Dead Birds is a 1963 American documentary film by Robert Gardner about the ritual warfare cycle of the Dugum Dani people who live in the Baliem Valley in present-day Highland Papua province (then a part of Papua province known as Irian Jaya) on the western half of the island of New Guinea in Indonesia.

[3][4][5][6] In 1998, Dead Birds was included in the annual selection of 25 motion pictures added to the National Film Registry of the Library of Congress, being deemed "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant" and recommended for preservation.

[14] Weyak, an adult man, farms, guards the frontier, and creates a complex knotted strap that will be presented to another at a funeral as Laca (or Laka), his wife, harvests sweet potatoes and goes to make salt with other women of the community.

[20] Research conducted for the film and in conjunction with it resulted in several companion works and related publications by Gardner and members of the Harvard-Peabody Expedition.

Robert Gardner and Karl Heider's book Gardens of War detailed the filmmaking and aspects of Dani culture relating to the film's themes .

[22][23][24] Peter Matthiessen separately wrote about the Dugum Dani and Baliem Valley in his book Under the Mountain Wall: a Chronicle of Two Seasons in the Stone Age.

[25][26] Dead Birds reflects the concerns of anthropology emergent by the early 1960s relating to the practice of warfare in non-state level societies.

[28] Dead Birds has been taken to exemplify the approach of anthropological holism as it knits together small and seemingly insignificant moments and actions, with those of great cultural significance.

[33] Since the film's release, some reviewers have praised filmmaker Gardner's presentation as poetic and cinematographic, while others have criticized it as lacking a clear scientific and ethnographic focus.

[36] Others complained that the film gave short shrift to data on the culture such as the kinship system and food production.