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...

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...

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...