Fifty Years Ago Today - Pete Vayda's Departure from Gunts

On Sunday, September 1, 1963,  Pete Vayda left Gunts. He had lead the Columbia University Expedition to study the Human Ecology of the New Guinea Rain Forest and had spent a year among the Maring-speaking people of the Simbai and Jimi Valleys. The local people gathered to give him a good send-off for the walk from Gunts to Simbai.

Local men lashed Pete's equipment and notes onto carrying poles in readiness for the 2 - 3 day walk to the Patrol Post in Simbai from where he would take a plane to Madang, and from there return via Australia to New York to write up the results of his fieldwork.  

Vayda's was one of the very first anthropological studies to be completed by running the detailed field data through a main-frame computer  -  information carried from the slopes of the Bismarck Mountains and transformed into new understandings at Pupin Laboratory in Morningside Heights. 

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