Ever wondered what it’s like to go on an archaeological dig? Follow our team online as they search for ancient Lapita pottery in Papua New Guinea.

28 February
Our final day! We started early this morning packing our clothes and belongings. We are leaving a big pile of all the clothes that we don’t want for the people in the community. Rebecca and Kasey purchased some soccer, rugby and volleyballs in town the other week and they have also found some posters of human skeletons for the schools here. We also have to clean the tents carefully and remove all the soil so we don’t get held up at customs.

Preparations for the farewell party started this morning with the killing of the pig. It was then butchered and the meat was wrapped up in banana leaves. They cooked the pig in an earth oven just like a hangi with hot stones underneath and on top of the meat. To finish, banana leaves were placed on top, followed by two large pieces of corrugated iron to keep the heat in, and dirt placed on top to cover everything.

People started arriving at about four o’clock, but the party didn’t start until seven or eight. Everybody came and it was so great to see all our friends coming to say goodbye and enjoy the feast with us. There were a lot of speeches – some local government officials joined us for dinner as well as the president of the island. After this, everybody ate. There is a hierarchy in the order that you can eat at these kinds of gatherings. First the guests and the important men in the village will go up to get food, then the rest of the men, then the women and finally all of the children. After dinner, we were asked to sit down and people came to give us gifts – we got so many gifts of baskets, oranges and shells as well as some meri blouses for us women. All the kids came and shook our hands and said goodbye, and after this, many of the villagers stood up and sang a few songs for us. A group of women stood up to dance and I joined in. They had smeared white clay on their faces, and after this dance, the ladies performed a custom dance for us. Rebecca and Kasey danced with them too. This dance was performed to a drum beat and was about going hunting, with the women using mock spears to dance with. It was a wonderful night and made me realise how sorry I will be to say goodbye tomorrow.

This is my last entry for this trip. I hope you have enjoyed reading about the excavation as much as I have enjoyed sharing our experiences. From here we travel to Kokopo tomorrow night and then Port Moresby the following day. The next day we travel to Brisbane for one night and we finally arrive home in New Zealand on Monday, so it will take us three days to get home!

27 February
Our second to last day in Rakival was spent packing up finds and equipment, preparing to leave, and of course filling up the last of the big holes we have made here! As this is a two year project, a lot of the equipment will be stored for next year, and this means that all the shovels need to be cleaned, sharpened and oiled so they don’t rust. Dimitri completed the section drawings of the stratigraphy of the last Maravot site this morning and by the end of the day the trench was filled up. As a farewell, the village is preparing a huge feast for us tomorrow night. We have purchased one pig and given away the rest of the rice that we haven’t got through. I am really looking forward to this, as is the rest of the village. In fact, word has spread all over the island. Rebecca travelled to Raul yesterday to visit the vegetable gardens there and the villagers she spoke to were dropping hints, possibly hoping for an invitation. It should be a great party!

All through the morning people were dropping past the house with leaving gifts of shells, fruit and even some shell money; this is the traditional currency in Papua New Guinea and is still used, along with cash, for important purchases like land or brides (Papua New Guinea is one of the few countries in the world where the husband must pay money to the family of the bride). In the afternoon I visited Georgina’s house to weave a basket. The people of this region have been weaving baskets from coconut leaves for many generations and everybody here can make them – all the men, women and even the kids can do it. With a lot of help I managed to make one not too shabby basket, which I am hoping will make it through customs ok. Tomorrow, if I have time, I am going to try to make another one.

26 February
I took another bumpy ride into town today – actually it was so bumpy that I almost lost my breakfast! The boat was overloaded with copra and people, so when we saw another boat heading to the mainland, our boat operator waved it down and transferred some passengers. I am sending these updates from the Rabaul Volcano Observatory, as today I also had to drop of some surveying equipment that we had borrowed for the excavation work. Fortunately for me, the manager was taking two staff members to Kokopo airport, to travel to Madang, where they need to examine some equipment that monitors a volcano there, and I was invited to go with them.

Volcanoes have played a big part in shaping the history of Rabaul. The city was originally the capital of Papua New Guinea and by all accounts was a beautiful city full of grand buildings. In 1937 the volcanoes Vulcan and Tavurvur erupted, killing over 500 people and flattening the city - Vulcan had once just been a small offshore island but now is so big it is attached to the coastline! It was a combination of the eruptions and the Japanese occupation that eventuated in the capital being moved to Port Moresby. These two volcanoes erupted again in 1994 and completely covered Rabaul in over a metre of ash, which collapsed all the buildings. There were very few casualties from this eruption as most people had evacuated before the ash came down. This part of town is now known as old Rabaul and there is practically nothing there. Most of the industry and businesses have since moved to Kokopo. Tavurvur has been throwing out ash ever since, and in the past week it has been chucking out heaps. When we travelled into Kokopo today, everybody had covered their faces with scarves or dust masks, and last week the ash closed the airport. It is not necessarily the amount of ash that can close the airport, but the direction that the wind is blowing, so hopefully we will be able to leave on Saturday when we are due to fly out.

25 February
Today we start the final leg of the journey before heading home – the washing, sorting and packing of all the finds! With four trenches opened in total, there are a lot of finds to wash. We organised our cooking ladies into a washing bee and got all the washing completed today. We started to clean out the house today also. A lot of our equipment needs to be cleaned and stored away for use next year, so this is the job for tomorrow. The Maravot trench produced its first pieces of decorated pottery today. One Lapita incised sherd and one dentate stamped piece. Before the Lapita people arrived in Melanesia, nobody made pots here. It is thought that the Lapita people travelled down from South East Asia where people had made pots for a long time. Today, people make pottery all over Melanesia.

The Lapita people were the first people to travel into Polynesia, and settled all of Polynesia in around one thousand years – one of the fastest migrations in history – so pottery making in the Pacific is their legacy. The difference in the sherds we found today is that the incised pottery is made by scraping a tool through the clay and is later than the dentate stamped pottery. For the dentate stamped pottery, a stamp was used to create the patterns, usually around the rim of the pot. No one has found the stamps that were used, possibly because they were made from an organic material that has decayed. The patterns are very complex and the decorated pottery was not used for everyday cooking or eating. It was special pottery, possibly used for ceremonies and religious purposes. As the designs are so complex, many archaeologists think they also functioned as a type of language or way of communication, with each design having a particular meaning. 

24 February
Today is Sunday and I went to Sunday school this morning with all the kids. One of my friends brought me a proper blouse and lap lap (sarong) to wear so I looked like all the other meri Tolais (Tolai women – Tolai is the name of the group of people in this area). The village is preparing for Palm Sunday and Easter, and I spoke to the kids about what we do for Easter in New Zealand.

This afternoon, Dimitri and I took a drive around the island. So far we have only seen the government station where we stayed when we arrived, and Rakival Village. There are a few other villages where Lapita pottery has been found, so we took some sherds and stopped at most of the coastal villages to ask if anybody had found anything like it when they were digging rubbish pits or building houses. There are many villages on Watom and over 2000 people live on the island. The largest village is Raul which is an hour’s walk up into the crater of the extinct volcano. I won’t get a chance to visit here but I have met a lot of people from this village while waiting for the boat on the mainland. Nobody could recall finding pottery in their village but we did stop at the village where Jim Specht dug in 1967. It isn’t far from Rakival and I was surprised to be greeted by name. It seems that several families who live there come to the church for services and there were a lot of familiar faces. Three families live in a very small village above a larger one 10 or 15 minutes walk up the hill. They welcomed us with sugar cane, oranges and betel nuts. The families were drying cocoa beans and they let me try one – it tasted bitter and not much like chocolate! This is a good cash crop for the local people as they get about NZ$150 for one sack. We looked at where Jim had dug and may recommend digging here next year.

23 February
Today we said goodbye to the two Antoines. I think everyone was sad to see them go. They have worked tirelessly (sometimes through the night!) to get the radar work complete, and have been great company. The boys in the village will particularly miss little Antoine (Badoc) who usually plays soccer with them every evening. From here they are moving on in the Pacific to work on another project. As a geophysicist, Antoine de Biran is often contracted by mining companies to do commercial work, and works on projects like ours more out of interest.

I spent the day with Dimitri today doing the site drawing for the site in the village. We drew two sides of the trench to scale from top to bottom. To start, you need to establish a base line to take measurements from. You can’t just measure from the top of the trench because it may not be even all the way around and this particular trench is on a slope. For measurements on all the trenches we use a datum line. This is a point usually 20 centimetres above the highest point of the trench. To ensure the datum line stays the same, it is marked with a piece of long string on a peg in the ground. Then you use a builder’s level on the piece of string to ensure all the measurements are correct. We measured 1.5 metres down to establish the base line for the drawing. Starting at one corner, we marked in each layer of soil measuring up or down from the base line every 20 centimetres along. Once each layer is finished, it’s a matter of connecting the dots to make the drawing. After the layers were marked in we started on the rocks lodged in the side of the trench and measured all four corners of each to draw them in. We then measured across each stone to double check the size. Now that this is finished, we can fill in the hole! The burial site near the church began to get filled in today and the new Maravot trench is down to 1.5 metres.

22 February
I headed into town today to pick up supplies and send the last report (there is no internet on Watom) and left the others to the digging. The site in the village is getting cleaned up today, and tomorrow we will make a drawing of the stratigraphy and then fill it in on Monday. Antoine Badoc helped to mark out a new Maravot trench – attempt number three – just slightly south of the other two. The soil in the new trench was undisturbed and we will continue to dig this site until we leave next week. Each week I travel from Rabaul to Kokopo, which is the largest town nearby, to do our shopping and errands. The trip takes about forty minutes and is pretty rough, as every time it rains, volcanic ash slides down onto the road. There is no point in repairing the road until the volcano stops throwing out ash.

Along the way you can see heaps of tunnels and caves carved into the limestone by the Japanese during the time they occupied Rabaul. I mentioned before, that this was the major Japanese base in the Pacific during World War II, and evidence of the occupation is everywhere. The bell used in Rakival village to call everybody to church is actually the nose cone of a bomb! The large caves on the way to Kokopo are where barges were dragged up to hide from Allied attacks. There were many Japanese on Watom Island and you can find numerous tunnels just around the corner from Rakival. There is actually a place named Tokyo on Watom and if you walk up into the jungle, you can find machine guns there. Just below the machine guns there is a Japanese submarine, sunk in a cave with the intention of hiding it. You can dive down about two metres to see it, and as a consequence of all these kinds of wrecks around Rabaul, the area is popular with divers. There were constant dogfights over Rabaul for around two years, from 1942-1944/5 when the Japanese navy and air force pulled out, leaving around 100,000 land locked soldiers to fend for themselves in the jungle. This was when many of the tunnels were built.

Later in the evening, Antoine de Biran gave a presentation of the radar results to the village. About 100 people turned up and many had travelled from other villages. He talked about the areas that he recommends for the archaeologists to dig in next year. Our Maravot trenches are in an area recommended by the radar. Most people in the village, however, were interested in potential sites for a well. There are a lot of stories about hidden treasure left behind by the Japanese soldiers and the villagers are very interested in finding some! Antoine explained that he had not found anything like that and encouraged people not to go digging around as there may well be unexploded ammunition buried in the ground, and not treasure!

21 February
We have not yet reached the bottom of the Maravot trench and we haven’t found any Lapita pottery. The trench is within the ranges of Antoine’s best guess from the radar results, and as I said, the stratigraphy is exactly as Meyer described it, so we are going to open another small trench a bit further forward if we have time. In fact, we tried to open another this afternoon but we hadn’t dug far before we realised that someone had disturbed that particular piece of land before. The top of the trench was a mix of the dark soil and the ash from further down, so we decided to close it. There is no way to measure the stratigraphy correctly if somebody has dug there before, but who knows? Perhaps we are closer than we think, and this is where Meyer dug.

Another group of students came today – this time from Watom primary school on the other side of the island. Some arrived by boat and others trekked for a long time through the jungle to get here. I kept getting asked questions about fossils from the teachers, which confused me as we are not looking for fossils. When I asked, I found out that fossils and different rock types are in the new school curriculum, but the teachers don’t have any information about them. I have promised them that the first thing I will do when I get home is to prepare some material to send back to all the schools on Watom. Where I work in the Search Centre at the Otago Museum, I have factsheets, a library, Internet, and experts on almost any subject in the Museum just a phone call away. If the teachers here want to find out something, they have to travel into Rabaul. Travelling to Rabaul and back would take a whole day, and there is no guarantee that they will find the information they are looking for.

20 February
Today we started on packing up some finds ready to send home. Kasey and Rebecca are removing the last of the skeletal material from the site by the church. All up four burials were found here. The last was a burial under the complete supine skeleton and this is somewhat disturbed and incomplete. The final work on this site is underway – the remaining skeletal material will be removed, and then the trench will be filled in, possibly on Friday or Saturday if all goes well. Dimitri is almost at the bottom of the new trench on the church grounds. Originally, we had thought that Maravot may have been located further back in the bush. However, it looks like the mission grounds may have been smaller than what was first thought, and we may well be too far back with this trench, even though we thought it might be too far in! The stratigraphy is as Father Otto Meyer described it, and we are finding a lot of pottery and obsidian but no Lapita sherds here yet. A full moon has meant that the tides have all changed and the bottoms of the sites get flooded in the afternoon.

I was surprised today when all our cooking women started asking for our empty jam and pasta sauce containers – everything gets recycled here and there is very little waste rubbish. All the food scraps go to feed the animals and any useful containers are kept for water, kerosene or sugar. Even aluminum cans are recycled, and people collect them and trade them in for cash. We handed ours over gladly and have begun to think about what we will do with the stuff we won’t keep when we go home. We think it will be best if we leave it to the community as a whole to decide who should have what. If we start handing out things, we will cause problems here after we leave, as there will be some people who may miss out.

19 February 
Hallie left today to return to New Zealand, where she will start teaching classes again next week. We were sad to see her go. This week our numbers will dwindle further as we say goodbye to Cedric (tomorrow) and Antoine Badoc on Saturday. When Hallie left, she kindly left her tent for me to use. I have a very cheap toy tent, which is fine if it doesn’t rain, but as I said, it rains most nights which forces me to beat a hasty retreat into the house! Every night so far I have had to face the choice (unless it’s already raining!) – do I sleep in the house with the mice (which make a huge racket), the large spiders and assorted other creepy crawlies, or sleep in my tent knowing that at some stage I will most likely have to come inside, soaking wet, to sleep with the mice, large spiders and other creepy crawlies! From now on I can rest, assured of a full night’s sleep, which is such a blessing. I journeyed over with Hallie this morning and spent the day doing errands and food shopping, which is not as easy as it sounds when you have to rely on public transport. I endured a bumpy boat ride home as the water had become very rough. Again, nobody seemed bothered apart from me. As I gritted my teeth, the ladies held onto me and I held onto them for dear life! Thankfully we got back to the island in one piece.

We had been granted permission to remove the child’s skeleton, so Rebecca and Kasey did this in the afternoon. It seems the council were very keen for us to remove it, as they were concerned about the spirit of the child. It is difficult to tell the age of the child but it may be between four and six years old. There is some debate within the camp as to whether it is a Lapita burial or not; some obsidian and pottery was found in the soil surrounding the child, but we won’t know for sure until we can get it home for testing.

The search for Maravot is going well. Dimitri opened up a two by one metre trench near the present church, and what would have been the old mission grounds, today.

18 February
Last night it absolutely poured down. This time of year is the rainy season in Papua New Guinea and we are used to thunder and lightning with a bit of rain most evenings or during the night, but this was the biggest rain we’ve had since the second night we arrived on Watom Island. The thunder cracked so loud it made everybody jump! Last night the sky opened up and it rained for about three or four hours. The lawn was completely flooded, and when Kasey and Rebecca went to check the site by the church, the entire trench was filled with water – this is the pit that measures ten metres on the top and over two metres down! We had to start this morning by bucketing out all the water, to discover that at one end of the trench the walls on the volcanic ash layer had crumbled into the pit. Fortunately, we had removed the complete skeleton on Saturday. One good thing about the rain is that it brought down some soil from the sides of the creek, and while Antoine’s team were carrying along the creek, they came across the skeleton of a small child, with the skull sticking out of the creek bank. We need to ask special permission to remove this from the community council who are meeting this evening, as this is not an area that we have arranged to dig in.

Today a group of grade 6, 7 and 8 students from one of the local schools visited to see first hand what we are working on here. There are three elementary schools on the island (but no secondary schools – you have to travel to the mainland to attend high school) and the other schools will come later in the week. I think they are very fortunate to come and see this work because they study Lapita culture at high school. Because they will have seen what we are doing, they will already know something about it when they get to study it. Dimitri, Hallie and Antoine de Biran all spoke to the students. They explained Lapita, about the skeletons we have found, and how the radar works. Antoine compared it to an ultrasound used on pregnant women, which baffled the kids as nobody gets an ultrasound in this area!

17 February
No work today because it is Sunday. Hallie, Dimitri, Kasey and I attended church with the local people. Everyone here sings wonderfully and the sound of all their voices singing together is pretty special. When we go to church, all the men sit on one side and the women and babies on the other. The children go to Sunday School and then join the service at the end. After church there is always a large community meeting where the people can discuss any problems. When you live in such a tight knit community this kind of thing is essential.

Cedric is now really unwell and running a fever. He has taken some anti-malarial tablets which should help, but we thought it would be best if he goes to the hospital. This morning we packed him onto a boat and Kasey took him over. In the afternoon we visited Georgina’s house for supper. Her family invited us during the week and have spent the last few days preparing for our visit. Dimitri, Hallie and I went and we felt very special. The family had made their home look beautiful for us and had strung up coloured streamers and coconut fronds. They made us a dinner of chicken, fish stew, pineapple, fried banana, cucumber, oranges and rice. And of course coconuts to drink! They are so delicious – you take the husk off the young coconut and just cut the top off and drink. The people here make beautiful woven baskets from coconut fronds and I was gifted with one during the week. Georgina’s mother said she can make about seven in one day and she also gave one to Hallie. Before we ate, Georgina’s uncle said grace and made a short speech saying that the intention of inviting us was to make friends so we can write to each other when we leave. I was very touched. We took some photos and promised to send them when we get home. It was a wonderful afternoon. Kasey and Cedric returned in the evening and he is looking much better; still unwell but his fever has come down.

16 February
The complete skeleton was removed today. When archaeologists find something special like this, it is called a feature, and needs to be dug out separately. The body stretches out over three squares, but everything that comes out of this area is being labeled ‘Burial 9’, so any bones, obsidian or sherds of pottery will be recorded together. The skeleton was given a sponge bath so we could see it better, and then carefully photographed with a scale next to it so we can show the size of the body in the photos. Then it was removed from the ground, bone by bone, to be bagged up, recorded and washed. We now also have a ‘Burial 8’ and a ‘Burial 10’. Two other skulls have been found on the outside edges of the trench, one on the north side and one on the south. The bodies extend outside the trench however, so we won’t be able to look at the full bodies of either. Hallie also thinks that there may be another body buried under the one we removed today as there are some other bones coming up mixed in with this burial.

In the village site, Dimiri has found several pieces of applied relief pottery which is the type you find just above Lapita pottery, so we are almost there. The designs on Lapita pottery are stamped into the clay. Dimitri thinks that this site will be finished in another day and then we will go searching for Maravot.

15 February
Work continued on the complete skeleton today. The body was placed in the grave lying supine, or straight out, which is the same way we place bodies in coffins. This is somewhat unusual in Lapita-associated skeletons from Watom, which are often buried in a crouched position sitting upright. When Jim Specht, another archaeologist, was here in 1967, he also found a skeleton lying supine. This could mean that there is a difference in the time from when these skeletons were buried to the ones in crouched positions.

The largest decorated Lapita sherd was found today in the site by the church. We cleaned it up to take along to a talk that Dimitri is giving to the Rabaul Historical Society this evening. I started the day washing the dirt off bones that are coming out of the church site. Once this is done, we can sort through them; bones that come from the sieves could be animal or human. The work in the village site is producing bucket loads of pottery sherds, and Cedric – our student from the University of Papua New Guinea – is helping here with the hope that he can use this work in a special project for his university courses.

At two o’clock Dimitri and I took a boat over to the mainland and met up with Steve Saunders who works at the Rabaul Volcano Observatory and is also a member of the Rabaul Historical Society. He invited Dimitri to speak this evening. Dimitri and I then went and had dinner at the Hamamas Hotel nearby, which has a great Chinese restaurant – a welcome change from tinned fish and noodle stew! The hotel also has a genuine Japanese bunker on the grounds! Afterwards, we went to the Rabaul Club for the talk. I had been expecting a group of local Papua New Guineans, but mostly it was ex-pats who live in Rabaul. They have done a great job of making a small museum that looks at local culture and plants, as well as the Japanese occupation of the area in 1942. Rabaul was the major Japanese base outside of Japan during World War II. Steve has written a lot of the information himself along with other members of the Historical Society. The talk went really well but finished quite late, and it was dark when we took the boat back, reaching Watom after ten o’clock – a very late night for us here. We also arrived to the bad news that Cedric is unwell and thinks that he may have malaria.

14 February
Today I helped out at the burial site by the church again, this time washing the bones that are being brought up as we move through the soil. There is a lot of animal bone and some human, and all of it is very fragile so you have to be very gentle. Dimitri is working on the site in the village again, and here he is finding a lot of pottery about 2.5 metres down. He is going to continue down another metre to the bottom and then go searching for Marawat, the site where Otto Meyer found huge sherds of pottery over one hundred years ago. In his writings, he did give a good description of the stratigraphy of the area where he found the pottery, but little-to-no directions! All he recorded is that he found it in Marawat ‘at the back of my house’. We are getting some good ideas on the location of Marawat from Antoine de Biran’s surveying work and from local knowledge, so this is very exciting.

Today was also very special (apart from one of our workers celebrating his 21st birthday – his name is Valentine!) because we found the first burial! Hallie thinks it may be a woman from looking at the size of the skull. So far we have excavated the skull and the arms and it is amazing to watch this skeleton come out of the soil little by little. It has to be excavated very carefully. We also found another skull on the south side of the trench and have surmised that the body is most likely outside of the trench we are digging. We may find even more burials tomorrow!

Tonight I visited Georgina’s family. She cooked some fish for us today so I returned her pot and gave the family some lamb stew. Everybody in the village has heard about the skeleton and want to know about it. In fact, this afternoon many people came to look at it. We received a welcome invitation to have dinner at her house on Sunday night so we can sample some real Papua New Guinea food!

13 February
Today I left the others to the archaeology and took a trip to the mainland to pick up supplies. There is one boat that leaves in the morning from Rakival village and it returns in the evening, so going to town is always a full day trip. It is impossible to miss the boat because everybody will wait until you arrive. The boats here are around five metres long with a single outboard motor at the back. This morning the boat carried twelve adults, two babies and twelve sacks of coconut husks that the people sell in town to be made into coconut oil. By the time all of us were on the boat we were sitting about ten or fifteen centimetres above the water!

The sea was rough today so we went really slowly, and about half way across I admitted to everyone that I was a little scared! Everybody laughed and then I asked them if they could all swim, which they thought was hilarious. We made it over OK, except that it started to pour with rain about ten minutes before we reached the shore. Then I somehow managed to step out of the boat into thigh deep water and complete the soaking! The ladies offered me a dry lap lap (sarong) but I decided to just let myself dry out.

When I go to town I have one person come with me from the village to help. Today Georgina came with me, but the way it seems to work out is that everybody on the boat goes together which is really nice. We go to all the stores I need to go to and then the other people do their chores and we all come home together. As I mentioned the other day, the people here are incredibly kind to us. I arrived back at camp at around six o’clock to the news that we are down to the burial layer on all squares in the site by the church.

12 February
Today was great. We opened up five squares on the south side of the church site and started working into the cultural material. As soon as we started, heaps of objects began to be uncovered – obsidian, bone, human bone, and at last, our first sherds of decorated pottery! We found about five sherds like this with different patterns, and also several sherds of plain pottery. We dug down in ten centimetre spits again and everything had to go through the sieve. This is getting really time consuming because once you get down this far you hit the water table and all the soil coming out is muddy and doesn’t go through the sieve easily. You have to look with your fingers because everything is covered in mud. At the end of the day, we had managed to get down through three spits in three squares and two spits in the other two squares. At the bottom of spit three we move into the next layer and this is where we are expecting to find the burial sites, so it is very exciting. As Hallie has limited time here, it is all hands on deck to find the burial sites. We have seven men from the village helping with the digging as well as every team member except for Antoine and Antoine, who will continue with the surveying. By the end of the day, everyone is dead tired. Working in the heat is exhausting and you have to be really careful about looking after yourself. We have started to take electrolyte sachets every day to keep us hydrated and prevent heat exhaustion. We sweat so much here it is easy to get dehydrated, and we have all lost some weight since arriving!

11 February
We are getting down through the layers – after five days of hard digging, we finally reached the layer where we expect to find the Lapita material at both sites. Success!

Over the last week we have dug down through just over 3000 years. The church site looked interesting this morning, because on the previous layer, several ‘features’ or changes in the soil had been found. These are marked with a kebab skewer and need to be dug out separately. We started today by leveling out the soil that was left raised up and then moved downwards. When we arrived at the top of the cultural layer – where the Lapita material is – we found more obsidian, a lot of charred material and a pig’s skull! It was very fragile and so it was excavated separately. We are still working by squares, and my job today was to manage the buckets of soil as they came out of the squares to make sure that the workers were sieving the correct squares. We worked four squares at a time so it didn’t get too confusing. I have never been so protective of piles of dirt before!

Dimitri’s dig has extended to a trench measuring three metres by two metres. As it is smaller than the other site, we can get through the layers much faster. We are not expecting to find any burials here, only the Lapita pottery. Antoine and Antoine (Antwo) spent the day doing more surveying work – this time using a ground penetrating radar that looks sort of like a lawnmower. They are also busy working on the results of the surveying work which will be revealed to us when they have finished sorting them through the computer.

10 February
I thought today that I would tell you a little about this place we are calling home for the next month. Papua New Guinea is called paradise because the shape of the country looks like a Bird of paradise – it’s a very good name. Firstly, the people here are so kind. They help us with everything from organising transport to mowing the grass where we pitch our tents, and almost every night somebody stays near the house to make sure we are ok. They all speak English but are doing a great job teaching us Tok Pisin. If I am waiting for the boat, the girls call me over and ask me to sit with them so I never feel like an outsider. People really look after you here. They are very generous even though they don’t have much themselves. The kids don’t have computer games or television, iPods or cell phones. They don’t even have much sporting equipment here, but they all seem happy and are quick to smile. There is a great lesson here for us in New Zealand. Because the culture is so different here we make an effort to ask before we do anything – we don’t want to offend anyone.

Early in the evening and first thing in the morning the bats (flying foxes) come out. I’ve seen two kinds so far. Some are very small ones the size of a large moth, and some are big huge ones with a wingspan of about one metre! At night you can see fire flies moving around in the dark, and if you catch a boat at night time, the wake from the boat lights up with phosphorescence, a bioluminescent plankton which lights up when agitated, which looks amazing. So far, the highlight for me was a boat trip we took the other morning. We spotted a pod of about 100 dolphins out to the side of the boat and then five or six came over to say hello! They jumped and dived all around the boat before disappearing. It was the most incredible thing I’ve ever seen and every time I take a boat trip I always look out for them, but I haven’t seen them since. You can also see flying fish here and boy do they fly! They jump out of the water and glide for about 100 metres along the surface. In the bay at Rakival village there is a large coral reef. We snorkel here sometimes after work and you can see hundreds of fish, all different colours and sizes, including nemos (clown fish) and big blue starfish – I can tell I am going to have a hard time leaving here!

9 February
Antoine and Antoine have finished the radar survey and today we are taking the equipment back to the mainland to return it to Australia where it was hired. I went with them to pick up supplies – more rice and tinned fish (yum!) and petrol for the generator that died on us yesterday, so we now need to get that fixed.

At the end of the day, both sites are doing well. As there is cultural material in the top layers, all this soil needs to go through the sieve. We are almost down to the volcanic ash; this is called sterile soil, meaning that we shouldn’t find anything cultural here because it all came down at once. We don’t need to sieve this and can move down in 20cm spits, so it will go much faster. In the top layers of soil, all sorts of objects have come out. We have found pieces of obsidian, or volcanic glass, from Talasea in West New Britain (an important material for many Pacific cultures, including Māori, because it flakes into a sharp edge that can be used as a knife or spear head), pieces of animal bones, and pottery sherds.

Tomorrow is Sunday. Everybody in Rakival village is Catholic so they all go to church. Nobody can work on Sunday so it is a rest day – this is a good opportunity for us to catch up on other jobs and also go to town for a western style meal!

8 February
Progress is going well - Antoine Badoc and Antoine de Biran started first thing yesterday with the radar equipment, surveying all the areas of interest to us. Because some of this equipment is very expensive to hire, they will spend two whole days trying to complete what can be done as quickly as possible, before sending one of the instruments back. They started with the site next to the church, and then moved onto the ground on the other side of the church (following the idea that if there are burials on one side, they may well extend to the other). The radar works like this: the area to be surveyed is marked out into a large perfect square, then one person carries the radar from one end of the square to the other and back, in one metre sections. On the first go, the radar looks down to a depth of three metres and on the second pass, you turn the radar on its side and it goes down to five metres. Unfortunately, it can’t tell us if there are skeletons or pottery there! What it can tell us is the differences in the layers of soil in that area (the stratigraphy) and if any area of soil has been disturbed at any time in the past. It can find, for example, postholes from a house that is no longer present, trenches that other archaeologists have dug, the Japanese trench from World War II, or potentially a burial site. By going over the ground at two different depths, we get a better idea of accuracy; if something shows up on the five metre depth sweep but not on the three metre survey, then we know it is between three and five metres down. Today they will also move over the area that Otto Meyer, the priest, is believed to have dug in (not an easy task as it is covered in bush!). When the surveying is finished, all the data has to be processed, so it will be a few days before we know the results.

Dimitri has started excavating his site in the village. He is starting with a three metre by one metre trench that extends the site he excavated in 1985. During the last excavation he found a significant amount of pottery in this site, so we had the radar go over this as well.

Yesterday we said goodbye to two members of the team, Herman and Mat, who had to return to Port Moresby. We were sad to see them go - they have been invaluable in setting us up here and educating us on local customs and culture. We are looking forward to catching up with them again in Port Moresby at the end of the trip.

7 February
Today I headed over to the mainland to send this to all of you, and I thought you might be interested in how we live here in Rakival. Base camp is the house used by the visiting church minister. Some of us sleep in there and others sleep in tents. There is no electricity so we have just rented a generator from the volcano observatory on the mainland. This powers the computer and the radar equipment. At night time we use hurricane lamps and torches to see. We have a wash area made from tarpaulins where we use small buckets to pour water over ourselves. We also have a long drop toilet! Very basic, but the view from the wash house is incredible! We pay three girls to get us fresh water (we have a water tank set up now but haven’t had any rain), wash our laundry and do our cooking. Next week we will have different people so that many people in the village get a chance to work. The local people bring us fresh fruit, vegetables and fish. Apart from that, we eat tinned fish, corned beef and rice – in fact, we eat this a lot! Today I will go to the local market to buy some different vegetables and fruit that you can’t get on the island. We like eating the pineapples here, and at 20 NZ cents, we can have a lot! Last night I brought out the laptop to write this diary and all the kids came to watch. I showed them the photos we have taken on the computer; they thought it was pretty cool as no one here has these kinds of things.

6 February
We marked out our five by two metre trench today in the cemetery site near the church. This gets divided into ten squares measuring one square metre each. The top soil gets removed and the soil is made as level as possible. We measure the depth of this layer using a dumpy level – an instrument that has a telescope. Someone stands at the site corners with a giant ruler and another person looks through the telescope and makes a note of the measurement. Now we can start moving down! We excavate 10cm at a time, called spits, using trowels and shovels. Each square has a letter and a number marked on a stake in one corner and each square has several buckets labeled in the same way; this means that when finds come out of the soil we know exactly what square they came from. As each bucket fills up it gets moved to the sieving area. Four people work the sieves, two to each one. The soil passes through the sieves and anything interesting stays on top. I helped with this today, and it was hard work! Everyone at the site ended up covered with dirt and sweat – archaeology is not glamorous work. We didn’t find anything of real interest today in the first 20cm of soil – this is expected. We want to get down to about 2 metres, so we have a long way to go!

Today we also welcomed the final members of our team, Antoine Badoc and Antoine de Biran, who brought radar equipment which can see where people have dug before and possibly pick up other interesting finds under the ground.

5 February
This morning everybody woke up early, ready to start the dig. There are three areas that we want to look at on this trip. Each one has been dug before on previous excavations. Rakival village has been looked at several times; first by Otto Meyer, a Catholic priest living here in the early 1900s, then by Jim Specht in 1967 and finally by Dimitri and Roger Green in 1985. Today we started on the cemetery site where skeletons have been found before – this is near where the modern church stands. But first, we have to find the site where Dimitri and Roger last dug. We are going to excavate a trench alongside of this. Working from Dimitri’s scale drawings from the last trip, we measure out the corners of the original site. We find these by measuring from two corners of the church, where Dimitri measured last time. Where the two tape measures cross, marks the corner of the site. Next, we dig a trench running north to south aiming to cut into both the original dig and the area that has not been dug before. We know that we have found the right area because the soil looks different in each area. In the site dug before, the soil is all mixed around from when the site was filled in. Where we want to dig, you can see several definite layers of different types of soil. In archaeology these layers are called stratigraphy and are important to archaeologists because they act like a time line. For example, here in Rakival a volcano erupted in around 1400AD and you can see the thick layer of volcanic ash. This means that anything we find under this ash should be at least 600 years old.

We also had a chance to look at another area next to a nearby creek. A man was digging a hole here for us to put our rubbish in, and out came a human femur bone – it’s hard to tell where this may have come from; it could have been washed down from further up the creek. All along the creek bank we found sherds of pottery. Otto Meyer found huge sherds, whole pots and skeletons on his first dig but he did not document where he found them. We hope to have a small dig around the creek area too.

3 February
Today we were taken by boat to Rakival village, the site of the dig, for a community talk. We arrived just after church had finished, which meant that we could talk to the whole village. All the children – about 60 kids – came down to shake our hands and say hello. Our arrival created a lot of excitement for the pikinini (kids). Chairs were set up for us under a large tree and the community sat down to listen to us explain our plans. Each team member spoke about their area of interest and expertise. Hallie and Dimitri spoke for a long time about the project; it is very important for the local people to understand what we are looking for here on Watom Island. The local people were also very interested in archaeological methods. Some school groups will come to visit us during the excavation so we can show them what we are doing and explain how archaeology works. We also invited people to visit us at the excavation sites if they wanted to ask us any questions. After the ceremonies, we walked over one of the sites that we will start to dig on Tuesday.

On returning to camp, I went with Hallie, Kasey and Rebecca on a trek along the coast to wash in a nearby stream. We walked through the tropical forest to reach the washing spot which was a creek surrounded by coconut trees and thick forest. We were followed all the way by a group of children; four girls sat a short distance away watching us strange, foreign women. As we were washing, the girls inched closer and closer until they sat with us. The boys were further down the creek, obviously jealous of the girls who could hang out with us, because they started to sing loudly to attract our attention. All the children guided us back to camp, asking us our names and teaching us Tok Pisin (a shared language used in Papua New Guinea; they also speak English, and then every area has its own tok ples or local indigenous language), laughing at our pronunciation!

2 February
We arrive on Watom!
This morning we caught an early flight to Rabaul, the closest town to Watom Island. This whole area is dotted with volcanoes; in fact, Watom Island was created by a volcanic eruption. As the plane landed, we could see Tavurvur Volcano smoking and the plane filled with the smell of sulphur as we came down through the clouds. Our first stop was to a supermarket to pick up supplies. As we were unable to bring these supplies from New Zealand, we needed everything! At the end of our shopping, we had five full trolleys of food, cooking equipment and excavation tools. As we drove to catch our boat, the volcano all of a sudden started spewing huge clouds of grey ash into the air. We have been informed that this happens often and were told not to worry!

Finally, we reached the boat and headed to Watom Island. We can’t move to the excavation site until we meet the local officials on Monday, so we are staying in a nearby village. We will visit tomorrow to introduce ourselves to the community. Today we also met our eighth team member, Cedrick Tarum, an archaeology student from the University of Papua New Guinea. Cedrick comes from the Duke of York Islands nearby, and can act as an interpreter because he knows the local languages. In exchange, we are training him in archaeological methods.

31 January
Today we visited the Art Gallery and Museum of Papua New Guinea to meet Herman Mandui, a Curator at the Museum. Herman and Mat have been busy at this end making sure that the local people on Watom Island are expecting us and understand what we are doing here. The Museum is fantastic. It has an incredible collection of traditional art such as carved house posts and shields from all over Papua New Guinea. Because of the many groups of people living here, the art styles change in each region. The Museum also has some live animals – among the animals, they have a green python, a hornbill and a wallaby. The animals here have been found injured or sick in the wild and are brought to the Museum where they stay until they can be released. Luckily for us, we also learn there are no poisonous snakes where we are going!

30 January
A lush green landscape welcomed us as we flew into Port Moresby, Papua New Guinea, this afternoon. We stepped out of the airport into 29 degrees of heat and humidity (this is at 5pm so I think it’s going to get a lot hotter!). Heading to the hotel, I can already see that this is going to be a visit to a land of extreme contrasts. Not only the vast cultural differences between the 700 plus groups of people who live in Papua New Guinea, but also the contrast in social status - I see people hanging out on graffiti covered walls, huge razor wire fences, fires burning in rubbish cans and then brand new office buildings and huge new SUV trucks and utes. I had been told to expect this. Our hotel is closed with two sets of steel gates and we can’t leave after night falls. Here we meet Dr Mat Leavesley (University of Otago), who is currently lecturing in archaeology at the University of Papua New Guinea. “Can we go out tomorrow by ourselves?” we ask. In one word “No”. We need to have someone with us at all times. Port Moresby is a dangerous city.

There are five members of the team from New Zealand; Dr Dimitri Anson is a Humanities Curator from the Otago Museum. Dimitri came to Watom Island in 1985 as part of the Lapita Homeland Project, searching for the origins of the Lapita people, and he is a leading expert in Lapita pottery; Dr Hallie Buckley from the University of Otago and two of her students, Rebecca Kinaston and Kasey Robb. Hallie is a Bio-archaeologist, which means she is a specialist in human skeletal remains from archaeological sites. Hallie and her students hope to gather a huge amount of information from any skeletal remains discovered and the way that they are buried. In 1985, eight skeletons were found at Watom. The combined information from the human remains and pottery sherds that we may find will give anthropologists a more complete picture about who the Lapita people were and how they lived. The last member of our team is me, Rosanna Lister, a Communicator from the Otago Museum and I am here to share everything we find with you!


BACKGROUND

A research grant, awarded by the Australian Pacific Research Association, will see new excavation and research on ‘Lapita’ period sites on the island in February 2008. ‘Lapita’ is the name given to a group of people who moved through islands in South East Asia into Oceania from around 3500 years ago. The Watom Island site dates to about 3000 years ago. The Lapita people’s movements through the Pacific have been tracked by changes in their methods of distinctive pottery decoration.

The Watom Island Lapita site was last excavated by personnel from the Otago Museum and the University of Auckland in 1985. Watom Island is exceptional in having an extensive Lapita cemetery, meaning that skeletal material can be uncovered, making analyses of biological origins, diet, migration and disease possible.
Changes in style of pottery at Lapita settlement sites on Watom Island may also provide clues about what became of the Lapita people and culture.

The Museum will be undertaking this excavation with the University of Otago’s Anatomy Department, the Office de la Recherche Scientifique d'Outre-Mer, Paris, the Museum and Art Gallery of Papua New Guinea, and the University of Papua New Guinea.