Ballot Archive

21 Mar 2019

Candidate Details

Candidate Name

Tim Thomas

Academic degrees, honours etc.

BA Otago University PhD Otago University

Profession or occupation

Senior Lecturer Archaeology

Grounds for election

Dr Tim Thomas, a senior lecturer in Archaeology at the University of Otago, is an expert in the archaeology and historical anthropology of Oceania, and has made significant contributions to the discipline in this area. His research career has focused on the key questions of how and when human populations colonized the Pacific, how they managed that process socially, and how cultural diversity was generated. He has contributed important theoretical perspectives on colonization as a social practice and long-term process, involving relationships of power and place-making. Dr Thomas’s twenty years of fieldwork-based research in the Solomon Islands has examined this at a fine scale. His study of archaeological landscapes and architecture has provided a rich account of how chiefdoms in the Solomons negotiated attachment to landscape and place, and manipulated cultural and linguistic boundaries.

Signatories

The following Fellows have signed this Blue Paper