Martin Gibbs

Biography

Martin Gibbs is Professor and Chair of Australian Archaeology at the University of New England (UNE) and has previously taught at UWA, JCU and USyd. He was elected a Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries of London in 2011.  His research is primarily on Australasian-Pacific historical and maritime archaeology, but he has also published on prehistory, ethnohistory and heritage.  Since the 1980s his research has explored different aspects of early European colonisation and colonialism in the Australasia-Pacific region, including major projects on the failed 16th Century Spanish colonies of the Pacific, 17th Century Dutch shipwrecks and survivors, and early British colonial outposts. He is Director of the Landscapes of Production and Punishment Project, a multi-disciplinary research program that reconceives convict transportation to Australia through the lens of an industrial system. The project marries the life course, big data and digital history approaches used by historians with archaeological site and analyses. Digital outputs include the ‘New South Wales Archaeology On-line’ grey literature database and the award-winning ‘Convict Landscapes: Locating Australia’s Convicts 1788-1868’ website.