Dr Dylan Gaffney
Tutorial Fellow in Archaeology
Associate Professor of Palaeolithic Archaeology
Dylan Gaffney is tutor and fellow at Hertford College. He is also Associate Professor of Palaeolithic Archaeology in the School of Archaeology, and Stipendiary Lecturer at St Hugh’s College. He holds an honorary fellowship with the University of Otago and is a Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries.
Dylan completed a BA at the University of Otago, double majoring in anthropology and classical studies. His BA Honours and MA theses, written at the same university, were completed under the supervision of Glenn Summerhayes and Anne Ford. These studies combined archaeological and anthropological methods to analyse stone tool making and pottery manufacture around Papua New Guinea. Following this, he worked as Research Coordinator at Southern Pacific Archaeological Research, directing excavations around Aotearoa New Zealand. This research was completed alongside Richard Walter and Karen Greig and involved examining the earliest stone tools made by Māori settlers, the nature of early urbanisation amongst European colonists, and the first overseas Chinese communities that contributed to the increasingly multicultural face of the southern Pacific. Moving to Britain in 2017, Dylan completed a PhD at the University of Cambridge, supervised by Cyprian Broodbank and Graeme Barker, and funded by Gates Cambridge. This research examined the earliest human dispersals from Asia into Oceania and included exploratory surveys, excavations, and zooarchaeological analyses in the Raja Ampat Islands of West Papua, Indonesia. He was Junior Research Fellow at St John’s College, Oxford, from 2021–2023 and joined Hertford in October 2023.
For further information about Dylan, see https://www.arch.ox.ac.uk/people/dr-dylan-gaffney-0
Undergraduate teaching
At Hertford, Dylan teaches undergraduate tutorials in Archaeology & Anthropology and supervises undergraduate theses. For first year students, Dylan currently teaches on the topics of world archaeology and human evolution.
Graduate teaching
Dylan lectures on the MSc Archaeology course. He welcomes enquires about Master’s and Doctoral supervision on a wide range of topics relating to the archaeology of the Pacific and Southeast Asia, as well as global Pleistocene archaeology.
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Research interests
Research
Dylan’s research focuses on the ways that human behaviour has fluctuated over centuries, millennia, and tens of millennia. In particular, his research examines the behavioural and ecological dynamics of human migration around the Pacific and Island Southeast Asia. This research involves undertaking reconnaissance survey and excavation in the islands of Indonesia and Papua New Guinea, as well as lithic (stone tool) analysis, geochemical characterisation, and zooarchaeological (animal bone) studies to describe the changing nature of people’s technology, subsistence, and exchange patterns. Dylan’s current project in the Raja Ampat Islands is exploring how the earliest seafarers moved from Asia to the Pacific over 50,000 years ago, and how humans transformed their new island ecologies by translocating animals, altering the composition of the rainforest, and foraging for different plants and animals. Developing on this, the project seeks to untangle how these deep histories have set the scene for people’s environmental practices in the present, and how indigenous conservation might therefore play out in the future.
For information about this project, see https://www.raja-ampat-arch.com
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Related websites
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Publications
For a full list of Dylan’s writing, see: https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Dylan-Gaffney-2
Authored books
Gaffney, D. 2020. Materialising Ancestral Madang: Pottery Production and Subsistence Trading in Northeast New Guinea. University of Otago: Dunedin. ISSN 0110-3709. pp 1–272.
Edited books
Gaffney, D., Tolla, M. (eds.) forthcoming. West New Guinea: Social, Biological, and Material Histories. Australian National University Press: Canberra.
Ford, A., Shaw, B., Gaffney, D. (eds.) Forty Years in the South Seas: Archaeological Perspectives on the Human History of Papua New Guinea and the Western Pacific Region. Australian National University Press: Canberra.
Journal articles
Gaffney, D., Tanudirjo, D.A., Djami, E.N.I., Mas’ ud, Z., Macap, A.R., Russell, T., et al. 2024. Human dispersal and plant processing in the Pacific 55000–50000 years ago. Antiquity.
Gaffney, D., Tanudirjo, D., Arnold, L., Gaman, W., Russell, T., Djami, E. and Macap, A., 2024. Five centuries of settlement dynamics and mobility in the northern Raja Ampat Islands of West Papua. The Journal of Pacific History.
Xhauflair, H., Lourdeau, A., Gaffney, D., Ford, A., Tanudirjo, D. and Jago-on, S.C., 2023. Des civilisations du végétal préhistoriques sous les tropiques? L’Anthropologie, p.103192.
Gaffney, D. 2022. Peopling island rainforests: global trends from the Early Pleistocene to Late Holocene. World Archaeology, 54(2): 338–263.
Leppard, T., Cochrane, E., Gaffney, D., Hofman, C., Laffoon, J, Schmid, M., Broodbank, C. 2022. Global patterns in island colonization during the Holocene. Journal of World Prehistory 35: 163–232.
Gaffney, D. 2021. Pleistocene water crossings and adaptive flexibility within the Homo genus. Journal of Archaeological Research 29: 255–326.
Douglass, K., Gaffney, D., Feo, T.J., Bulathsinhala, P., Mack, A., Spizer, M., Summerhayes, G.R. 2021. Late Pleistocene/Early Holocene sites in the montane forests of New Guinea yield early record of cassowary hunting and egg harvesting. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), 118(40): e2100117118.
Gaffney, D., Summerhayes, G.R., Luu, S., Menzies, J., Douglass, K., Spitzer, M., Bulmer, S. 2021. Small game hunting in montane rainforests: specialised capture & broad spectrum foraging in the Late Pleistocene to Holocene New Guinea Highlands. Quaternary Science Reviews 253: 106742.
Gaffney, D., Greig, K., Stoddart, D., Tromp, M., Luu, S., Field, J., Coster, A., Summerhayes, G.R. 2020. Tropical foodways and exchange along the coastal margin of northeast New Guinea. Journal of Field Archaeology 45(7): 498-511.
Wu, P., Walter, R., Gaffney, D., Gong, S., Reid, M., Palin, M. 2020. Identifying nineteenth century Trans-Pacific production and trade: A geochemical and stylistic study of Chinese opium pipe bowls from southern New Zealand. Journal of Archaeological Science: Reports 31: 102362.
Gaffney, D., Tanudirjo, D. 2019. Sago oven pottery production in the Raja Ampat Islands, far western Melanesia. Journal of Pacific Archaeology 10(20): 63-72.
Gaffney, D., Summerhayes, G.R. 2019. Coastal mobility and lithic supply lines in northeast New Guinea. Archaeological and Anthropological Sciences 11: 2849-2878.
Gaffney, D., Summerhayes, G.R., Szabo, K., Koppel, B. 2019. The emergence of shell valuable exchange in the New Guinea Highlands. American Anthropologist 121(1): 30-47.
Gaffney, D., Summerhayes, G.R., Mennis, M., Beni, T., Cook, A., Field, J., Jacobsen, G., Allen, F., Buckley, H., Mandui, H. 2018. Archaeological investigations into the origins of Bel trading groups around the Madang coast, northeast New Guinea. Journal of Island and Coastal Archaeology 13(4): 501-530.
Gaffney, D., Summerhayes, G.R., Miamba, K. 2018. An archaeological survey of inland Madang, northeast Papua New Guinea. Archaeology in New Zealand 61(3): 12-26.
Gaffney, D. 2018. Maintenance and mutability amongst specialist potters on the northeast coast of New Guinea. Cambridge Archaeological Journal 28(2): 181-204.
Summerhayes, G.R., Field, J., Shaw, B., Gaffney, D. 2017. The archaeology of forest exploitation and change in the tropics during the Pleistocene: the case of Northern Sahul (Pleistocene New Guinea). Quaternary International 448: 14-30.
Roberts, P., Gaffney, D., Lee-Thorp, J., Summerhayes, G.R. 2017. Persistent tropical foraging in the highlands of terminal Pleistocene/Holocene New Guinea. Nature: Ecology and Evolution 1(0044).
fney, D., Ford, A., Summerhayes, G.R. 2016. Sue Bulmer’s legacy in highland New Guinea: a reexamination of the Bulmer Collection and future directions. Archaeology in Oceania 51 (1): 23-32.
Gaffney, D., Summerhayes, G.R., Ford, A., Scott, J., Denham, T., Field, J., Dickinson, W.R. 2015. Earliest pottery on New Guinea mainland reveals Austronesian influences in highland environments 3000 years ago. PLoS ONE 10(9): e0134497.
Gaffney, D., Ford, A., Summerhayes, G.R. 2015. Crossing the Pleistocene–Holocene transition in the New Guinea Highlands: Evidence from the lithic assemblage of Kiowa rockshelter. Journal of Anthropological Archaeology 39: 223-246.
Book chapters
Gaffney, D. and Tanudirjo, D., 2024. Late Holocene potting traditions in the far western Pacific: Evidence from the Raja Ampat Islands, 3500–1000 BP. In Ford, A., Shaw, B., and Gaffney, D. (eds.) Forty Years in the South Seas: Archaeological Perspectives on the Human History of Papua New Guinea and the Western Pacific Region. Australian National University Press: Canberra.
Shaw, B., Ford, A. and Gaffney, D. 2024. Glenn Summerhayes’ forty years in the south seas. In Ford, A., Shaw, B., and Gaffney, D. (eds.) Forty Years in the South Seas: Archaeological Perspectives on the Human History of Papua New Guinea and the Western Pacific Region. Australian National University Press: Canberra.
Gaffney, D., Zmigrod, L. 2023. Historicising creativity: an interdisciplinary perspective across the social and natural sciences. In Porr, M. and Weidtman, N. (eds.) One World Anthropology and Beyond: A Multidisciplinary Engagement with the Work of Tim Ingold. Routledge: London.
Gaffney, D., Denham, T. 2021. The archaeology of social transformation in the highlands of New Guinea. In McNiven, I. and David, B. (eds.) The Oxford Handbook of the Archaeology of Indigenous Australia and New Guinea. Oxford University Press: Oxford.
Summerhayes, G.R., Leavesley, M., Szabo, K., Gaffney, D. 2019. Kamgot at the lagoon’s edge: site position and resource use. In Bedford, S. and Spriggs, M. (eds.) Debating Lapita: Distribution, Chronology, Society, and Subsistence. Terra Australis 52. Australian National University Press: Canberra.
Gaffney, D., Summerhayes, G.R., Mennis, M., 2019. A Lapita presence on Arop/Long Island, Vitiaz Strait, Papua New Guinea? In Bedford, S. and Spriggs, M. (eds.) Debating Lapita: Distribution, Chronology, Society, and Subsistence. Terra Australis 52. Australian National University Press: Canberra.
Gaffney, D. 2019. Technological process in Pre-colonial Melanesia. In Flexner, J. and Leclerc, M. (eds.) Archaeologies of Island Melanesia: Current Approaches to Landscapes, Exchange, and Practice. Terra Australis 51. Australian National University Press: Canberra.
Reviews
Gaffney, D. 2021. Review of ‘The Spice Islands in Prehistory: Archaeology in the Northern Moluccas, Indonesia,’ by Bellwood (ed.). Asian Perspectives: The Journal of Archaeology for Asia and the Pacific, 60(1).
Community books
Gaffney, D., Tanudirjo, D.A., Djami, E.N.I., Macap, A., Russell, T. 2023. An Archaeology of Waigeo, Raja Ampat Islands, West Papua. University of Otago Working Papers in Anthropology, 8. Archaeology Programme, University of Otago: Dunedin, NZ. ISBN: 978-0-9922626-7-9.
Gaffney, D., Summerhayes, G.R., 2017. An Archaeology of Madang, Papua New Guinea. University of Otago Working Papers in Anthropology, 5. Department of Anthropology and Archaeology, University of Otago: Dunedin, NZ. ISBN: 978-0-9922626-4-8.