I am a science writer fascinated by the way indigenous cultures encode knowledge without writing, especially the pragmatic stuff - animals, plants, medical knowledge including a pharmacopoeia, laws, navigation, genealogy, history, land and resource rights plus all sorts of ethical metaphors. I am constantly astounded by the range and brilliance of the memory techniques historic indigenous cultures have used to memorise a vast amount of information when they can't write it down. I then realised that this understanding offered a new theory on the purpose of Stonehenge and many other archaeological sites.Having completed a PhD on the topic in 2013, Cambridge University Press has published the academic version, "Knowledge and Power in Prehistoric Societies". I have never written anything as important as this before and know that this topic will occupy me for the rest of my life. My focus sites are Stonehenge in the British Neolithic context, Poverty Point, LA, in the mound-building context of the American Southeast and Chaco Canyon in the Ancestral Pueblo context of the American Southwest. I have an Arts Victoria grant to write on similar themes for the mainstream market to be published in July 2015. That will add a lot more sites, including Avebury in England, Orkney in Scotland, Carnac in France and Newgrange in Ireland, Rapa Nui (Easter Island) and the Nazca lines in Peru among many others. It will also include the way I have used these indigenous memory methods myself to memorise a huge amount of information that I simply wouldn't have thought possible before. Writing dominates my life. I started with educational books - 10 of them - logical because I was a teacher. I wrote a novel, "Avenging Janie" and then three popular science books published in Australia, the US and UK: "The Skeptic's Guide to the Paranormal", "Crocodile: evolution's greatest survivor", and "Spiders: learning to love them". I overcame my arachnophobia a bit too well and now I am obsessed by spiders. I simply adore the gorgeous critters. "Skeptic's Guide" has been translated into Russian.But it will be indigenous memory systems and archaeology which will dominate my writing for many years to come. I simply love the stuff!