Five | New Zealand and Introduction to Thailand

I signed a contract with the Cambridge University Press to write a little topic book for schools on the Old Stone Age, so my days on board Rangitane were partially filled on my portable typewriter. We reached Curaçao in the Dutch Antilles on Christmas Day before transiting the Panama Canal. Polly had spent time on deck knitting me a jersey. She put it down when we both went to the ship’s rail as the Galapagos Islands hove into view, when a capricious wind uplifted it and deposited it in the Pacific Ocean. On New Year’s Day we were summoned to the radio room to take a radio telephone call from our respective parents back in snowy Hertfordshire. Our final stop was Tahiti, where we spent an afternoon on the beach. Then it was all ocean until one morning, we sighted Aotearoa, the land of the long white cloud, New Zealand. We docked at the Pipitea Wharf in Wellington. Peter Gathercole had arranged for Professor Jan Pouwer to meet and take us to the airport for our flight south. There we were greeted by Peter Gathercole and his colleague in the Anthropology Department, John Harré, and we were driven to a flat rented on our behalf by the University in Cumberland Street. It was on the first floor of a wooden house and the carpets were dirty. Everything was strange. It was the 14th

January 1967, mid summer and Dunedin seemed empty of people. We went to bed feeling wretchedly remote from our entire world. The following morning we felt, if possible, even worse. I walked down to the main street looking for a travel agent to find out how much it would cost to fly home. It cost £3 a minute to ring home and we had no telephone.

I went into the Anthropology Department. It was a little brick house and I had a small office on the first floor with no view. Peter Gathercole had graduated from Cambridge and went on to undertake a postgraduate diploma at the Institute of Archaeology under Gordon Childe. He was a dedicated communist who had much annoyed right-wing Grahame Clark by selling the Daily Worker outside Peterhouse, the most conservative college in Cambridge. His most recent fieldwork had taken him to remote Pitcairn Island, where he had excavated a prehistoric adze quarry. John Harré was a social anthropologist who had just published a book on race relations in New Zealand entitled Maori and Pakeha. Robert Hamilton (Ham) Parker was appointed as a special assistant. He had no University qualifications, but had been a regular volunteer on Jack Golson’s excavations in the North Island.

Panchu Gopal Ganguly was an MA from Lucknow, but came to Otago with a failed PhD from the Australian National University. Linden Cowell was the Department technician and Brigitte Hubrich was the secretary. Apart from the house, there was a metal shed-like structure that served as a laboratory. The flat was so depressing that we looked for a house to rent. We found a student rental property near the University. It was marginally preferable, having an overgrown garden at the back for Tom to play in, but without any insulation and as it turned out, bitterly cold in winter. Peter Gathercole had organised for me to join some students in a survey for archaeological sites about 80 km north of Dunedin in our first February, so we spent a week in a camping ground seeking out prehistoric Maori rock art. I returned as the new academic year was looming, and was asked to give an introductory course on Palaeolithic Europe, and a second year paper on prehistoric Melanesia. I knew a little about the former, and nothing of the latter. As the term progressed, I set myself two objectives, publishing as many papers as possible from my PhD dissertation and building up a comparative collection of bones from the birds and mammals most likely to be found in prehistoric New Zealand sites. This included seals, dolphins, moa and lots of other birds. I was also encouraged to apply to the University for funding to undertake my own site survey and excavations and I chose Southland as a possible location.

Peter Gathercole had arrived in Dunedin in 1958 for a half-time post at the Otago Museum, and a half-time lecturer in Anthropology. He spent the next eight years painstakingly persuading and cajoling the Arts Faculty to expand into and create a full Department. By the time that I arrived, he consistently pushed in Faculty meetings for the creation of the Foundation Chair. By the end of the 1967, a committee was formed to explore this possibility and report back to Faculty. By early 1968, our lives took on a more settled look. We had moved into a lovely house vacated by a colleague on sabbatical leave. I had completed a small excavation on the south coast, and in February James, our second son, was born. In the Department, I came to know a graduate student from the University of Hawaii called Donn Bayard. He had excavated a site in Thailand called Non Nok Tha. In 1966, Ham Parker had joined him there, and they were working on some of their finds.

He returned alone for a second season in January 1968, and having learned of my interest in economic prehistory based in part on faunal remains, he asked if I would be interested in analysing and reporting on the bones from Non Nok Tha. I found out in departmental seminars given by Donn and Ham Parker that this was a site of huge potential. They had found multiple human burials over a lengthy timespan, with a sequence that suggested a transition from an initial Neolithic settlement into burials interred with socketed bronze axes and casting moulds. In 1968, Donn Bayard’s supervisor Wilhelm (Bill) Solheim published a paper that reported on the initial radiocarbon dates, with the conclusion that the bronzes dated to the 4th millennium BC (Solheim 1968). This implied that they were far earlier than in China. A socketed axe was nicknamed WOST, the world’s oldest socketed tool. The faunal remains when they arrived were right up