 Okie dokie. Firstly thanks very much to Eza for bullying me here today. She's been the one of the main focus or one of the main drivers of some of this work so she said you've got to come so thanks for that. I'm going to be talking today about an area that is a bit probably obscured or a lot of you I suspect. So before I launch into some of the kind of results and things we've found and I should say I've got some results I've also got sort of broad ideas. I wanted to talk and spend a little bit of time on some context stuff. There's a couple of reasons for this. One New Zealand's about as far away from where we are here as you could possibly get and the other reason is the archaeology is a bit obscure as I said. So I was genuinely asked when I came to UCL if this was our archaeology is the Lord of the Ring stuff. It's not it's a little bit more ephemeral than that but we're going to talk a little bit about that. So the point of that is not just to sort of give you the background on New Zealand but it's also hopefully to link some of the questions that we're asking with broader themes globally which I actually think in a weird way while New Zealand is a very late prehistory while it's a very different prehistory it does connect quite nicely to some of the themes that you see around the world. So I'm going to start even broader than New Zealand very quickly and talk a little bit more about the Pacific because this is the really jumping off point. So New Zealand down the bottom now south west of this big kind of shark thin shape thing you can see there. The other corner is being Rapa Nui or Easter Island as many of you will know and the Hawaiian Islands up at top. Now this area is what most people call Polynesia. So in here you have societies within this region are ancestrarily linked, ancestral cultural connections of course that means they've got very similar genetics, very similar linguistics and to a large extent the degree to which these societies are similar or different from one another is to do with the settlement process in the region. So very, very, very quickly there's about three broad pulses of settlement. The first comes out to the first red arrow you can see there the dotted line and that's in the Pleistocene that settles Australia, Ugini, all that sort of thing. The second pulse doesn't occur until around 3,500 BP with the Lepida people and that's the first truly oceanic movement of people. That sweeps along the top of Ugini. I'm just going to do my weatherman impression. It sweeps along the top of Ugini coming out as far as Samoa and Tonga and that takes about 500 years so that's a long way in a very short time. Once they get to Samoa and Tonga they stop for about 2,000 years and this is what I mean by it's kind of interesting to see how these things relate to continental environments. So once they get to Samoa and Tonga there's a pause of about 2,000 years and there's the development of what you might call an ancestral Polynesian society which then explodes out over the rest of this triangle in about 300 years and this triangle is about a quarter of the Earth's surface so we're not talking about small distances here it also gets to South America and comes back as well. So it's very rapid. Now the nature of that settlement is again very similar to what you see elsewhere. It's what you might call a Neolithic package I suppose, what we call a transported cultural landscape. So people are taking plants, animals, ideas, beliefs, all that sort of stuff with them to new islands. And the other thing I suppose this is the real jumping off point and the reason I talk more broadly about Polynesia is that you can see that an awful lot of this movement from west to east is happening in that tropical band. And if we think about this in terms of some of Peter Bellwood's ideas about the movement of horticulturalists and agriculturalists the speed of that settlement probably shouldn't be that surprising in that it is going along relatively similar climatic ranges. I hastened where there are fairly serious differences locally here but in general terms there is this kind of similarity. But you can see I think you can probably see the point I'm about to make. You can see the big exception to this is down here. This is a massive jump and this is a north-south jump against the grain climatically so to speak and this is what Bellwood would refer to as a high friction move. So this is a difficult move to move down across things like that. Now for us what this means of course is that we have to consider exactly how these people with a culture that's adapted to a tropical environment has made this jump. I mean and this isn't the equivalent of say moving along the same latitude perhaps over ground because there is no transitional point here. People come from southern cooks and they move 2000 miles down to New Zealand probably took about a month so that one month they're in a tropical environment the next they might be in a temperate environment. So this is a pretty big pretty big change. And you can also see one last footnote New Zealand sits across because it's very long and thin. New Zealand's approximately the same land mass as the UK but it's longer so it sits across those different bands so we might expect some differences. So in terms of what we kind of think we know in New Zealand there are some serious problems. What we do know is that that movement south lowers productivity so of the 20 odd species of plants that Polynesians take with them to other islands six or five or six depending on who you listen to actually get established in New Zealand and the yield of those plants is around about half as much as it is elsewhere. You just can't get the yield off them as much. The concentration of this yield is very much up here. This is a distribution map of hillfort sites effectively which are associated with agricultural land so you can see there's a big concentration up there. And the final thing to say is that the very bottom half of the South Island is too cold for a domesticated species so there's no water culture there whatsoever. So there you see quite a clear reversion to hunter gathering and foraging. Population wise all these things of course are interconnected. The lower yields mean that generally speaking the estimates are a bit dodgy but generally speaking New Zealand population is considered to be much lower than the per kilometer squared readings or numbers that we get from elsewhere like Hawaii or places like that and it's not just lower it's much lower. But in terms of our models of what population actually looks like we just sort of steal them from Polynesia and generally speaking it's the logistic model where there's water culture and below this line here which is the non-water cultural region down here we assume some kind of collapse associated with the loss of faunal resources which is the mainstay of the economy down there. Now you might expect when I was talking about with friction you might expect there to be a concentration of people in the north early because that's the most similar to the environments that people came from but in fact what we find is that there's an awful lot of settlement down here which is the constant where the where the large game resources concentrate but again hasten to add there's some problems with I'm sure there's some problems with preservation and recovery bias here. And so these these settlements are based around exploitation of wild game basically hunting out patches and then moving on and what happens in terms of the area that I'm quite interested in in terms of the water cultural zone is that because most of the data is from here what happens is people just pick it up and dump it over up in the North Island and that doesn't seem particularly useful. So that's a sort of starting point we have generic models from Polynesia that aren't necessarily that useful we have a lot of derived models from other regions that might not be that useful in terms of understanding the development and the actual establishment of food producing systems and we have no real empirical checks of either of them. So with for his sins and Riko Prima has been working with me a little bit on some of this population stuff so we're trying to deal a little bit with trying to address what the actual population models look like and rather than it's just these sort of broad generic models. I think a lot but given the audience I'm going to assume that most of you are familiar with the SPD method and our carbon which and retail and any revenue developed so I'm not going to talk specifically about the details necessarily but just some of the results. So what we did first just sort of broadly divided up New Zealand into optimal sub-optimal and non-water cultural zones we were interested to see if that temporal banding that we talked about here had an impact on population and we expected that it would and we then compared it we used a model testing approach that I haven't shown here compared it to just a basic logistic fitted logistic model and what we found broadly speaking was that horticultural zone logistic growth was pretty fair. I should hasten to add this isn't what I'm talking about. So in where there's horticulturalistic logistic growth is a pretty reasonable model but in the south it didn't work at all and we sort of expected that. So then we used the fermentation test and so what this does rather than compare our data with an idealized model what we're doing here is appearing each region with the underlying growth treated across the whole country. So what we're trying to find out here is to what extent does a one particular region vary from the overall growth around New Zealand and you can see if I start with the south you can see that our observed data vastly overshoots the expectations of the model in that early period and undershoots represented by the blue the bottom here in the later period and this 1450 date lines up almost bang on with the decline of large or big game resources in the south. So we're quite we're recently happy with that we felt that that was a there's a reasonable connection to be made there with food producing or the nature of of where you're getting your food but in the north whereas most archaeologists would argue that it's just logistic we found that when you use the fermentation test you can tease out a little bit more data than that. So in the first instance I just say that there is you can see that the early period there is in the blue both the central and northern regions is undershooting the expectations of the model. So perhaps you could argue that this is an opportunity cost for establishing for not going after the big Kentucky fry chicken down in the South Island and seals and all the rest of it but actually trying to establish a more solid base of resources but you can see very much in the later period this is completely different than most of the growth is on trend with the model or exceeding it and one more thing that we just mentioned very quickly is that it's quite interesting to note that in the north that that initial boom that red area that you can see in the middle there fits quite nicely with some of the oral traditions that we have that suggests that that's the concentration of early growth and that actually there's a sort of recolonisation of the central zone by Māori groups after that and we're actually picking that up in the central region a little bit as well I think with this red area here which is suggesting that growth is exceeding the expectations of our model. So we can maybe connect that to some of the oral traditions of say of internal population movements which is not only sort of refining our understanding of population but also perhaps lining up quite nicely with some of the oral traditions which in New Zealand are quite solid and quite nice. We've done a little bit more work that focuses on sort of sub-regional patterns as well but I've decided not to sort of talk about that but broadly speaking that sort of breaks down even the classifications that we have here and it suggests that you know that local variation is quite important as well so beyond region or even a finer scale in region. So just to wrap up very quickly I've only got a few minutes left the ADU may speak and as I said this is very much in development and basically this is born out of the problem that we have in New Zealand which is that we have this model of settlement that is largely based on something that isn't really appropriate but we don't have an awful lot of sites that we can say but this is what's going on we certainly don't have almost any early horticultural sites they are there but they're very rare and so rather than trying to establish what's going on there by using the very small data points that we have talking to ESA we sort of started thinking about using agent based modelling to get at this issue by just trying to sort of theory build I suppose or model build using ABM so it's very simple it's just a question of how groups of people might settle high friction unfamiliar environments given certain parameters and so what we hopefully hopefully do is sort of compare the variation the different models that we come up with and also try and then compare that to the what archaeological data would you have so it's a relatively simple method and we're in really you know it's very early stages yet but it's just focusing on the clustered resources which is very much the case in New Zealand it's a lot of areas that you can grow crops a lot of areas that you can't and we're just asking a simple question basically if somebody moves into a new environment and they satisfy they're happy with what they can see what happens if they invest heavily in that area they put all their eggs in one basket and what happens if they perhaps do that process get some crops up and running and then decide to move on and try that on the sort of a loop and of course each have got costs because if there's some kind of stochastic process that they're not aware of or climate goes bad or just that they've chosen the wrong place if they've invested heavily there's obviously a massive problem with that however if they move on they've got the problem of transportation and trying to reap those gardens so it's just as I say very early stages but that's what we're sort of trying to get at so I will with that finish up thanks very much