University of California Berkeley
I joined the Berkeley faculty at the beginning of 1989 and I have held the Class of 1954 Chair since 1994. Geographically, my field of research encompasses the Pacific Islands, with particular concentrations in Melanesia and Polynesia. Substantively and theoretically, I am interested in the origins and diversification of the cultures and peoples of the Pacific, in the evolution of complex sociopolitical formations (especially "chiefdoms"), in prehistoric as well as ethnographic subsistence systems (especially those involving some form of intensification), and in the reciprocal interactions between indigenous peoples and the island ecosystems of the Pacific.
Representative Publications
2001. Hawaiki: Ancestral Polynesia: An Essay in Historical Anthropology. Cambridge University Press. (with Roger Green)
2000. On The Road of the Winds: An Archaeological History of the Pacific Islands Before European Contact. Berkeley: University of California Press.
2000. Historical Ecology in the Pacific Islands. Yale University Press.
1999. The Lapita Peoples. Oxford: Blackwell.
1994. The Wet and The Dry: Irrigation and Agricultural Intensification in Polynesia. University of Chicago Press.