Rate My Professor Ian Barber

Professor Ian Barber serves as Professor in the Archaeology Programme at the University of Otago's Division of Humanities. Promoted to full Professor in 2022, his research interests include New Zealand Māori and Moriori archaeology, cultural change and contact, archaeological resource management and politics, anthropology of revitalisation and religion, and agricultural innovation and introductions in New Zealand and Polynesia. He specialises in the study of dynamic historical environments, including new uses of the past, applying innovative and frequently interdisciplinary theory and methods to investigate changing relationships between material and social environments. Barber works closely and in collaboration with several New Zealand Māori and Chatham Island Moriori communities in research.

Barber has received two Royal Society Marsden awards: as Principal Investigator for UOO1415 “Pushed to the limits,” concerned with tropical agricultural contributions and adaptations, and as Associate Investigator for UOO1322 with P. Wehi as PI, concerned with animal-human relationships in the Polynesian colonization of New Zealand. In 2010, he was awarded the Fulbright New Zealand Senior Scholar Award to study links between the past and present in revitalization movements, focusing on LDS (Mormon) communities in the US and Polynesia, during which he was based in the Department of Anthropology at Brigham Young University, Utah, in Fall 2011. He served as Visiting Fellow at Princeton University (Center for the Study of Religion) in 2006. Key publications include Barber, I. G., & Benham, R. W. (2024). American sweet potato and Asia-Pacific crop experimentation during early colonisation of temperate-climate Aotearoa/New Zealand. Antiquity, 98(401), 1376-1394; Barber, I. G., & Higham, T. F. G. (2021). Archaeological science meets Māori knowledge to model pre-Columbian sweet potato (Ipomoea batatas) dispersal to Polynesia's southernmost habitable margins. PLoS ONE, 16(4), e0247643; and Barber, I. G. (2020). Lands of contrast: Latter-day Saint societies in New Zealand/Aotearoa and Australia. In R. G. Shepherd, A. G. Shepherd & R. T. Cragun (Eds.), The Palgrave handbook of global Mormonism (pp. 455-474). He has delivered public lectures, including his Inaugural Professorial Lecture "Archaeology and the mātauranga science debate" at the University of Otago in June 2023, and national media and public lectures in New Zealand and the USA (Georgetown University and The Field Museum, Chicago, October 2011).