Our team is led by Professor Richard Walter of the University of Otago Te Whare Wānanga o Ōtākou and Associate Professor Armagan Sabetian of Auckland University of Technology Te Wānanga Aronui o Tāmaki Makau Rau.
This multidisciplinary team is comprised of collaborators from various fields of archaeology, analytical, ecological and marine sciences. Explore their profiles to learn more about the people behind the project.

The Team

Our Research Team

Discover the team that's making it all happen.

Professor

Richard Walter

Primary Investigator

Richard Walter is an archaeologist who specialises in the archaeology of Aotearoa and the tropical Pacific. His research fields are historical anthropology, the archaeology of culture contact, indigenous history and knowledge, material culture studies, the archaeology of exchange, and environmental archaeology. He is currently Research Professor of Archaeology at the University of Otago.Richard’s work is strongly field based, and he has ongoing work in many parts of Aotearoa and in the tropical Pacific including the Solomon Islands and Cook Islands. In the Solomons his research has focussed on prehistoric colonisation including Lapita settlement, and the emergence of late-period Melanesian diversity. He is currently working on village-based cultural heritage management projects on Santa Isabel and the Arnavon Islands, and on colonisation research in the Western Solomon Islands. He has recently (2017) co-authored a major book on the archaeology of the Solomon Islands.In Aotearoa Richard’s major work has involved understanding the lifeways of the first Polynesian settlers as they adapted to the new lands, and on the emergence of the tribal chiefdoms of classical Māori society. He has active field projects in Hawkes Bay, Bay of Plenty, Otago and Marlborough.Richard has published eight books and more than ninety scholarly papers in the field of Pacific archaeology.

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Associate Professor

Armagan Sabetian

Primary Investigator

Historically interested in the population dynamics of fishes through traditional age and growth analysis of otoliths, I’ve become increasingly intrigued by the potential of novel time-series analyses to allow retrospective reconstruction of spatial behavioural patterns such as migrations and habitat use. I hope to contribute to the knowledge-base of otolith chemistry by advancing the field beyond the comparisons of geochemistry profiles of specific time-points in the life of a fish (e.g., natal origins, nurseries) using absolute or average elemental values.

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Dr.

Monica Tromp

Associate Investigator

Monica Tromp currently works for Southern Pacific Archaeological Research (SPAR) at the University of Otago. Monica is a microbioarchaeologist who specialises in several archaeological science techniques. These include plant microparticle analysis, SEM-EDS analysis, trace element analysis, stable isotope analysis, proteomic analysis and human osteology. She enjoys working on a wide-range of projects with different people and disciplines to learn more about our past and how it has shaped our present and future.

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Dr.

Malcolm Reid

Associate Investigator

Malcolm has been a trace element chemist for >30 years. He currently manages the laboratories of the Centre for Trace Element Analysis in the Department of Geology, University of Otago. Instrumentation includes a quadrupole ICP-MS, a sector field ICP-MS, a multi-collector ICP-MS and a excimer laser ablation system. The CTEA also operates state of the art cleanrooms for the sample preparation for concentration and isotope ratio measurements.

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Assistant Professor

Jens Hegg

Associate Investigator

I am an Assistant Professor of Biology at Gonzaga University in the United States. My interest in ecology is rooted in a fascination with the ways that the behaviors of individuals and sub-groups of animals affect larger ecological processes through their influence on population size, resilience, and community structure. I am especially interested in how animals change their behavior depending on the conditions they encounter in the patchy landscape (or waterscape) they encounter, and how that ultimately creates diverse life-histories in populations through natural selection and evolution.

Most of my work uses the chemistry stored in the hard parts of animals to reconstruct their behavior, movement, and the surrounding environment they experienced. These isotopic and trace elemental techniques are particularly well suited for aquatic species that lay down growth layers in their shells, bones, or otoliths.

This project continues my interest in new analytical techniques that allow us to uncover the diverse behavior patterns present within populations, and importantly, how they shift over time and in response to changing conditions. Methods like dynamic time warping, borrowed from the fields of speech recognition and data mining, allows us to group the lifetime behavior of animals based on the “shape” of the chemical records stored in their hard parts. These methods work with all the available data stored in an animals hard part, providing an incredibly sensitive way to understand behavioral patterns without removing data or making assumptions about it’s meaning.

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Dr.

Julian Lilkendey

Associate Investigator

Julian Lilkendey is a marine ecologist with a PhD in Natural Sciences, who integrates standard fisheries biological techniques with state-of-the-art approaches to study the functional ecology of marine fishes in challenging habitats. Within the project, "700 years of human-marine interactions in Aotearoa," he investigates the impact of human activity on New Zealand's coastal ecosystems using paleoecological reconstructions based on fish movements. With cutting-edge techniques such as otolith microchemistry and time series analysis, Julian's team is delving deep into the historical and ongoing impacts of human activity on these precious ecosystems, providing critical insights into the response of fish populations to global change and offering valuable information for developing effective ecosystem management strategies.
Julian's extensive travels have allowed him to integrate various cutting-edge methodologies into his work, including those from fields such as archaeology, geology, informatics, marine biology, molecular biology, and research data management, among others. Through his interdisciplinary approach to research, Julian aims to contribute to the conservation and restoration of the world's most valuable coastal ecosystems and their biological resources while promoting human well-being, preserving biodiversity, and indigenous socio-ecological systems. His goal is to engage the local community in the research process and ensure that the project's findings are communicated in an accessible and impactful way, believing that by working together, we can create a better understanding of the human impact on marine ecosystems and develop solutions to ensure their conservation and sustainability for generations to come.

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Dr.

Jingjing Zhang

Associate Investigator

All my research involves simulation and/or statistical modelling, and mostly also field-based components such as GPS tracking of animals. My aspiration in research is to develop novel analytical tools to explore the richness of data, to gain new insights into the system dynamics of ecosystems.
- Quantitative modelling, population ecology, fisheries models
- Movement ecology on understanding animal-environmental interactions
- Ecosystem dynamics, network model, landscape ecology
- Applied statistics, data science

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Dr.

Matthew Campbell

Associate Investigator

Matthew was a founding director of CFG Heritage in 2005. He has a BA and MA in Anthropology from the University of Otago and a PhD in Archaeology from the University of Sydney. He has been a professional archaeologist since 1988 and has worked in New Zealand, Australia and the Pacific. He has lectured in Archaeology at the University of Auckland, where he remains a Research Fellow, and is a former President of the New Zealand Archaeological Association. He continues to publish in academic journals. His specialist skills include faunal analysis, particularly fishbone.

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