Kohika The Archaeology Of A Late Maori Lake Village

Geoffrey Irwin is Professor of Archaeology in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Auckland, New Zealand. He has carried out fieldwork in New Guinea, the Solomon Islands, Fiji, Indonesia and New Zealand. In the Pacific he has studied early migration and navigation, and the emergence of seaborne trading systems. In the course of fieldwork he has sailed in traditional canoes of southeastern Papua New Guinea and on one occasion, sailed his own yacht through Island Melanesia, retracing the path of the Lapita archaeological culture that was ancestral to Polynesian and Maori. This voyage resulted in The prehistoric exploration and colonisation of the Pacific, which was published by Cambridge University Press in 1992. His local work has concentrated on the origins of Classic Maori settlement, focusing on the emergence of defended social landscapes dominated by pa. Two projects have been in the North Kaipara described in Land, pa and polity: a study based on the Maori fortifications of Pouto (Monograph 15, NZAA, 1985), and a current project located in the inner islands of the Hauraki Gulf. He has had a long interest in wetland archaeology and during the work on the Kohika lake village, visited several wet sites in Europe and America. Further wetlands research is continuing at the Kohika site, in partnership with the local Ngati Awa tribe, and supported by a grant from the Marsden Fund, adminstered by the Royal Society.Irwin, Geoffrey is the author of 'Kohika The Archaeology Of A Late Maori Lake Village', published 2004 under ISBN 9781869403157 and ISBN 1869403150.