origin story by heritage new zealand
Andrew Brown has built a successful career immersed in New Zealand archaeology. So how did he get involved in the quest to unearth the secrets of the mysterious Stonehenge?
Read below for a full excerpt from the Heritage New Zealand Summer 2021 issue, ORIGIN STORY.
Full excerpt:
For Andrew (Andy) Brown the opportunity to help uncover the secrets of one of the world's most famous monuments started with a knock on his door.
Mike Parker Pearson, Stonehenge scholar and giant of the UK archaeology scene, is also famed for shouting students a beer. So when the University College (UCL) Professor of British Later Prehistory called in to the Kiwi’s university office, the then-PhD student heeded the call and headed to the pub.
“We were having a beer and I said to Mike, ‘Do you have any digs on?’ because I’d been in the UK for more than a year and hadn’t done any digging, and ready wanted to,” recalls Andy, now a Whangārei-based consultant archaeologist.
“He said, ‘Yeah, we’re going to Wales. Do you want to come?’”
That invitation led to Andy working a number of stints on the Stones of Stonehenge Riverside Project - a major archaeological study of Stonehenge and its landscape, which ran from 2003 to 2009.
Stonehenge’s smaller bluestones (as opposed to its larger sarsens) originated in the Preseli Hills in Wales - around 230 kilometres away from where the monument stands today on Salisbury Plain, Wiltshire. The Stones of Stonehenge Project - which drew on experts from a wide range of fields - aimed to locate the quarries from which the bluestones had been sourced. It also sought evidence to support the theory that the stones were actually part of an earlier monument erected much closer to their source, and later disassembled and re-erected in Wiltshire.
“The findings of the project really showed Stonehenge in a different light,” says Andy. “It was remodelled a number of times and the bluestones were always a park of it. When you start engaging with Stonehenge in that way, you see it much more as a living, changing monument.”
Stonehenge’s place of origin is a world away from Andy’s own - and far from the focus of his career.
Although instilled with a passion for history by her parents during his childhood on a farm just outside Hāwera, Andy can’t recall an ‘aha’ moment when he realised archaeology was his calling.
“When I went to uni, it was to study archaeology; it wasn’t with a sense that I was going to be an archaeologist. I’d never met anyone who was an archaeologist, and more than a few people said to me, ‘How are you going to get a job doing that?’”
It was in his honours year at the University of Otago, when he joined a research group led by Richard Walter, and Chris Jacomb looking at the first century of Māori settlement, that a fire was really lit.
“We did a number of excavations of early sites. I was always just one of the team, and I found it cool looking at things like ovens; and it’s not just one object, you can see from its features how a village might have been laid out and how people were living in that space.”
That work proved a launching point for his academic career. For his master’s degree he looked at changes in material culture in early Māori settlements in Otago, then explored the topic more widely - looking across New Zealand and incorporating other factors like demography - during his PhD at UCL, which is among the top three universities globally for archaeology.
“One area of my master’s that really interested me was how you account for changes in material culture. One of my particular areas of interest was evolutionary theory - think about how artefacts change in a way that’s analogous to genetics, where some characteristics are selected for, and others piggyback or change in frequency through random processes.
“Stephen Shennan, a professor at UCL, is a thought leader in the space, so I thought I’d be cheeky and send him an email. He said he’d be interested in supervising, and that’s how my PhD started.”
Andy’s research continued during three years of postdoctoral study at Bournemouth University as a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow.
Work on the Stone of Stonehenge Project punctuated his time in the UK. Initially, while at UCL, he was involved in excavating two quarry sites - at Craig Rhos-y-felin and Carn Goedog in Wales, identified as sources of the bluestones.
Later, while at Bournemouth University, he helped supervise a large geophysical survey, led by Kate Welham, Professor of Archaeological Sciences, to identify possible origin Stonehenge sites.
“The last year I was there we surveyed a site called Waun Mawn - a weather-beaten place on the Welsh hillside and we found some stone holes. The year after I left, they found more - and they’re fairy convinced that’s the location of the first erection of stones.”
In 2019 Andy returned to New Zealand from the UK. He now runs an archaeological consultancy, which in association with Whakatāne-based archaeologist Lynda Walter, carries out projects spanning the upper North Island.
But connections made through the Stones of Stonehenge Project continue.
Josie Hagan joined the project as a first-year archaeology student of Kate Welham, and with an interest in New Zealand, she struck up a conversation with Andy at the pub after a day’s fieldwork.
The pair kept in touch, with Andy later supervising Josie’s undergraduate dissertation at Bournemouth University, where she investigated the suitability of using LIDAR, 3D laser scanning, to explore New Zealand archaeological sites.
Her interest in New Zealand archaeology piqued, Josie has since moved here, undertaking archaeology work from Lynda, and now doing her master’s degree at the University of Otago. Due to finish in March 2022, he project is combining cultural mapping with traditional archaeological methods at a land block just south of Gisborne, exploring how this can support the aspirations of the Māori landowners.
“As undergraduates, we don’t study New Zealand archaeology in the UK, so there a lot to get my head around when I did my dissertation. But having Andy as my supervisor was brilliant, because he’s just so passionate about New Zealand archaeology,” says Josie.
“Now that I’m here, I feels like it’s a dream come true. It’s been a steep learning curve, but I can’t believe I’m actually here, that I have this job in archaeology, and how different my life is from two years ago.”
Likewise for Andy, the passion for the work continues.
“It’s such a cool job, and a good fit for my personality,” he explains.
“You’re always in different situations and get to talk to everyone from CEOs to digger operators, explaining what you want to do and why.
“The nature of the job means you’re also often outside, digging and exploring. Then there’s the discovery aspect, where you’re right on the edge, interpreting something tactile that’s right in front of you.”
Camp Waihi
“There are so many great places that l've had the privilege to go to and work at over the years, but in the end my favourite heritage places has to be somewhere in my turangawaewae - south Taranaki.
The place has so many layers of history, with sites from throughout the pre-European period, the New Zealand Wars and beyond into the agricultural period when so many, now disused, dairy factories sprang up.
The site I’d single out in Camp Waihi, south of Normanby and near where I grew up. The camp was the headquarters of the armed constabulary during the conflict with Titokowaru; the redoubt’s ditches have been ploughed by are still just visible in the paddock. It is marked by a small, often overgrown cairn made of river boulders. On the ground below is a soldiers’ cemetery associated with the camp where many of the casualties from Te Ngutu o te Manu are buried alongside more recent burials.
Right next to the cemetery is Pikituroa Pā, which has a number of storage pits circled by a deep defensive ditch. Little is known about Māori occupation of the site, but its defences were re-used for a redoubt prior to the construction of Camp Waihi. What I love about this place is that is has all these aspects of history interacting within such a small area.”
