Archaeology Actually

Kia ora, Today (25th April) is ANZAC Day (ANZAC is an acronym for Australian & New Zealand Army Corps), an official day of commemoration in New Zealand and Australia of the sacrifices made by our servicemen and women (past and present). The day itself is the anniversary of landings by the allied forces of the First World War on the beaches of the Gallipoli Peninsula, Turkey, in 1915.  As noted elsewhere :  "In the wider story of the First World War, the Gallipoli campaign made no large mark. The number of dead, although horrific, pales in comparison with the death toll in France and Belgium during the war. However, for New Zealand, along with Australia and Turkey, the Gallipoli campaign is often claimed to have played an important part in fostering a sense of national identity." It may surprise many to hear that archaeologists have been actively involved in the investigation of the campaigns of twentieth century wars. For example, some World War II archaeology that I...

"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...

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 ...