Atholl Anderson is a pre-historian in the Department of Archaeology and Natural History at ANU, who has undertaken extensive projects extending across the Pacific Ocean from Southeast Asia to South America and from equatorial to sub-polar regions, in addition to a current project on the human settlement of islands in the Indian Ocean. He has excavated numerous sites of early human colonisation and undertaken analyses, especially of radiocarbon chronologies, which demonstrate that patterns of migration and settlement were more episodic, less directed and generally younger than previously thought. This conclusion has led him to propose radically different explanations of Polynesian and other Indo-Pacific voyaging.