A household mission and a mission of houses: comparative historical archaeology in Oceania

Topic

Ian Smith, along with his partner Angela Middleton, made a remarkable contribution to the historical archaeology of Polynesian missions, among many other accomplishments. Through their collaborative work at Te Puna–Angela’s doctoral research–and Hohi, they established key themes, including the shifting roles of missionaries, not only as proselytisers, but also as traders and educators. Arguably the most significant finding of this research was contextualising historical Christian mission sites within the Māori landscapes of the Bay of Islands. Building on this foundational research, I present two major projects in the historical archaeology of Christianity in independent and autonomous Oceania. The first, focusing on the Presbyterian mission to the southern islands of Vanuatu, demonstrates a missionary project focused on modelling European domestic life for indigenous converts, the “household mission” model. The second, the French Catholic mission in the Mangareva Islands, reveals the appropriation of the European household by Polynesian converts, who constructed entire villages of stone cottages. Each case study demonstrates the incorporation of Christianity into Oceanic worlds during a period of ecological, demographic, and material upheaval between the 1830s and the 1900s.

Speaker Biography

James Flexner is Associate Professor of Historical Archaeology and Heritage at the University of Sydney. He received his PhD in 2010 from the University of California, Berkeley for a study of the Hawaiian leprosarium in Moloka‘i. He has since focused on historical archaeology in Vanuatu, French Polynesia, and the east coast of Australia, most recently as an Australian Research Council Future Fellow (2022-2026). James was inspired to study Pacific archaeology as a semester abroad student at the University of Otago in 2003, where he had Ian Smith as a lecturer.