The Highlands weren't really contacted significantly until 1938
and shortly after that the war came along, so that contact was pretty severely interrupted.
So there were people living there that were still using stone tools, still living using their traditional technologies.
That inspired a great deal of interest among social anthropologists and eventually archaeologists.
When I was there I wanted to see the country outside 
of the station of Goroka
There was a chap that had a caving club, Kevin Reed, he worked for the lands department as a surveyor
and we would get ahold of a Land Rover from 
the Public Works Department
and go out a couple hours out of the station into 
the bush and find caves and explore them.
I started to get interested in what I found in the entrances where people had camped
so I started to keep records and make notes, 
little drawings and maps.
I realized there probably were deposits under the floor of 
the cave in the mouth
Also people had gone into the caves looking for bats and
you could tell where they stopped because the torch made carbon deposits on the ceilings so you could see where those stopped,
then you knew, from then on, you were probably the first 
homo sapiens to travel into that area.
So it made it a really exciting adventure to go in there.
It's an amazing landscape. It's a landscape where the life of people is inscribed on the landscape and you can see it.
You can see trails and you can see old garden ditches and you can see places where there once were villages along ridges.
It's like reading a book almost and it became apparent very quickly to me that time would be expressed as movement across the landscape,
largely because people have to feed themselves as they migrate, as they move.
Sweet potato takes about 8 months and taro and yam take a year to mature
so they can only expand ameoba-like across the landscape.
My idea was if I did transects, I would see time in 
distance across the landscape.
We would hike all day and then spend the night in a smokey little hut listening to elders talk about where they had lived.
So there were literally sites everywhere and in three months we had found most of the 75 sites.
The first site I found, we had installed ourselves at the 
agricultural station in Aiyura
and I drove out in our old Land Rover toward [Norcori] Swamp
and I saw and old man walking beside the road in a lap lap with a dog; cute little dog. He's walking along, has him on a vine or something.
I pulled up and asked him if there were any old places [speaks in pidgin]. And he say's, "Oh yes, [speaks in pidgin]"
So I said, "Get in the truck, let's go find them." and so he got in and took me to NFB,
probably one of the very most important sites we found.
There was a monolith on the site, about 5 feet high. He explained that his ancestors had brought it down from the hills and planted it there
When I saw that monolith, I pretty much knew I was going to make my point about open sites in Papua New Guinea.
It was a moment of great relief.
Just meeting the people there was incredible. It was just so moving and so touching. I was in tears a lot of the time.
At NFB, I had played with the kids there just to get some relief from the tedious work of excavation
which went on for 12-14 hours a day of you include labwork
So I would go out in the evenings and hunt mice with them and we just had a good time with our little bows and arrows
If we managed to shoot some, we would bring them back and the elderly people who lived in that village,
they would eat the mice and they really appreciated our bringing it to them.
So there they were! I ran into them and they recognized me and there was this big hubbub.
In New Guinea, when you haven't met for a long time or 
you've been away for a long time, you hold them and you cry
I've seen old men who have been away from each other for 10 years cry for a half hour in the train platform in Goroka in 1963.
We didn't spend a half hour, but we definitely did some crying and it felt really good to engage in that.
