Associate Professor Stuart Bedford

Associate Professor Bedford has been involved in archaeological research across the archipelago of Vanuatu for almost 30 years.

He has led a series of excavations on a number of founding (Lapita) settlements on different islands that date to 3,000 years ago.

His work has contributed to profiling the earliest populations through aDNA, identified a whole range of extinct fauna and tracked human and environmental transformations over millennia to the present. Human adaptation to natural hazards is a current focus. Colonial violence in the 19th and early 20th century is also a passion.