Atholl Anderson

Atholl John Anderson (born 1943) is a New Zealand archaeologist who has worked extensively in New Zealand and the Pacific. His work is notable for its syntheses of history, biology, ethnography and archaeological evidence. He made a major contribution to the evidence given by the Ngāi Tahu iwi to the Waitangi Tribunal.

Early life Anderson was born in 1943 in Hāwera and is descended from Ngāi Tahu on Stewart Island. He grew up in Dunedin and Nelson.

Education Anderson conducted a survey of archaeological sites in Tasman Bay for his Master of Arts degree in geography from the University of Canterbury, which he received in 1966. His master's thesis title was Maori occupation sites in back beach deposits around Tasman Bay. He then completed a Diploma in Teaching and in 1968 became assistant principal of a school in Karamea on the West Coast of the South Island. In 1970, he began a Master of Arts degree in anthropology at the University of Otago, which he completed in 1973 with first-class honours. He received a Commonwealth Scholarship that enabled him to go to the University of Cambridge, where he undertook fieldwork in northern Sweden and completed his PhD thesis, Prehistoric competition and economic change in northern Sweden, in 1976.

Career Anderson took up his first academic position in 1977 at the University of Auckland. The following year, he was appointed as an assistant lecturer in the anthropology department at the University of Otago, progressing to a personal chair in the department. He left Otago in 1993 to take up the Establishment Chair of Prehistory at the Australian National University in Canberra.

While he is primarily an archaeologist, Anderson has used archaeology, history and ethnography extensively in his work. In an interview about his 1998 book The Welcome of Strangers: an Ethnohistory of Southern Maori AD 1650–1850, he described it as a book that "draws together the disparate sources of information about later southern Māori in an attempt to describe, in some detail, the origins and migrations of the historical peoples, their social and economic organisation, their distribution in the landscape and their responses to the arrival of European culture." In 2015, he collaborated with historians Judith Binney and Aroha Harris to publish Tangata Whenua: a History, which won an Ockham New Zealand Book Award in 2016. The authors used environmental science, geology, linguistics, archaeology and history to investigate the migration and settlement of New Zealand.

In addition to his academic work, Anderson has served on the board of the New Zealand Historic Places Trust and as an advisor to Te Rūnanga o Ngāi Tahu. He researched Ngāi Tahu's Treaty of Waitangi claim to the Waitangi Tribunal. 1996 Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities 1996 James Cook Research Fellowship 2000 Centenary Medal 2002 Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries of London 2015 Humanities Aronui Medal, Royal Society of New Zealand 2016 Prime Minister's Award for Literary Achievement 2019 Honorary Doctor of Laws, University of Otago

Selected publications

Anderson, Atholl (1983). When all the moa ovens grew cold : nine centuries of changing fortune for the southern Māori. Dunedin: Otago Heritage Books. Anderson, Atholl (1986). Te Puoho's last raid : the march from Golden Bay to Southland in 1836 and defeat at Tuturau. Dunedin: Otago Heritage Books. Anderson, Atholl (1989). Prodigious birds : moas and moa-hunting in prehistoric New Zealand. Cambridge University Press. Anderson, Atholl (1998). The welcome of strangers : an ethnohistory of southern Maori A.D. 1650–1850. Dunedin: Otago University Press.

Anderson, Atholl; Binney, Judith; Harris, Aroha (2015). Tangata whenua : a history. Wellington: Bridget Williams Books.