Early Archaeology of the Pacific

Matthew Spriggs, Laureate Fellow and Professor of Archaeology, Australian National University, Australia

Introduced by Ingrid Ahlgren, Curator of Oceanic Collections, Peabody Museum of Archaeology & Ethnology, Harvard University

The earliest European explorations in the Pacific region sparked speculation about the origins of Pacific Islanders. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, several archaeological studies were made in Polynesia, Micronesia, Island Melanesia, Australia, and New Guinea. Matthew Spriggs will discuss the findings of a five-year project to understand the early history of Pacific archaeology and its contributions to our understanding of human settlement in the region.

Matthew Spriggs is an Australian Research Council Laureate Fellow, working on the project “The Collective Biography of Archaeology in the Pacific (CBAP).” He is also Professor of Archaeology in the School of Archaeology and Anthropology at the Australian National University. He has undertaken extensive archaeological research in the Pacific Islands and Island Southeast Asia for over forty years, particularly in Vanuatu. His Laureate project is concerned with the history of Pacific archaeology.

See the related small exhibit following the talk, Uncovering Pacific Pasts.
Presented by the Peabody Museum of Archaeology & Ethnology.