Archaeology Actually

"There's archaeology in New Zealand???" This is fairly typical of the response I get when I tell people that I work as an archaeologist in New Zealand. Strictly speaking, of course we have an archaeological record - people lived here in the past and as with all other places in the world where people have lived they left their mark on the landscape! Of course, one thing that New Zealand's human history lacks in comparison to other places in the world is a long antiquity - the present consensus amongst archaeologists that work in this country, based on the (credible!!) evidence available, is that people have lived here for less than 1000 years.  Although that may not sound particularly impressive to a layperson, to archaeologists working here New Zealand's archaeological record provides a rare opportunity on the global scale to study the processes of colonisation in a landscape previously untouched by humans at such high resolution. And what's more, a colon...

The following is a slightly edited version of a report I originally wrote for PAST, the newsletter of the Prehistoric Society , which provided me with some funding to attend the Motupore Island excavation in Papua New Guinea in 2016. This did not end up appearing in PAST, so I thought I would post it here. In June 2016 the University of Papua New Guinea (UPNG) ran an archaeological field school on Motupore Island, Papua New Guinea (PNG). Because my research as a graduate student at the University of Otago had looked at the archaeology of sites and regions thought to be linked to Motupore Island, I was invited to attend as an overseas student. A short report on the excavation follows.  Motupore Island in Bootless Bay is a small, waterless island located some 16km east of Port Moresby, the national capital of PNG. The island is about 800m long, 275m wide at its widest point, and rising to a maximum 61.4m above sea level. On the protected northern (shoreward) end of the island, a cu...