Contributors

Ingrid Ahlgren is Curator for Oceanic Collections at the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology at Harvard University, as well as a research associate at the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of Natural History. Ingrid holds a Doctorate in Anthropology from The Australian National University (ANU) College of Asia and the Pacific, a Master of Science from Stanford University, and a Bachelor of Arts from Tufts University. Born and raised in the Republic of the Marshall Islands (RMI), Ingrid has worked in the region for 15 years as an anthropologist, collaborating with the RMI’s Ministry of Internal Affairs, Environmental Protection Authority, Ministry of Health, Alele National Museum and various non-government organisations. Her research investigates the intersections of Oceanic identity, environment, cultural resources and Indigenous access to museum collections.

Katherine Aigner is a historian/ethnographer based at the Centre for Aboriginal Economic Policy Research, ANU. Since 2009, her interest in cosmologies and knowledge systems has led her to collaborate with the Vatican Museums’ Anima Mundi – Peoples, Arts and Cultures Museum. She culturally reconnected their Indigenous collections with communities around the world, bringing the Indigenous voice into the museum space for exhibitions and catalogues. She edited Australia (2017), the catalogue dedicated to the Vatican’s collection, and with Fr Nicola Mapelli PhD published Oceania (2022), the fourth catalogue in the series, the others being Ethnos (2012) and The Americas (2014).

Ekaterina Balakhonova is a senior research fellow of the Research Institute and Museum of Anthropology of the Moscow State University. She received her PhD in Physical Anthropology in 1992 and works as a research curator of the ethnographic collections of the Museum of Anthropology. Her research interests include the history of the museum and its ethnographic collections.

Marie-Claude Boileau is an archaeological scientist specialising in ceramic analysis. She is the director of the Center for the Analysis of Archaeological Materials (CAAM) at the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology.

Elizabeth Bonshek is an independent researcher, affiliated with the British Museum as a visiting academic. She combines anthropology and studies in materiality in investigations of changing social and cultural values in contemporary Melanesia. She has researched Melanesian collections in museums in Australia, United Kingdom and Europe. She is the author of Tikopia Collected: Raymond Firth and the Creation of Solomon Islands Cultural Heritage (Kingston Press, 2017) and a coeditor of Melanesia: Art and Encounter (British Museum Press, 2013) (ORCID: 0000-0002-2791-0907).

Emma Brooks is a senior heritage advisor for the New Zealand Department of Conservation Te Papa Atawhai. She is a former curator of human history at Canterbury Museum.

Emilie Dotte-Sarout is a Discovery Early Career Researcher Award (DECRA) research fellow in archaeology at the University of Western Australia. Her current research focuses on the hidden contributions of women in the history of Pacific archaeology, building on the work she conducted about the history of francophone archaeology in the region, as part of the Collective Biography of Archaeology in the Pacific team at ANU. In parallel, she continues her research in archaeobotany to better understand past interactions between people and their environments both in the Pacific and Australia.

Anna Edmundson is a lecturer at the Centre for Heritage and Museum Studies at ANU and a curator in the field of Oceanic Art. Her work explores cultural connections between people and objects across a wide range of disciplinary fields including history, digital humanities and museum studies. Her work challenges the notion that museum-making is a solely European tradition and explores the intersections between different models of collecting, preserving and interpreting moveable cultural heritage. Her current research explores new technologies for digital returns, community archiving and knowledge restitution for First Nations Australian and Pacific Islander communities.

Louise Furey is Curator of Archaeology at Auckland Museum Tāmaki Paenga Hira. She has written extensively on Māori material culture and archaeology. Particular research interests are the early settlement sites and ornament styles from the thirteenth to fourteenth centuries. She is currently involved in large interdisciplinary research projects in the Hauraki Gulf and the Kermadec Islands.

Elena Govor, a Russian-born historian based at ANU, conducts her research in the field of South Pacific materials in Russian museum and archival collections and cross-cultural contacts between Russians and the peoples of the Pacific and Australia. She has examined these topics in a range of publications, including Twelve Days at Nuku Hiva: Russian Encounters and Mutiny in the South Pacific (University of Hawai‘i Press, 2010) and Tiki: Marquesan Art and the Krusenstern Expedition (Sidestone Press, 2019, ed. with Nicholas Thomas). She participated in the international projects ‘Artefacts of Encounter’, ‘Pacific Presences’, and ‘The Collective Biography of Archaeology in the Pacific’.

Eve Haddow is a lecturer and researcher in Museum Studies at the University of Queensland, Brisbane, Australia. Her research interests include material culture from the Western Pacific, missionary collecting and photography, histories of archaeology and anthropology, Australian South Sea Islander collections and facilitating connections between contemporary communities with these varied collections and stories.

Anita Herle is Senior Curator and Professor of Museum Anthropology at the Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, University of Cambridge. Her research interests include the early history of British anthropology, material culture studies, art and visual anthropology, with a particular interest in the Torres Strait, Fiji, Vanuatu and Canada.

Hilary Howes is an Australian Research Council (ARC) DECRA Fellow based in the Centre for Heritage and Museum Studies at ANU. Her research addresses the German-speaking tradition within anthropology and archaeology in Australia and the Pacific region. Her current project ‘Skulls for the Tsar: Indigenous Human Remains in Russian Collections’ offers the first detailed investigation of the acquisition of Indigenous human remains from Australia and the Pacific by the Russian Empire during the long nineteenth century. She was previously a postdoctoral fellow on Matthew Spriggs’s ARC Laureate Fellowship project ‘The Collective Biography of Archaeology in the Pacific: A Hidden History’.

Tristen Jones is an archaeologist and curator based in the Department of Archaeology, School of Philosophical and Historical Inquiry at the University of Sydney. Her research on Australian Indigenous and Pacific material culture collections focuses on the materiality and agency of objects, their relevance to contemporary Indigenous communities, and how collections can transform disciplinary histories. She was previously a research associate on Matthew Spriggs’s ARC Laureate Fellowship project ‘The Collective Biography of Archaeology in the Pacific: A Hidden History’.

Adria Katz is now a consulting scholar at the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, Philadelphia, USA, after 38 years as Keeper of the Oceanian collections.

Mirani Litster is an archaeologist with a research focus on Australia and the Indian Ocean. Mirani specialises in the archaeology of early globalisation, islands, frontier conflict and cross-cultural encounters. Mirani is currently based at James Cook University in the College of Arts, Society and Education.

Campbell Macknight is an honorary professor in the School of Culture, History and Language, College of Asia and the Pacific, ANU. He has written extensively on the history of trepang fishermen from Makassar who came to northern Australia in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and on the prehistory and early history of South Sulawesi, both subjects of interest to F.D. McCarthy. He is currently editing McCarthy’s diary of his visit to Southeast Asia in 1937–38.

Alison Mann is an archaeologist and assistant collections manager of cultures and histories within the Queensland Museum Network, based at the Museum of Tropical Queensland, Townsville. Her research interests review and address the safety of museum collections – culturally, intellectually and physically. Her actions towards the management of collection objects have involved standardisation of terminology within historical collections to describe objects, object identification, classification and cataloguing. Her interest in museum collections management was ignited over 20 years ago on two expeditions to excavate the wreck site of HMS Pandora. As object registrar and hyperbaric medicine specialist, she identified many factors that impact on how we as a community see, describe and document our cultural and physical history.

Tamara Maric is a French archaeologist, head curator of the Musée de Tahiti et des Îles – Te Fare Manaha. Between 2002 and 2018, she worked at the Service de la Culture et du Patrimoine in Tahiti, the French Polynesian Government office that oversees archaeology in the region (presently Direction de la Culture et du Patrimoine). She studied settlement patterns of Tahitian chiefdoms for her doctoral research at the Université de Paris-1 Panthéon-Sorbonne.

Andy Mills is Curator for Archaeology and World Cultures at The Hunterian, University of Glasgow, Scotland. He has research interests in Pacific art history, missionary collecting, the ethnohistory of Western Polynesia, early European voyages of exploration and the history of museums, among other things.

Guillaume Molle is a senior lecturer in Pacific archaeology and ARC DECRA fellow at ANU, and deputy-director of the International Centre for Polynesian Archaeological Research (CIRAP) in Tahiti. His research focuses on the human settlement of Eastern Polynesia and the development of ritual architecture among Polynesian chiefdoms. He has directed projects in the Marquesas Islands, the Gambier and Tuamotu Archipelagos, and on the atoll of Teti‘aroa. He is currently preparing a monograph on the archaeological history of the Marquesas Islands to be published by University of Hawai‘i Press.

Mara A. Mulrooney is a principal and senior archaeologist at Pacific Legacy, Inc. She currently serves as president of the Society for Hawaiian Archaeology and is editor of the Rapa Nui Journal. Mara previously served as director of cultural resources and anthropologist at the Bishop Museum. While working for the museum, she co-founded the Ho‘omaka Hou Research Initiative and worked to increase access to the museum’s collections through the development of original exhibitions and online publicly accessible databases.

Sascha Nolden is a research librarian at the Alexander Turnbull Library, National Library of New Zealand in Wellington. He is a graduate of the University of Auckland and Victoria University of Wellington, with research interests in history and biography, including the transcription and translation of letters, diaries and other archival primary sources.

Aoife O’Brien is curator for the Oceania collections at the Museum of Ethnography/Etnografiska museet (Stockholm) and the Museum of World Culture/Världskulturmuseet (Gothenburg), both part of the National Museums of World Culture/Världskulturmuseerna in Sweden. She has a PhD in anthropology/art history from the Sainsbury Research Unit for the Arts of Africa, Oceania and the Americas at the University of East Anglia in England where her doctoral research focused on material culture from the Solomon Islands during the early colonial period, and has held fellowships at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, Washington University in St Louis, and the Saint Louis Art Museum. Her research interests include the history of collecting and collections, the contemporary resonance/relevance of museum collections, visual anthropology and cross-cultural encounters.

William Scates Frances is a PhD candidate in history at ANU. He writes and teaches the history of exploration, science and race thinking in the nineteenth century, with particular attention to the United States South Seas Exploring Expedition (1838–42). He lives and works on unceded Dharug land, with a position at Academic Skills at the University of New South Wales, Sydney. You can find him on Twitter at @hpstorian and reach him via w.scates_frances@unsw.edu.au.

Peter Sheppard is a professor of archaeology in the anthropology program in the School of Social Sciences at the University of Auckland, New Zealand. Sent to the Solomon Islands as a postdoctoral student by Roger Green in 1989 to follow up on his Lapita research, Peter has continued to devote his own research and publishing to the study of that region over the last 32 years.

Reidar Solsvik is a Norwegian archaeologist and the curator/archivist of the Kon-Tiki Museum since 2006. He holds a master’s degree in archaeology from the University of Bergen. He was also part of the University of Oslo-led cross-discipline research program ‘Oceania: Identity Matters. Movement and Place’ (2002–08). His primary area of expertise is the ancient religious sites of Polynesia, particularly the marae, and he has published extensively on the topic, and carried out fieldwork on Huahine, in the Society Islands and on Rapa Nui. Presently, he is engaged with archival research for a book on Thor Heyerdahl’s works and theories.

Matthew Spriggs is Emeritus Professor of Archaeology at ANU and Honorary Curator of Archaeology at the Vanuatu Cultural Centre, Port Vila, Vanuatu, where he now lives. He retired exactly one year after completing his 2015–20 ARC Laureate Fellowship project ‘The Collective Biography of Archaeology in the Pacific: A Hidden History’. His interests include Pacific and Island Southeast Asian archaeology, archaeological theory and the history of archaeology. His current ARC project (with Lynette Russell of Monash University) is ‘Aboriginal Involvement in the Early History of Archaeology’ (2021–23).

Glenn R. Summerhayes has held the chair in anthropology at the University of Otago since 2005. Prior to that he was head of archaeology and natural history at the Research School of Pacific and Asian Studies, ANU. Summerhayes has been actively involved in Papua New Guinea (PNG) archaeology for over 40 years. For his contribution to the archaeology of New Guinea he was conferred as an Officer of the Order of Logohu, PNG, in the 2014 New Year’s Honours. In 2021, he was awarded a Medal of the Order of Australia for his contribution to tertiary education and history.

Jillian A. Swift is Curator of Archaeology at Bishop Museum and Affiliate Graduate Faculty in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa. She also serves as lead editor for the Society of Hawaiian Archaeology’s annual journal, Hawaiian Archaeology. Swift specialises in zooarchaeological and biomolecular methods, and her work employs a combination of community-engaged fieldwork and museum collections research to investigate human–environment interactions and long-term sustainability on Pacific Islands. Current projects include archaeological investigations of traditional agricultural practices in Hālawa Valley, Moloka‘i, and biomolecular approaches to understanding land use and sustainability on Tikopia Island.

Jo Anne Van Tilburg is an archaeologist, director of the Easter Island Statue Project (EISP), and director of the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) Rock Art Archive, Cotsen Institute of Archaeology at UCLA. Under her leadership the archive was awarded the California Governor’s Award for Historic Preservation. She served as an appointed member of the US National Landmarks Commission, National Park System Advisory Board. She and her EISP team recently conducted major excavations in Rano Raraku Quarry, Rapa Nui (Easter Island).

Moira White is Curator, Humanities, at Otago Museum, Dunedin, New Zealand. She is a life member of the New Zealand Archaeological Association, and of the Association of Friends of the Otago Museum. Among her areas of research interest are biographical studies of staff and donors to the museum.

Duncan Wright is a senior lecturer and head of archaeology at the ANU School of Archaeology and Anthropology. His research focuses on the (pre)history of Torres Strait Islanders, with a particular interest in ritual and religion. Previously, he held research positions at Griffith and Monash universities and completed a PhD at Monash University in 2010.