Archaeology Actually

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...