A public lecture by Dr. Christopher Buckley at the Hillside Club, Berkeley, California, March 22, 2026.

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 items made from stone, bone, and fiber. The collection lay undisturbed for nearly four decades until it was gifted to the Tracing Patterns Foundation (TPF) of Berkeley in 2020.

This talk tells the story of how the collection was assembled, how TPF cataloged, photographed, and conserved it, and the remarkable discoveries made along the way. It is also the story of TPF’s efforts to repatriate the collection to a new museum in New Guinea.