Archaeology Actually

It has been an eventful last couple of months. In June I spent a couple of weeks in Papua New Guinea (PNG) taking part in an excavation on Motupore Island . The day after arriving back in New Zealand I was off to the New Zealand Archaeological Association conference in Blenheim (which I have covered in recent posts on this blog). Since getting back from conference I've found out that my thesis has passed (with distinction!), had a second paper accepted for publication by a peer-reviewed journal and have found myself a job in archaeology (for the next 6 months, anyway)! My participation in the Motupore Island excavation (a University of Papua New Guinea (UPNG) fieldschool) was made possible by an award from the Prehistoric Society in the UK that helped cover the costs of travelling to PNG. The detail about the setting and history of the island provided in this post is drawn from a series of evening seminars given on the island by Emeritus Professor Jim Allen, who carried ou...

Kia ora, As a follow up to my recent posts about the recent New Zealand Archaeological Association conference in Blenheim and the Wairau Bar archaeological site, I have found a piece on the Radio New Zealand website about the conference and the history of the site. There is a wee bit of footage from the conference fieldtrip to Wairau Bar and radio interviews with representatives of Rangitāne O Wairau, the local tangata whenua, as well as some of the researchers that have been involved in the recent study of the site. I've also found a couple of other 'bits and bobs of interest' discussing recent archaeological research around Oceania. In one study, appearing in the Journal of Archaeological Science: Reports , and reported by Live Science , researchers from the Australian Museum, University of Sydney, and the University of Auckland employed a methodology known as experimental archaeology in order to test ideas about how ca. 3000 year old flaked stone tools excavated at...

Kia ora, This is a continuation of  my last post : The sessions over the remaining two days of the NZ Archaeological Association conference featured a number of interesting talks covering a range of topics - heritage management, historical archaeology, buildings archaeology, landscape archaeology, and environment and ecology in archaeology. For those that are interested the full conference programme, including the paper abstracts, is available (as a .docx file) here .  For me, a highlight of the conference was the dedicated student paper session on Day 2. The presenters in this session were each given ten minutes to talk, in contrast to the twenty minutes allowed in the other sessions. Baylee Smith (University of Otago) won the Best Student Paper at Conference for her presentation on her masters research employing statistical methods to model the distribution of pre-European pā sites across New Zealand. Huriawa pā, on a promontory overlooking the mouth of the Waikouai...

Kia ora, As I mentioned in yesterday's post , I've just got back from the  New Zealand Archaeological Association 's 2016 Conference in Blenheim. Overall, it seemed a successful conference, albeit a lot smaller than other conferences that I've been to overseas with, by my own estimate, somewhere in the zone of 100 delegates, including representatives of Rangitāne O Wairau, the local tangata whenua.  My own impressions were that the overall standard of papers presented at this year's conference was higher than what I'd seen at the last two NZAA conferences that I had attended. Following the mihi whakatau (welcome) and lunch, the first paper session focused on archaeology in the wider South Pacific region. And guess who was up first!  My paper presented some of the results of my recent M.A. research - a stylistic and geochemical analysis of 1st millennium A.D. ceramics from Papua New Guinea (I intend to come back to this work in a future blog post!) The ...

Kia ora, I've just recently gotten back from this year's  New Zealand Archaeological Association conference held in Blenheim (up the top of the east coast of NZ's South Island) last week. Our hosts for the conference were the local tangata whenua, Rangitāne O Wairau. The destination of a mid-conference field trip was the Wairau Bar , the location of the earliest known archaeological site in New Zealand, with occupation dated to ca. 1300 AD.  Wairau Bar was the location of excavations undertaken around the middle of the 20th century by researchers from the Canterbury Museum, which resulted in the recovery of a rich range of artefacts and human remains ( kōiwi ) from a number of burials and their relocation to the museum. Unsurprisingly, the holding of the  kōiwi  from the Wairau Bar at the Canterbury Museum remained an especially sore point for  Rangitāne O Wairau for  many years .  In 2008, Rangitāne signed a memorandum of understanding with Can...

Kia ora, So ... yeah ... it has been a while since I've posted anything on this blog (Apparently 304 days!)   But I'd like to think I have a reasonable excuse. After two long years, another life chapter recently drew to a close with the submission of my Master of Arts thesis for examination: (OK, OK .... so it's actually a pretty poor excuse for 304 days of no blog posts!) Anyway, after thesis submission came the somewhat terrifying realisation that I now need to  find myself A JOB!!! On that note - while I do have a few leads in mind, if anyone reading this happens to have an archaeology job going do feel free to get in touch!!!  :-D  (if only it were that easy!) Around job hunting it's actually shaping up to be a pretty busy and exciting month ahead. After studying the archaeology of Papua New Guinea for the last three years I'll be heading over there in early June to participate in a two week excavation. More on this trip later. Although I had to pay...