottage, perched on the rainforest-covered heights above Wewak, confirms his fascination with tribal objects. Eerie hook-nosed masks and giant carvings cover the walls. Twenty years a dealer, Stuttgen defends the sale of skulls, saying, "It is a victimless crime. I was just trying to help the (local) people. They brought them here. I just helped them mail them," he says. The skulls were not genuine but imitations, he insists, so there could be no loss of cultural heritage and no crime committed. "There are almost no old ones left," he says. "You may see one only in the Port Moresby museum. These are copies. Necrophiles buy them." Stuttgen says the skulls were being sold to foreign buyers for about 600 kina ($150) each. He also says he suspects local authorities are hoping he will offer a bribe to make the case go away, but he refuses to identify his supplier or give details about the intended recipients of the grisly cargo. The boxes the skulls were packed in, however, provide better clues. They are clearly addressed to individuals in Germany. One recipient is a natural-therapies practitioner who declined to speak to Time about the skulls but says he does know Stuttgen. Efforts to contact the other man were unsuccessful.

But for Eoe and his team, it is all but impossible to bring legal action against overseas buyers; they struggle even to track down the local suppliers and dealer. Museum enforcement officer Sebastian Haraha is frustrated by their lack of results. One dealer slipped into p.n.g. from neighboring Indonesia, he says, and managed to take three truckloads of artifacts back across the border without inspection by any authority. "I was trying to catch up with him, but every place I went to I just missed him," says Haraha, fanning out a wad of photographs of items he is attempting to trace."We don't know what he ended up taking out."

The sales often amount to theft, Eoe explains, with unworldly villagers paid far less than the objects' real value. "The dealers buy artifacts using large numbers of low-denomination notes," he says, "so the villagers see this large amount of money and let the object go for much less than it is worth." Among the most valuable are the intricately carved poles that support the roof of a village's haus tambaran. These poles, made from a special hardwood, represent the most powerful spirit in a village and can fetch as much as $100,000 at international auctions, says Eoe. Haraha says he is seeking to question Stuttgen about some spirit-house poles that were put up for sale recently in Wewak.

Sometimes, however, it's the collectors who are the ones conned. The skilled carvers of the Sepik are also master forgers - and skulls feature prominently in their repertoire. Anthropologist Garnier examined images of the seized skulls for Time, and believes they are, as Stuttgen claims, modern imitations. Should they prove to be genuine, he says they could be worth more than $12,000 in Europe, especially in the Netherlands, which has become a clearing house for such items. Even if they are not ancient items, however, the bones have to be sourced from somewhere. Eoe says the villagers may have been taking skulls from graves or retouching old ones - a scenario which could have unpleasant implications for those responsible. In traditional society, says anthropologist Nancy Sullivan, it's believed that "if you have done something (wrong), the shame and guilt will make you sick.'' At Tambanum village, about 65 km south of Wewak, more than 1,000 people from the Iatmul tribe live along the banks of the Sepik, and on the tiny creeks and tributaries that carve up the district. They know the power of the skulls. One of their people, they believe, paid a terrible price for selling a head. The man, Toni Kawa, "went into the bush and when he came back he started vomiting; and just from vomiting he died," says a fellow villager who preferred not to be named. "Then his wife died. The only way (to stop the bad luck) is for Toni's clan to die." Another villager believes the reason Toni died was "because he took an old head to sell, and he was supposed to replace it with a new one that he made, but he never made the new one." From beneath another carver's hut, a man emerges, offering to sell Time a skull for 12,000 kina (about $3,000). He stops the conversation when an elder arrives and insists that no such artifact is for sale.

On the other side of the river's broad reach, Kawa's mother sits in mourning under his house, while relatives deny the allegations that he sold skulls. But finally one admits that some of Kawa's kinfolk are nervous, fearing not illness but criminal prosecution and the stigma of being involved in a trade that has already led to two deaths. "Everybody who shared the money out of the skulls is losing their life, too,'' says one of the villagers.

It's an uncomfortable message for the illegal collectors and dealers. The skulls may have been smuggled out of reach of the p.n.g. authorities, but locals believe their protective spirits travel with them. In their new resting places, looking out at comfortable Western living rooms from expensive display cases, ancient malevolent magic may yet be brewing.

• Rory Callinan
• The skeletal mementoes of tribal enemies and ancestors are being spirited out of Papua New Guinea in a macabre global trade