During the 1980s Bud Hampton, a geologist, became interested in the inhabitants of the Baliem valley on the island of New Guinea, in the remote Pacific. At that time, they had only recently been contacted by the outside world, and were still using stone tools that they quarried and knapped themselves. Bud assembled a remarkable collection of Baliem valley artifacts, including sacred stones and artifacts made from stone, bone and fiber.

The collection lay undisturbed for nearly four decades, until it was gifted to the Tracing Patterns Foundation of Berkeley in 2020. This talk is the story of how the collection was assembled, how the Tracing Patterns Foundation catalogued, photographed and conserved it, and of the remarkable discoveries that we made along the way. It is also the story of our efforts to repatriate the collection to a new museum in New Guinea.

A beautiful catalog of the collection will be on show and on sale at the event.