Rate My Professor Tim Denham

Professor Tim Denham is Professor of Archaeological Science and Head of the School of Archaeology and Anthropology at the Australian National University (ANU). He earned a BA (Hons) from Cambridge University, an MS from Penn State University, and a PhD in 2004 from ANU under Professor Jack Golson, focusing on the emergence of agriculture at Kuk Swamp in the New Guinea highlands. Initially trained as a geographer, Denham spent six years as a consultant archaeologist primarily in Hawai‘i and England before beginning his PhD at ANU in 1997. Following his doctorate, he lectured in soil science at Bournemouth University (2001-2002), archaeology at Flinders University (2002-2004) and La Trobe University (2013), and environmental change at Monash University (2009-2012) during his Monash Research Fellowship (2006-2012). Upon returning to ANU in 2013, he convened the Masters of Archaeological Science program until 2015, served as Associate Dean (HDR) in the College of Arts and Social Sciences (2015-2016), held an Australian Research Council (ARC) Future Fellowship (2016-2020) investigating plant exploitation, cultivation, and domestication in the wet tropics, and leads the Geoarchaeology Research Group (GRG) and TropArch (Tropical Archaeobotany).

Denham's research centers on the exploitation, cultivation, and domestication of vegetatively reproducing plants such as bananas in New Guinea, Island Southeast Asia, northern Australia, and southern China; geoarchaeology and environmental change; microCT applications in archaeobotany for identifying domestication traits in pottery sherds and parenchyma; and revising Holocene histories of these regions, including Austronesian dispersal and the Lapita phenomenon. Notable publications include 'Origins of agriculture at Kuk Swamp in the Highlands of New Guinea' (Science, 2003), editor of Rethinking Agriculture: Archaeological and Ethnoarchaeological Perspectives (Left Coast Press, 2007), 'Early agriculture and plant domestication in New Guinea and Island Southeast Asia' (Current Anthropology, 2011), 'Multidisciplinary perspectives on banana (Musa spp.) domestication' (PNAS, 2011), 'Convergent evolution and parallelism in plant domestication' (PNAS, 2014), Tracing Early Agriculture in the Highlands of New Guinea: Plot, Mound and Ditch (Routledge, 2018), and editor of Ten Thousand Years of Cultivation at Kuk Swamp in the Highlands of Papua New Guinea (ANU Press, 2017). As primary author and coordinator, he contributed to Papua New Guinea’s successful UNESCO World Heritage nomination of the Kuk Early Agricultural Site (2008). His scholarship, cited over 11,000 times, advances understandings of early agriculture, human-environment interactions, and multidisciplinary archaeobotany.