Fiona Petchey

• PhD
• Professor (Associate) at University of Waikato

In southeastern Australia, GunaiKurnai caves are known by current Aboriginal Elders and from nineteenth century ethnographic documents as special places used by mulla-mullung (“clever men” and “clever women”) for the practice of magic and medicine. Pollen analysis conducted on sediments from one such cave, Cloggs Cave, reveals an unusually well-pre...

The initial release of the Aotearoa New Zealand Archaeology Radiocarbon Database (ANZRD) contained more than 4100 14C ages. These come from over 1650 different NZAA recorded sites, a few museum samples, and some sites that are yet to have completed ArchSite records. The database also includes information from the Chatham Islands, Kermadec Islands,...

The dynamics of our species’ dispersal into the Pacific remains intensely debated. The authors present archaeological investigations in the Raja Ampat Islands, north-west of New Guinea, that provide the earliest known evidence for humans arriving in the Pacific more than 55 000–50 000 years ago. Seafaring simulations demonstrate that a northern equ...

Several disease-causing bacteria have transitioned from tick-borne to louse-borne transmission, a process associated with increased virulence and genome reduction. However, the historical time frame and speed of such evolutionary transitions have not been documented with ancient genomes. Here, we discover four ancient cases of Borrelia recurrentis,...

In societies without writing, ethnographically known rituals have rarely been tracked back archaeologically more than a few hundred years. At the invitation of GunaiKurnai Aboriginal Elders, we undertook archaeological excavations at Cloggs Cave in the foothills of the Australian Alps. In GunaiKurnai Country, caves were not used as residential plac...

Identifying continuity and discontinuity in Holocene hunter-gatherer burial sites is often challenging. Roonka, is the largest excavated burial area in Australia. Despite preliminary analysis in the 1970–1980s chronology was challenging given the complex record of dune formation, intrusive burials, erosion and exposure. As part of collaboration wit...

Aboriginal manufacture and use of pottery was unknown in Australia prior to European settlement, despite well-known ceramic-making traditions in southern Papua New Guinea, eastern Indonesia, and the western Pacific. The absence of ancient pottery manufacture in mainland Australia has long puzzled researchers given other documented deep time Aborigi...

This handbook is currently in development, with individual articles publishing online in advance of print publication. At this time, we cannot add information about unpublished articles in this handbook, however the table of contents will continue to grow as additional articles pass through the review process and are added to the site. Please note...

Studies of pre-bomb mollusks live-collected around the Australian coastline have concluded that near-shore marine radiocarbon reservoir effects are small and relatively uniform. These studies are based on limited samples of sometimes dubious quality representing only selective parts of Australia’s lengthy coastline. We systematically examine spatia...

Gua Sireh, located in western Sarawak (Malaysian Borneo), is known for its rock art. The cave houses hundreds of charcoal drawings depicting people, often with headdresses, knives and other accoutrements. Here, we present direct radiocarbon dates and pigment characterizations from charcoal drawings of two large (>75 cm), unique Gua Sireh human figu...

Seafaring ceramicists connected widely spaced communities along the expanse of PNG's south coast for more than 1,500 years following the arrival of people using pots with Lapita decoration c.2,900 cal BP. Archaeological investigations at locations from the Gulf of Papua in the west to Mailu Island in the east suggest a major change occurred to seaf...

The settlement of the Pacific is an important chapter in human dispersal for which radiocarbon (14C) dates provide chronological control. At some point during the last 3000 years, Polynesian culture developed within Tonga and Samoa out of earlier ancestral populations. Unfortunately, between ~2650 and 2350 cal BP, the terrestrial 14C calibration cu...

A new quality assurance framework was developed to assess the reliability of 14 C ages from a small-scale legacy dataset from archaeological sites across the Torres Strait (northeastern Australia). Chronometric transparency principles were applied across three stages of data analysis, comprising of a basic, immediate, and advanced assessment of the...

Reliable chronological frameworks for archaeological sites are essential for accurate interpretations of the past. Geochronology represents the core of interdisciplinary research because it allows integration of diverse data on a common timeline. Since the radiocarbon revolution in Australian archaeology in the 1950s, thousands of ages have been pr...

This article presents the results of the radiocarbon dating programme and interpretation of a medieval chapel and graveyard in Poulton, Cheshire. The structure was associated with a lost Cistercian Abbey of 12th-13th-century date, which was relocated to Staffordshire after c. 60 years. Extensive excavation has revealed a minimum of 783 interments,...

Understanding the role of climate change, resource availability, and population growth in human mobility remains critically important in anthropology. Researching linkages between climate and demographic changes during the short settlement history of Aotearoa (New Zealand) requires temporal precision equivalent to the period of a single generation....

Palaeontological animal bone deposits are rarely investigated through research partnerships where the local First Nations communities have a defining hand in both the research questions asked and the research processes. Here we report research undertaken through such a partnership approach at the iconic archaeological site of Cloggs Cave (GunaiKurn...

Amanzi Springs is a series of inactive thermal springs located near Kariega in the Eastern Cape of South Africa. Excavations in the 1960s exposed rare, stratified Acheulian-bearing deposits that were not further investigated over the next 50 years. Reanalysis of the site and its legacy collection has led to a redefined stratigraphic context for the...

Background to the Aotearoa/New Zealand Radiocarbon Database. The database reports more than 4100 radiocarbon ages, information on the archaeological context, and bibliographic links. Public access to the online viewer is via the Waikato Radiocarbon Laboratory webpage (https://radiocarbondating.com/Research/nz-radiocarbon-database). Archaeology in...

In many locations around the world, shell radiocarbon dates underpin archaeological research. The dating of shell brings the chronological relationship between the sample and target event (e.g., hunting and food preparation) into congruence, while shells are valuable geochemical proxies for understanding past climate dynamics and environments. Howe...

Previous research indicates that human genetic diversity in Wallacea—islands in present-day Eastern Indonesia and Timor-Leste that were never part of the Sunda or Sahul continental shelves—has been shaped by complex interactions between migrating Austronesian farmers and indigenous hunter–gatherer communities. Yet, inferences based on present-day g...

The Archaeology of Tanamu 1 presents the results from Tanamu 1, the first site to be published in detail in the Caution Bay Studies in Archaeology series. In 2008–2010, the Caution Bay Archaeological Project excavated 122 stratified sites 20km northwest of Port Moresby, south coast of Papua New Guinea. This remains the largest archaeological salvag...

The Archaeology of Tanamu 1 presents the results from Tanamu 1, the first site to be published in detail in the Caution Bay Studies in Archaeology series. In 2008–2010, the Caution Bay Archaeological Project excavated 122 stratified sites 20km northwest of Port Moresby, south coast of Papua New Guinea. This remains the largest archaeological salvag...

This paper looks at the identification of one of the dated burials excavated from the upper level of the site of Amoreira, Muge, Portugal in 2001. The date has a median probability age of 7000 calBP and is from an adult male with an estimated marine diet of ca. 41%, supporting the model that the population at Amoreira was marine focused until aband...

The Neolithic in Mainland Southeast Asia is considered to be the period of human prehistory that commenced with the transition from hunting and gathering into mixed economies of foraging and farming. It lasted until the appearance of copper and bronze metallurgy and thus dates between circa 2500 and 1200 BC. In Vietnam, Neolithic sites and cultures...

Western Arnhem Land in northern Australia has the rare distinction, both at national and global scales, of containing a vast landscape of many thousands of rockshelters richly decorated with art, some of which was probably made tens of thousands of years ago, others as recently as a few decades ago. Yet the challenge remains as to how to date this...

IntroductionThe southern Arnhem Land plateau contains a rich mosaic of thousands of rock art sites located in outcrops of Proterozoic Marlgowa Sandstone of the Kombolgie formation (Carson et al. 1999) (Figure 11.1). Within this region in Jawoyn Country can be found Nawarla Gabarnmang, an impressive rockshelter exhibiting a gridded network of pillar...

Recurring occupation beside waterways is an essential part of Aboriginal dwelling and movement in the landscape. Riverbanks and their wider floodplains were repeatedly inhabited as hunting and fishing grounds and to gather plants and other materials; moreover, Aboriginal people used rivers and creeks as routeways and landmarks to navigate Country,...

The iconic Ho‘oumi Beach site (NHo‐3), Nuku Hiva Island (Marquesas), was excavated by Robert Suggs in the late 1950s. It figured importantly in his island‐wide reconstruction of settlement patterns, socio‐political organisation, material culture and subsistence change – a cultural historical framework that has guided Marquesan archaeology for six d...

This paper is a response to criticism by Carson (2020) concerning the age of the Unai Bapot archaeological site in the Mariana Islands. Of specific contention are supposed errors in the marine radiocarbon ( ¹⁴ C) research reported by Petchey et al. (2017). According to Carson, this work produced marine reservoir offsets (Δ R ) of “suspiciously wide...

Understanding of Late Pleistocene megafaunal extinctions in Australia and New Guinea (Sahul) suffers from a paucity of reliably dated bone deposits. Researchers are divided as to when, and why, large-bodied species became extinct. Critical to these interpretations are so-called ‘late survivors’, megafauna that are thought to have persisted for tens...

In this paper we report on new research at the iconic archaeological site of Cloggs Cave (GunaiKurnai Country), in the southern foothills of SE Australia’s Great Dividing Range. Detailed chronometric dating, combined with high-resolution 3D mapping, geomorphological studies and archaeological excavations, now allow a dense sequence of Late Holocene...

Les nouvelles recherches menées à Cloggs cave (contreforts des Alpes australiennes, État de Victoria) ont mobilisé les données de la géologie, de la géomorphologie, de l’archéologie et les résultats de différentes techniques de datation pour répondre aux débats engagés dès les années 1970 sur une possible coexistence entre la mégafaune et les premi...

Archaeological records documenting the timing and use of northern Great Barrier Reef offshore islands by Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples throughout the Holocene are limited when compared to the central and southern extents of the region. Excavations on Lizard Island, located 33 km from Cape Flattery on the mainland, provide high resol...

Insects form an important source of food for many people around the world, but little is known of the deep-time history of insect harvesting from the archaeological record. In Australia, early settler writings from the 1830s to mid-1800s reported congregations of Aboriginal groups from multiple clans and language groups taking advantage of the annu...

Objectives This study aims to assess if inter‐island mobility can be identified during the Namu period (ca. 1,510–1800 AD) using ⁸⁷Sr/⁸⁶Sr analysis of dental enamel for individuals from the Namu burial ground on Taumako Island in the eastern Solomon Island Chain. Historic evidence from this region suggests that females migrated between the Duff, Re...

Obtaining radiocarbon dates from archaeological human bone in the Arabian Gulf has proved challenging due to the poor preservation of bone collagen in this region. This issue is problematic in Bahrain because the established chronology of the burial mounds and cemeteries is derived from a few charcoal and shell dates and the typology of pottery fou...

Whether kūmara ‘sweet potato’ (Ipomoea batatas) arrived in South Polynesia with initial colonisation or later is discussed in the light of recent evidence from East Polynesia and by examination and statistical modelling of radiocarbon ages associated with kūmara arrival and dispersal in New Zealand. Largely unresolved difficulties in radiocarbon da...

Chronological modelling of village sites across the Torres Strait utilises legacy archaeological data and new 14 C dates to investigate temporal events associated with major settlement expansion over the last two millennia. This research is the first attempt to chronologically model all archaeologically dated Torres Strait village sites and aims to...

The archipelago of Vanuatu has been at the crossroads of human population movements in the Pacific for the past three millennia. To help address several open questions regarding the history of these movements, we generated genome-wide data for 11 ancient individuals from the island of Efate dating from its earliest settlement to the recent past, in...

New research undertaken at Cloggs Cave, in the foothills of the Australian Alps, employed an integrated geological -geomorphological-archaeological approach with manifold dating methods and fine resolution LiDAR 3D mapping. Long-standing questions about the site's chronostratigraphy (e.g. the exact relationship between basal megafaunal deposits and...

The radiocarbon (14 C) calibration curve so far contains annually resolved data only for a short period of time. With accelerator mass spectrometry (AMS) matching the precision of decay counting, it is now possible to efficiently produce large datasets of annual resolution for calibration purposes using small amounts of wood. The radiocarbon interc...

Precise and accurate radiocarbon chronologies are essential to achieve tight chronological control for the ~ 750-years since Polynesian settlement of New Zealand. This goal has, however, been elusive. While radiocarbon datasets in the region are typically dominated by marine and estuarine shell dates, such chronological information has been ignored...

Early researchers of radiocarbon levels in Southern Hemisphere tree rings identified a variable North-South hemispheric offset, necessitating construction of a separate radiocarbon calibration curve for the South. We present here SHCal20, a revised calibration curve from 0-55,000 cal BP, based upon SHCal13 and fortified by the addition of 14 new tr...

Southeastern Australia’s temperate East Gippsland region is a large and diverse landscape that spans from the Bass Strait coast to the Australian Alps. The region includes a number of national parks and reserves jointly managed by Aboriginal Traditional Owners, the Gunaikurnai Land and Waters Aboriginal Corporation (the ‘Gunaikurnai Corporation’),...

Currently the earliest evidence for dog dispersal into the Greater Australian region and surrounds is found in Australia (Madura Cave 3210–3361 cal BP), New Ireland (Kamgot, c. 3000–3300 cal BP) and Timor-Leste (Matja Kuru 2, 2886–3068 cal BP). Previously, the earliest published dog remains for the large continental island of New Guinea was from Ed...

Excavations in 2015 at the site of Ru Diep in north-central Vietnam (Ha Tinh Province) raise significant questions about the transition into the Neolithic in this region, more than 5000 years ago. The material culture from the site reveals a mixture of both pre-Neolithic (Quynh Van culture) and Neolithic elements, in a shell mound context. The C14...

Holocene climate change in the South Pacific is of major interest to archaeologists and Quaternary researchers. Regional surface ocean radiocarbon ( ¹⁴ C) values are an established proxy for studying changing oceanographic and climatic conditions. Unfortunately, radiocarbon variability in the marine environment over the period of specific importanc...

The southern lowlands of Papua New Guinea (PNG) are biogeographically distinct. Vast tracts of savanna vegetation occur there and yet most palaeoecological studies have focused on highlands and/or forest environments. Greater focus on long-term lowland environments provides a rare opportunity to understand and promote the significance of local and...

Excavation at the Long Bay Restaurant resulted in the discovery and disinterment of 25 pre-European Māori burials. The full clearance and sieving strategy employed to recover all kōiwi tangata (human remains) produced a fine-grained 13 × 12 m excavation of a stratified coastal site, providing detailed faunal and material culture samples. Coupled wi...

The Caution Bay archaeological project on the south coast of mainland Papua New Guinea has excavated 122 sites over a 9 km2 area. Lapita ceramics appear at a number of sites at c. 2900 cal. BP. Here we present the results of excavations at Moiapu 3, a site that helps define the end of the dentate-stamped Lapita phase of this region. It is suggested...

The Taupo eruption deposit is an isochronous marker bed that spans much of New Zealand’s North Island and pre-dates human arrival. Holdaway et al. (2018, Nature Comms 9, 4110) propose that the current Taupo eruption date is inaccurate and that the eruption occurred “…decades to two centuries…” after the published wiggle-match estimate of 232 ± 10 C...

Radiocarbon dating Pacific archaeological sites is fraught with difficulties. Often situated in coastal beach ridges or sand dunes, these sites exhibit horizontal and vertical disturbances, datable materials such as wood charcoal are typically highly degraded, may be derived from old trees or driftwood unless specifically identified to short-lived...

We present Bayesian modelling on a long sequence of radiocarbon ages from the archaeological site of Nawarla Gabarnmang, central Arnhem Land plateau, northern Australia. A horizon of wind-borne sediments containing flaked stone artefacts and charcoal commencing >45,610 cal BP (the young end of the modelled boundary age range, which extends beyond t...

The ‘direct’ dating of rock art has proliferated since the development of accelerator mass spectrometry radiocarbon, uranium-series and optically stimulated luminescence dating, yet still, most rock art is not directly datable due to the mineral nature of the constituent pigments. Here we present another method: the recovery and dating by stratigra...

This paper reports the results of an investigation into past major tsunamis on the Aitape coast of Papua New Guinea. The investigation was mounted to gather information to help assess the level of ongoing tsunami risk, in the aftermath of a catastrophic tsunami that struck this coast in 1998. We found that local residents have a strong oral traditi...

New Zealand was first settled by Māori soon after 1200 CE, however the age, and so the social and environmental contexts of the rock art they made remains uncertain. We report the first attempts at the direct dating of New Zealand rock art through radiocarbon analysis focusing on the return of an unexpectedly early date. Historical information and...

Radiocarbon dating Pacific archaeological sites is fraught with difficulties. Often situated in coastal beach ridges or sand dunes, sites exhibit horizontal and vertical disturbances, while datable materials such as wood charcoal are typically highly degraded, or derived from old trees or drift wood and bone collagen rarely survives in the tropical...

Accounts of New Guinea’s recent past are replete with both archaeological and ethnographic evidence of trade that indirectly connect virtually the entire country from coast to highland. One consequence has been a bias towards central places (e.g. Mailu Island) and/or large-scale production villages (e.g. of the Port Moresby region) as origin locati...

The colonisation of the Pacific is an important chapter in human dispersal for which chronological control is primarily provided by radiocarbon (¹⁴C) dates. In this context, the ability to reliably date shellfish is important because alternative dating materials, such as charcoal and bone, are typically highly degraded. However, the interpretation...

The re-excavation of Karnatukul (Serpent’s Glen) has provided evidence for the human occupation of the Australian Western Desert to before 47,830 cal. BP (modelled median age). This new sequence is 20,000 years older than the previous known age for occupation at this site. Re-excavation of Karnatukul aimed to contextualise the site’s painted art as...

Recent genomic analyses show that the earliest peoples reaching Remote Oceania-associated with Austronesian-speaking Lapita culture-were almost completely East Asian, without detectable Papuan ancestry. However, Papuan-related genetic ancestry is found across present-day Pacific populations, indicating that peoples from Near Oceania have played a s...

We report the results of 212 radiocarbon determinations from the archaeological excavation of 70 shell mound deposits in the Wathayn region of Albatross Bay, Australia. This is an intensive study of a closely co-located group of mounds within a geographically restricted area in a wider region where many more shell mounds have been reported. Valves...

Rates of accumulation calculations for Wathayn shell mounds. (XLSX)

Archaeological deposits from Boodie Cave on Barrow Island, northwest Australia, reveal some of the oldest evidence for Aboriginal occupation of Australia, as well as illustrating the early use of marine resources by modern peoples outside of Africa. Barrow Island is a large (202 km2) limestone continental island located on the North-West Shelf of A...

This research investigates the potential of radiocarbon wiggle-match dating of palisade posts to provide precise and accurate calendar ages for Māori pā (forts), using Otāhau Pā in the inland Waikato region, New Zealand, as a case study. Even though pā are a dominant element of the pre-European North Island archaeological landscape, they are poorly...

Roonka is one of the most complete excavations of an Aboriginal burial ground in south-eastern Australia. The chronology of the site and the nature of its use have proven difficult to interpret. Previous dating and chronological interpretations of the site have emphasised a chronology of changing use and burial practices, but the nature of the site...

Western Arnhem Land in northern Australia has the rare distinction, both at national and global scales, of containing a vast landscape of many thousands of rockshelters richly decorated with art, some of which was probably made tens of thousands of years ago, others as recently as a few decades ago. Yet the challenge remains as to how to date this...

Radiocarbon dating has had a significant impact on rock art research, but an initial enthusiasm for this dating method by archaeologists has been replaced by a degree of scepticism. Radiocarbon dates undertaken directly on rock art or on associated mineral crusts have often reinforced such scepticism, in part because organic carbon-based materials...

The first colonists of temperate climate, southwestern Polynesia settled an archipelago unsuited generally to the cultivation of several tropical homeland crops, including fruiting trees. On the Chatham Islands, these colonists achieved settlement permanency after the thirteenth century AD to become the indigenous Moriori in the absence of all Poly...

This chapter reports on the personnel, research structure and analytical methods employed in the Caution Bay project, constituting the sum of the various phases of field and laboratory research at Caution Bay. We stress that from the onset our approach has been to investigate through excavation the character of the archaeological record at a landsc...