Ben Shaw is an archaeologist and Senior Lecturer in the School of Culture, History and Language at the Australian National University. Ben’s research is geographically focused on Papua New Guinea where he has undertaken extensive fieldwork over the past 17 years across many island, coastal and highland regions. He has also worked in Australia, New Zealand, and French Polynesia. Ben’s research spans the full length of human history from colonisation through to historic contexts. His major interest is the interplay between past climates, environments, and human behaviours. Specifically, using multidisciplinary approaches to understand how cultural and technological adaptations contributed to the emergence of complex human diversity in the Asia-Pacific region, and globally.

Ben is a New Zealand trained archaeologist and biological anthropologist, having studied at the University of Otago. After working as a consultant in New Zealand and Papua New Guinea, he completed a PhD in archaeology at the ANU (2011-2014) for which he developed an archaeological sequence for Rossel Island in eastern Papua New Guinea where a linguistically and genetically unique population live. This was followed by an ARC postdoctoral fellowship (2015-2016) and an ARC DECRA fellowship (2017-2020), both at the University of New South Wales in Sydney. In 2020, he took up a positon at the Australian National University, and in 2022 was elected as a Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries of London in recognition of his contribution to understanding the human pasts of the Pacific region.

Ben is currently working in the islands of the Milne Bay Province and the Bogia-Ramu area in the Madang Province of Papua New Guinea. In the Milne Bay islands he has established a Late Pleistocene antiquity for human colonisation, defined the timing for the arrival of cultural groups associated with the spread of pottery producing cultrual groups (Lapita), and modelled the antiquity of historically known cultural practices. In the Highlands as part of a collaborative transdisciplinary research initiative he has identified sociocultural changes linked to agricultural developments. Prior to this, Ben developed and tested an isotopic approach for identifying migration in the Pacific Islands using human and animal dental remains from archaeological contexts. He is currently part of an international team funded by a Royal Society of New Zealand Marsden grant to investigate the Holocene dispersal of people along the northern New Guinea coast.

You can view youtube videos of Ben’s fieldwork in Papua New Guinea here.

BA Hons (Otago) , MSc (Otago), PhD (ANU)

My research is centred on modelling human adaptations to ecosystems which vary over time (Late Pleistocene to Historic contexts) and space in the Australasian and Pacific Island regions, with a focus on the highland, lowland and island landscapes of New Guinea. Fieldwork is aimed at locating and excavating archaeological sites which expand existing records through a detailed geomorphological landscape approach. I have an interest in inter-disciplinary engagement of regional and global research questions which require modelling of diverse datasets and meta-analytic assessment to address complex problems with modern human adaptive behaviours.