Name: A Household Mission and a Mission of Houses: Comparative Historical Archaeology in Oceania
Start: 2026-05-07T07:30:00+12:00
Location: Tūhura Otago Museum

A Household Mission and a Mission of Houses: Comparative Historical Archaeology in Oceania

Join us for our annual Ian Smith Memorial Lecture with James Flexner.
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 outcome of this research was the contextualisation of historic Christian mission sites within Māori landscapes in the Bay of Islands. Building on this foundational work, James Flexner presents 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 centred on modelling European domestic life for Indigenous converts—what can be described as the “household mission” model. The second, examining 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 highlights the incorporation of Christianity into Oceanic worlds during a period of ecological, demographic, and material upheaval between the 1830s and the 1900s.
Speaker bio
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, where he completed a study of the Hawaiian leprosarium on Moloka‘i. Since then, he has 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 first inspired to study Pacific archaeology during a semester abroad at the University of Otago in 2003, where he studied under Ian Smith.
5.30pm, Thursday 7 May
Hutton Theatre
Free