Archaeology Actually

Hi All, It has certainly been a busy last couple of months, and an update to this blog is well and truly overdue! As I noted in my last post , in May I was given the opportunity to work fulltime as an archaeological assistant monitoring the first stage of a construction project here in Dunedin - my first paid archaeological work experience!  Here is an update on the project, focusing on the archaeology! Since the work at the Emerson's Brewery site has finished I've been doing a bit of travelling (and attending a couple of archaeology conferences to justify the time spent away from my thesis!) In late June I visited the Bay of Islands in northern New Zealand to attend the annual New Zealand Archaeological Association Conference in Waitangi. There's plenty of history in the region - the Bay of Islands was a hotbed of early Māori and European interaction. Visiting the Waitangi Treaty Grounds, where the much maligned Treaty of Waitangi was first signed on February ...

Hi all,   It has been quite a busy last month for me, hence the lack of posts to this blog!   Part of the reason why I have been busy is that I am currently in the middle of a month of salvage or rescue archaeology work experience. Most nations of the world have some form of protective legislation related to cultural/archaeological heritage. As noted in a couple of my previous posts, the Heritage New Zealand Pouhere Taonga Act 2014 , which has recently replaced the Historic Places Act 1993, makes the modification or destruction of any archaeological site 1 in New Zealand unlawful unless an archaeological authority has first been obtained from Heritage New Zealand Pouhere Taonga. As part of the planning process for the construction of new facilities for a local craft beer brewery in the city of Dunedin an archaeological authority was applied for due to the expected disturbance of late 19th century cultural material, as the site occupied land that was known to have be...

Hi All, As I have previously mentioned, for the last couple of years I have been on the executive committee of the University of Otago Anthropology Society (UOAS), a student society that runs a number of social events during the year, as well as anthropology and archaeology related experiences. A particular goal of the society at present is to get out beyond the university environment and into the community, applying our developing skills where they may be of use. Recently some of us from the society assisted a local charitable organisation, the Southern Heritage Trust, by cataloguing pieces of dismantled historic rope making equipment in Dunedin. For more details about this project, see my earlier post entitled Archaeology in the Community . This post is about another project that members of the society were involved in, alongside a local consultant archaeologist, Dr Peter Petchey of Southern Archaeology Ltd. A short report about this project has appeared in the most recent...

The following post is an interesting study that has recently come to my attention and continues a theme from my last post on the Archaeology of the Irish Diaspora . Increasingly, genetic studies are becoming an important source of potential information about the human past. As noted in my last post, a diaspora is a specific type of mass relocation of people, defined by Brighton and Orser (2006: 64) as "the forced dispersal or scattering of people from a homeland as the result of famine, war, enslavement, ethnic cleansing, conquest, and political repression." Such movements are permanent and multi-generational. To give one prominent example, between about 1500 and 1850 AD, more than 12 million enslaved Africans were shipped to the Americas as part of the trans-Atlantic slave trade. Certainly there can be little doubt of the impact that this event has had on modern demographics. Captives being brought on board a slave ship on the West Coast of Africa (Slave Coast). Wood engrav...

With St. Patricks day (March 17) practically upon us, I thought this would be a good excuse to have a look at some Historical Archaeology associated with Ireland and the Irish diaspora! A diaspora is a specific type of mass relocation of people, defined by Brighton and Orser (2006: 64) as “the forced dispersal or scattering of people from a homeland as the result of famine, war, enslavement, ethnic cleansing, conquest, and political repression.” Such movements are permanent and multi-generational. Briefly, the beginnings of an Irish diaspora can be traced back to the beginning of the seventeenth century AD. Following the establishment of British rule in Ireland, Irish Catholics considered rebels by the Protestant ruling minority were forcibly transported as indentured servants to the West Indies (Brighton & Orser 2006). However, the watershed period for Irish dispersal occurred in the nineteenth century following a series of failures of the potato crop in Ireland, and the widesp...

Hi All, It has been a while since I last posted to this blog. Things have been all go - with research, writing, tutoring and also some "real-world" archaeological experience! For the last couple of years I have been on the executive committee of the University of Otago Anthropology Society, a student society which runs a number of social events during the year, as well as anthropology and archaeology related experiences. A particular goal of the society at present is to get out beyond the university environment and into the community, applying our developing skills where they may be of use. Recently, an opportunity arose to help out a charitable organisation, the Southern Heritage Trust . As noted on the linked website, the trust was established in 2002 and is devoted to the appreciation and protection of the social, cultural, architectural and industrial heritage of Dunedin and the Otago region of New Zealand. This involved assisting with cataloguing pieces of equipme...

In my last post I mentioned the importance of context to archaeological research. That is, knowing PRECISELY where an object was found and its relationship to other objects in the archaeological record.  The goal of archaeology is to understand past human behaviour and how that behaviour changes over time. The primary (and in some cases, the only!) source of evidence available to help achieve this goal is the archaeological record, or the material record of that behaviour. So, how do archaeologists get from ruins, pieces of dirty stone and pottery and patterns of dark patches in the soil to an understanding of human behaviour in the past and how this changes over time? This is where context is important!   To recap from the last post - Excavation, the principal method of data acquisition in archaeology, involves the systematic uncovering of archaeological remains through the removal of the deposits of soil and other material covering them and accompanying them. Two ...