Chris Urwin is a research fellow at Monash University and the Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence for Australian Biodiversity and Heritage. He conducts archaeological and museum-based research with Indigenous communities in Australia and the Pacific. He researches how people build places through time, and how personal and community histories are constructed when artefacts are collected and exchanged. Urwin has held a postdoctoral fellowship at the National Museum of Natural History (Smithsonian Institution) and worked as archaeology curator in the First Peoples department at Museums Victoria (Melbourne). He continues to work with colleagues in museum institutions, serving as a Research Associate of the Smithsonian and Museums Victoria.  

Chris completed his PhD at Monash University in 2019, for which he worked with two villages in Orokolo Bay on Papua New Guinea's south coast to establish radiocarbon chronologies for their ancestral sites, alongside a program to document local oral traditions. This research has helped improve our understanding of the history of exchange and social change on PNG's south coast. Chris enjoys communicating archaeology and anthropology for a popular audience. From 2017-2019 he was social media officer for the Australian Archaeological Association.

Online magazine articles stemming from Chris' research can be found here: 

• Archaeology: Western science or global practice? (Current World Archaeology)
• Indigenous cultures have archaeology too (Sapiens.org, Wenner Gren Foundation)
• Cultural heritage key to regional development in PNG and Australia (The Interpreter, Lowy Institute) 
• Archaeology is unravelling new stories about Indigenous seagoing trade on Australia’s doorstep (The Conversation AU)
• Magic, culture and stalactites: how Aboriginal perspectives are transforming archaeological histories (The Conversation AU)

For interviews/discussions of Chris' research in the media see: 

• Indigenous seagoing trade (ABC Radio National, Counterpoint)
• Culture and Country: exploring our history, part 2 (What Happens Next? podcast, presented by Dr Susan Carland)
• Researcher finds that Orokolo Bay locals have their own form of 'Archaeology' (ABC Radio, Pacific Beat) 

Chris' research interests include:

• how Indigenous communities understand colonial-era collecting practices today
• how people build and remember their ancestral places through time
• the application of Bayesian chronological models in archaeology

His research has been funded by the Smithsonian Institution, the Australian Nuclear Science and Technology Organisation (ANSTO), the Australian Institute of Nuclear Science and Engineering (AINSE), the Australian Archaeological Association.

In 2021 he was awarded a publication subsidy by the Australian Academy of the Humanities to support his forthcoming book "Building and Remembering: An Archaeology of Place-Making on Papua New Guinea's South Coast" with the University of Hawaii Press (expected publication date: late 2022).