J L Flexner
Biographic Data
| ID | 20650 |
|---|---|
| NAME | J L Flexner |
| GIVEN NAMES | J L |
| FAMILY NAME | Flexner |
| SIGNATURE | FLEXNER J L |
| AFFILIATIONS | The University of Sydney |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-2577-5991 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 57 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 123 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 57 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2008 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 6 |
Terre pour leurs jardins (Earth for their gardens)
Since the turn of the millennium, thousands of pages have been published ruminating on community archaeology. What was once promised as an area of critical self-reflection in the field, has sometimes led to broad assumptions about what ‘community’ wants from its archaeological heritage. For archaeologists who work with Indigenous communities, it is worth interrogating whether there is widespread community interest in archaeology at all. This pape…
Spatial organization and materiality in Polynesia’s earliest Catholic cemeteries, Mangareva Islands, French Polynesia
Processes of religious conversion in Oceania during the nineteenth century involved transformations of everyday life, belief, and worship, alongside a re-evaluation of relationships with ancestors, spirits, and the worlds of the dead. These changes were materialized in the creation of different types of cemeteries that departed from long-established mortuary practices. In French Polynesia, the first long-term foothold for Roman Catholicism was es…
Direct dating of colonial-era coral building materials using the U-Th method in the Mangareva Islands, French Polynesia
In colonial settings, missionary construction projects often dramatically transformed local architectural styles and settlement patterns. The relatively young age of these activities means that colonial chronologies are often based on documentary evidence or artefact typologies rather than chronometric determinations. Here, the author explores the use of uranium-thorium dating for coral blocks from a series of missionary-style buildings with unkn…
Anarchist Theory and Inequality in Archaeology
This article considers anarchist archaeologies and how an approach to inequality shaped by anarchist values and modes of analysis can help us narrate more complex pasts and build more equal futures. The nature and impact of inequality are central concerns across humanities and social science disciplines. Archaeologists have long studied social differentiation, focusing primarily on the origins and cross-cultural articulation of inequality. An ana…
Islands under Surveillance
Modern societies sought to control their populations through programs of mass education and surveillance. The origins of this practice had roots in Europe, but were quickly exported to colonial contexts around the world, including the Pacific Islands. While schooling and surveillance are currently often associated with state institutions, historically Christian missions were also critical to the spread of these phenomena in colonized territories.…
Repatriation and Ethnographic Archives
Just over 100 years after Katherine Routledge's 1921–1922 expedition to the Mangareva Islands, digitized copies of a portion of her field notes from the Royal Geographical Society (with IBG) in London were returned to the source community in French Polynesia. Historical ethnographic fieldnotes represent an underutilized primary source of cultural knowledge in repatriation activities as part of a broader push by cultural institutions to decolonize…
Chroniques insulaires dans le Pacifique Sud
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Interdisciplinarity as solidarity
Twenty-first century academia increasingly resembles a Hobbesian ‘war of all against all’. Individual scholars constantly fight for positions, research funding and media attention while their universities fixate on rankings, rewards or recognition that can be lorded over peer institutions. Indeed, even within the same institution, schools or faculties can behave like rival factions in a gang, each competing with the others to gain prestige, advan…
Changing subsistence practices in pre-European populations of South Vanuatu
First analysis of diet practice of pre-European individuals from South Vanuatu using carbon and nitrogen data from bone collagen. • An expanded baseline of local resources based on taxonomic identification by proteomic determinations (Zooarchaeology by Mass Spectrometry). • South Vanuatu humans would have consumed mainly marine coral reef fish, C3 plants, and mangrove resources. Differences in dietary patterns between the islands of South Vanuatu…
Optimism, utopia, and blue-green futures for the archaeology of Oceania
An Anarchist Archaeology of Equality
Scholars of the past frame the ‘origins’ or evolution of inequality, usually using archaeological or anthropological evidence as a basis for their arguments, as an intentional, inevitable, important step towards the development of states, implicitly framed as the pinnacle of human political and economic achievement. Anarchist archaeologies reject the idea of hierarchy as a positive or inevitable evolutionary outcome underlying the path to civiliz…
Developing a holistic and collaborative approach for the archaeology of Australian South Sea Islanders in Queensland
Australian South Sea Islanders are a distinctive cultural group comprising descendants of over 60000 labourers who came to Australia from Vanuatu, Solomon Islands and elsewhere in the Western Pacific between 1863 and 1904. “Blackbirded” labourers were commonly referred to as victims of a slave trade, though many also came voluntarily to work in the sugar plantations of northern New South Wales and Queensland. The advent of racist exclusionary imm…
A 600–700‐year‐old basalt adze production site from Mount Bates, Norfolk Island
While pre‐European settlement of Norfolk Island has been recognised for many decades, particularly the larger settlement site at Emily Bay, until this point there has been limited understanding, and very little systematic recording of evidence for inland settlement. This report presents the location, chronology, stratigraphy and artefact assemblage of a previously undocumented lithic production site from Mount Bates in the north‐western uplands o…
Archaeology in 2022
Archaeology in 2022 features more calls than ever for a socially and politically engaged, progressive discipline. Archaeologists increasingly respect and integrate decolonizing and Indigenous knowledge in theory and practice. They acknowledge and embrace the fluidity and diversity of sexes and genders, past and present. They document patterns of migration, ancient as well as contemporary, to combat retrograde and racist narratives that remain per…
The colonial buildings of the Mangareva Islands, French Polynesia
In Historical Archaeology Francophone Catholic missions have been studied less commonly than Anglophone, Protestant ones. A survey of the islands of Akamaru, Aukena, Mangareva, and Taravai in the Mangareva Islands (Îles Gambier) of French Polynesia recorded over 100 standing structures related to Catholic missionary activities beginning in the 1830s. These structures form a unique assemblage of surviving colonial buildings in a Polynesian archipe…
Grassroots badly burnt
Here we salute the exceptional contributions of five ni-Vanuatu, who passed away over the last year, to the archaeological understanding of Vanuatu and the wider Pacific over a 50-year period. They were all at one time members of the Vanuatu Cultural Centre’s unique network of Filwokas (fieldworkers) who are involved in protecting, promoting and preserving the country’s cultural heritage. Their careers spanned the pre and post-Independence (1980)…
‘With the consent of the tribe
It is now something of a cliché to talk about the sale of Indigenous lands for what is seen as a pittance in contemporary terms, and to ask whether ‘the natives’ really understood what was being sold. A variety of sources, from archival to archaeological and oral historical, can be brought to bear on the colonial history of relationships to land. Missionary records from Tanna and Erromango, Vanuatu, provide evidence for the ways that people in th…
The Future of Museums
The following conversation took place on 18 May 2021 during a panel discussion to coincide with marking the six months since the opening of the Chau Chak Wing Museum at the University of Sydney, along with the annual occurrence of International Museum Day
Archaeology and Kastom
Recent expansion of alternative frameworks for archaeological interpretation, particularly non-Western ones, provides an opportunity to revisit and challenge orthodox narratives in the discipline. The Melanesian concept of kastom provides a framework to understand contradictions arising from the selective nature of colonial-era culture change. One facet of these transitions is the widespread adoption and integration of Christian beliefs and pract…
The Dawn of Everything
Fear of a cannibal island
Archaeological landscapes of colonial encounter were shaped to varying degrees by mutual mistrust, misunderstanding, anxiety, and the inherent terror of frontier violence. In the mission encounters of Island Melanesia, the colonial trope of 'cannibalism' added a particular tinge to these fears of the colonized other. Mythologies of cannibalism both repulsed and motivated Christian missionaries who were led to places such as Erromango in the New H…
Intégration polynésienne au Vanuatu (Mélanésie)
Certaines sociétés humaines modernes de l’archipel du Vanuatu (Mélanésie) présentent des traits culturels polynésiens et parlent des langues polynésiennes. Ces caractéristiques diffèrent de celles des autres sociétés présentes dans l’archipel qui sont apparentés aux influences mélanésiennes régionales. On suppose que des migrations polynésiennes auraient particulièrement contribué à la formation de ces sociétés « polynésiennes » du Vanuatu lors d…
Prefabrication, Patrilineality, and Intergenerational Reuse
Archaeology, anarchism, decolonization, and degrowth through the lens of Frase's four futures
An abstract is not available for this content so a preview has been provided. Please use the Get access link above for information on how to access this content
Questioning Collapse
Degrowth and a sustainable future for archaeology
It is increasingly acknowledged that 21st-century archaeology faces serious challenges from a variety of directions, ranging from the theoretical to the practical. Above all, the discipline's entanglement with capitalism, capitalist ideologies and capitalist institutions is simply unsustainable. The concept ofdegrowthinvolves a reconceptualization of archaeology's possible future(s) in terms of a withdrawal from capitalism and an emphasis on coll…
Bead grinders and early Swahili household economy
This paper focuses on a specific class of locally made artifacts known in the archaeological literature of the eastern African coast as bead grinders. Bead grinders are discarded potsherds or stone cobbles distinguished by long grooves abraded into their surfaces. Although they are some of the most commonly located artifacts on late first-millennium AD coastal sites, few close analyses of them have been conducted. Here we examine a particularly l…
Mission sites as indigenous heritage in southern Vanuatu
Christian missions are often characterized as a physical expression of Western colonial power, institutions that were resisted by indigenous people in various ways. In Vanuatu, while there was indeed dramatic resistance to mission incursion, the success of Christianity in many places (for not everyone converted) developed from a series of complex entanglements between indigenous Melanesians and Christian missionaries. This is apparent in oral tra…
Historical Archaeology, Contact, and Colonialism in Oceania
Archaeology in 2022
Archaeology in 2022 features more calls than ever for a socially and politically engaged, progressive discipline. Archaeologists increasingly respect and integrate decolonizing and Indigenous knowledge in theory and practice. They acknowledge and embrace the fluidity and diversity of sexes and genders, past and present. They document patterns of migration, ancient as well as contemporary, to combat retrograde and racist narratives that remain per…
Ethnology collections as supplements and records
Nineteenth-century ethnological collections can supplement what is found in archaeological assemblages because they include objects unlikely to appear on archaeological sites, which either don't normally preserve, are extremely rare or were intentionally destroyed in the past. However, collections are not neutral samples of what existed in past societies. They are biased by what collectors chose to take, and what was offered by the makers of ethn…
Because it is a Holy House of God”
Archaeology and Kastom
Recent expansion of alternative frameworks for archaeological interpretation, particularly non-Western ones, provides an opportunity to revisit and challenge orthodox narratives in the discipline. The Melanesian concept of kastom provides a framework to understand contradictions arising from the selective nature of colonial-era culture change. One facet of these transitions is the widespread adoption and integration of Christian beliefs and pract…
Anarchy and Archaeology
Anarchist theory is having a ‘moment’ in the social sciences. A growing number of scholars draw on anarchist thought to conceptualize human history and offer solutions grounded in direct democracy for a range of modern ills, including racism, sexism, and structural violence. As scholars wake to the realization that universities have become instruments for the advancement of capital, and as contemporary politics continues to embrace ethnonationali…
Sherds of Paradise
Postmedieval protestant missionaries working in exotic locations used objects both as a marker of their own ‘civilisation’ in contrast to that of the local populations and as a means of engaging these communities with Christianity. European things were displayed and conspicuously used to encourage a consumer mindset and interest in capitalism, thought to be crucial steps on the path to full conversion. Excavations at a Presbyterian mission house …
Iarisi's Domain
Archaeological data provide a critical perspective on the emergent relationships between Melanesians and Europeans during the mid-nineteenth century. Particularly important to the discussion are the native landscapes within which Europeans settled. As part of a larger exploration of early missionary settlement in southern Vanuatu, archaeologists working closely with local fieldworkers surveyed the native villages at Kwaraka and Anuikaraka, south …
Detecting exchange networks in New Britain, Papua New Guinea
Compared to elsewhere in Oceania, the history and character of stone axe‐adze production and exchange in the Bismarck Archipelago is very poorly known. To explore the feasibility of using geochemical analysis to trace past social interaction, we conducted a non‐destructive portable XRF study of 97 ground stone artefacts from archaeological contexts in New Britain and the ethnographic collection at the Australian Museum. The study capitalised on t…
Archaeologies of Island Melanesia
The island world of Melanesia-ranging from New Guinea and the Bismarcks through the Solomons, Vanuatu, and New Caledonia-is characterised more than anything by its boundless diversity in geography, language and culture. The deep historical roots of this diversity are only beginning to be uncovered by archaeological investigations, but as the contributions to this volume
Reform and Purification in the Historical Archaeology of the South Pacific, 1840-1900
An Anarchist Archaeology of Equality
Scholars of the past frame the ‘origins’ or evolution of inequality, usually using archaeological or anthropological evidence as a basis for their arguments, as an intentional, inevitable, important step towards the development of states, implicitly framed as the pinnacle of human political and economic achievement. Anarchist archaeologies reject the idea of hierarchy as a positive or inevitable evolutionary outcome underlying the path to civiliz…
Archaeology, anarchism, decolonization, and degrowth through the lens of Frase's four futures
An abstract is not available for this content so a preview has been provided. Please use the Get access link above for information on how to access this content
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Extensive cemeteries from Aniwa Island, Vanuatu, provide evidence for historical transformations in ritual practice among Christian islanders that continue through the present day. These cemeteries contain novel grave forms, including many lined with coral and mortar upright slabs that were not present on the island traditionally. The graves largely post-date European missionary presence on the island. They represent an indigenous adaptation of i…
Doing Archaeology in Non-State Space
Non-state space can be defined as a type of social space in which permanent hierarchies of various sorts are actively resisted or prevented from emerging. I reflect on my experiences working as an archaeologist doing collaborative field research on Erromango Island, Vanuatu, which fits many of the characteristic features of non-state spaces. Fieldwork on Erromango reflects paradoxical habits of scepticism regarding outsiders, while being welcomin…
Destruction of the 1912 Lenakel Church (Tanna, Vanuatu) in Cyclone Pam, and Thoughts for the Future of the Site
Fear of a cannibal island
Archaeological landscapes of colonial encounter were shaped to varying degrees by mutual mistrust, misunderstanding, anxiety, and the inherent terror of frontier violence. In the mission encounters of Island Melanesia, the colonial trope of 'cannibalism' added a particular tinge to these fears of the colonized other. Mythologies of cannibalism both repulsed and motivated Christian missionaries who were led to places such as Erromango in the New H…
Prefabrication, Patrilineality, and Intergenerational Reuse
After the missionaries
Archaeology of traditional religious sites in Polynesia tends to focus on the “pre-contact†era, before religions were transformed by European influence. An historical archaeology of traditional religious sites is essential, however, for understanding the relationship between 21st-century traditional or indigenous religious beliefs and practices, and the transformations wrought during the colonial era. Traditional religion certainly did not disapp…
An Institution that was a Village
Bead grinders and early Swahili household economy
This paper focuses on a specific class of locally made artifacts known in the archaeological literature of the eastern African coast as bead grinders. Bead grinders are discarded potsherds or stone cobbles distinguished by long grooves abraded into their surfaces. Although they are some of the most commonly located artifacts on late first-millennium AD coastal sites, few close analyses of them have been conducted. Here we examine a particularly l…
Foreign Animals, Hawaiian Practices
Archaeological research on the Hansen’s disease settlement at Kalawao, Moloka‘i highlights the relationship between the institutional mandates of the Hawaiian Board of Health, and the village organisation evident in the physical remains of the leprosarium. One aspect of this work focuses on the role of animals in the settlement, using archaeological surface remains as well as faunal remains recovered from excavations. Zooarchaeology in Kalawao re…
An Institution that was a Village
Historical Archaeology, Contact, and Colonialism in Oceania
The Historical Archaeology of States and Non-States
Pat Kirch’s work throughout Oceania has been driven by the idea that islands lend themselves especially well to comparative analysis. Recently, Kirch has argued that the most elaborate forms of Oceanic socio-political hierarchy, ideological control, and agricultural intensification evolved in the Hawaiian archipelago, resulting in the emergence of archaic states. In Vanuatu, in contrast, elite power was much less institutionalized, and nothing st…
Mapping Local Perspectives in the Historical Archaeology of Vanuatu Mission Landscapes
The concept of place is a powerful theoretical tool in the social sciences and humanities, which can be especially useful in archaeological work that involves community-based collaboration. Using place as a starting point, archaeologists can beneficially use their skills to answer questions that are of relevance to the local communities with which we work while also advancing knowledge about the past. For historical archaeology, this often involv…
Ma’i Lepera
Reviewed by: Ma’i Lepera: Disease and Displacement in Nineteenth-Century Hawai’i by Kerri A. Inglis James L. Flexner Kerri A. Inglis. Ma’i Lepera: Disease and Displacement in Nineteenth-Century Hawai’i. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2013. xviii + 268 pp. Ill. $24.00 (978-0-8248-3635-1). The story of leprosy isolation on the island of Molokai is a familiar one for Hawaiian historians, although newly emerging sources and approaches to Hawai…
Under the mission steps
Archaeological excavations at the late-19th century mission house at Kwamera, south Tanna Island, Vanuatu uncovered an inhumation directly underneath the mission step. Radiocarbon dating of the context revealed this burial to date to the 12th or 13th century AD. In addition to providing new information about the deeper past on Tanna, this finding provides some interesting material for thinking about long-term relationships to ancestors and sacred…
Iarisi's Domain
Archaeological data provide a critical perspective on the emergent relationships between Melanesians and Europeans during the mid-nineteenth century. Particularly important to the discussion are the native landscapes within which Europeans settled. As part of a larger exploration of early missionary settlement in southern Vanuatu, archaeologists working closely with local fieldworkers surveyed the native villages at Kwaraka and Anuikaraka, south …
Destruction of the 1912 Lenakel Church (Tanna, Vanuatu) in Cyclone Pam, and Thoughts for the Future of the Site
Because it is a Holy House of God”
Mission sites as indigenous heritage in southern Vanuatu
Christian missions are often characterized as a physical expression of Western colonial power, institutions that were resisted by indigenous people in various ways. In Vanuatu, while there was indeed dramatic resistance to mission incursion, the success of Christianity in many places (for not everyone converted) developed from a series of complex entanglements between indigenous Melanesians and Christian missionaries. This is apparent in oral tra…
Dark and Bright Futures for Museum Archaeology
Archaeology and Ethnographic Collections
The archaeological value of museum collections is not limited to collections labelled “archaeology.” “Ethnology” or “ethnography” collections can provide useful information for evaluating broadly relevant theoretical and methodological discussions in the discipline. The concepts of provenience (where something was found), provenance (where the materials for an object originated), and context (the ways an object is and was interpreted and used wit…
Sherds of Paradise
Postmedieval protestant missionaries working in exotic locations used objects both as a marker of their own ‘civilisation’ in contrast to that of the local populations and as a means of engaging these communities with Christianity. European things were displayed and conspicuously used to encourage a consumer mindset and interest in capitalism, thought to be crucial steps on the path to full conversion. Excavations at a Presbyterian mission house …
Ethnology collections as supplements and records
Nineteenth-century ethnological collections can supplement what is found in archaeological assemblages because they include objects unlikely to appear on archaeological sites, which either don't normally preserve, are extremely rare or were intentionally destroyed in the past. However, collections are not neutral samples of what existed in past societies. They are biased by what collectors chose to take, and what was offered by the makers of ethn…
After the missionaries
Archaeology of traditional religious sites in Polynesia tends to focus on the “pre-contact†era, before religions were transformed by European influence. An historical archaeology of traditional religious sites is essential, however, for understanding the relationship between 21st-century traditional or indigenous religious beliefs and practices, and the transformations wrought during the colonial era. Traditional religion certainly did not disapp…
Visualising Hawaiian Sacred Sites
In the early 1900s, Australian-born archaeologist John F.G. Stokes was the first to extensively use modern surveying techniques and photography to document Hawaiian archaeological sites. Stokes carried out fieldwork for a Bishop Museum-based research program driven by interests in Polynesian origins and Hawaiian religious change, focusing specifically on the monumental temple sites called heiau in Hawaiian. Using a sample of the visual record of …
Reform and Purification in the Historical Archaeology of the South Pacific, 1840-1900
Preliminary Results of the South Vanuatu Archaeological Survey
South Vanuatu was an important hub of settlement and interaction in the tropical southwestern Pacific. A recent field project, the South Vanuatu Archaeological Survey, has begun carrying out field research, focusing initially on the islands of Futuna, Aniwa, and Tanna. This work builds upon pioneering research carried out in the 1960s, which in these islands has not been followed up until the last five years or so. We present initial findings fro…
Who was Polynesian? Who was Melanesian? Hybridity and ethnogenesis in the South Vanuatu Outliers
Archaeological constructions of past identities often rely more or less explicitly on contemporary notions of culture and community in ways that can sometimes oversimplify the past and present. The archaeology of European colonialism has shown the proliferation of ‘hybrid’ identities that emerged from relatively recent cross-cultural encounters (though this concept is not without its critics). We argue that this perspective can also inform interp…
Anarchy and Archaeology
Anarchist theory is having a ‘moment’ in the social sciences. A growing number of scholars draw on anarchist thought to conceptualize human history and offer solutions grounded in direct democracy for a range of modern ills, including racism, sexism, and structural violence. As scholars wake to the realization that universities have become instruments for the advancement of capital, and as contemporary politics continues to embrace ethnonationali…
Doing Archaeology in Non-State Space
Non-state space can be defined as a type of social space in which permanent hierarchies of various sorts are actively resisted or prevented from emerging. I reflect on my experiences working as an archaeologist doing collaborative field research on Erromango Island, Vanuatu, which fits many of the characteristic features of non-state spaces. Fieldwork on Erromango reflects paradoxical habits of scepticism regarding outsiders, while being welcomin…
Detecting exchange networks in New Britain, Papua New Guinea
Compared to elsewhere in Oceania, the history and character of stone axe‐adze production and exchange in the Bismarck Archipelago is very poorly known. To explore the feasibility of using geochemical analysis to trace past social interaction, we conducted a non‐destructive portable XRF study of 97 ground stone artefacts from archaeological contexts in New Britain and the ethnographic collection at the Australian Museum. The study capitalised on t…
Archaeologies of Island Melanesia
The island world of Melanesia-ranging from New Guinea and the Bismarcks through the Solomons, Vanuatu, and New Caledonia-is characterised more than anything by its boundless diversity in geography, language and culture. The deep historical roots of this diversity are only beginning to be uncovered by archaeological investigations, but as the contributions to this volume
Archaeology (41 works) · Pacific and Southeast Asian Studies (40 works) · History (38 works) · Sociology (31 works) · Geography (27 works) · Archaeology and ancient environmental studies (24 works) · History (22 works) · Anthropology (20 works) · Historical and Cultural Archaeology Studies (19 works) · Colonialism (17 works)