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...