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Staff Profiles

Dr Mick Atha

Landscape Analyst (Research Associate)

Background

Aged 16, I mistakenly embarked on a 5-year technician apprenticeship in a Dickensian crane works in Leeds. Two decades later I completed a BSc Archaeology degree at Bradford, worked around the circuit for a while, and then in the mid-noughties did an MA and PhD at York focused on the social contexts of late prehistoric and Roman landscape change. A late-flowering but interesting archaeological career has taken me to many parts of the British Isles, also to Germany and, between 2007 and 2021, to Hong Kong (HK). As a licensed archaeologist in HK, I directed field research on a diversity of site types and periods, published some site reports and co-authored a book on HK archaeology (in English and Chinese), and also ran my own heritage consultancy and editing firm. I also spent the last 10 years teaching archaeology and landscape studies in the Department of Anthropology at the Chinese University of HK. Beyond work, I enjoy listening to rock music, reading, hiking, birdwatching, playing cricket for Stocksfield CC, listening to cricket on TMS, and following the ups and downs of LUFC. 

Research

At the heart of my archaeological research is a long-standing interest in exploring the ways that past people, when faced with particular socio-historical circumstances, engaged with the world around them, thereby creating new places and inscribing the physical environment with layers of social meaning. The result of those interactions is the historic landscape we encounter today, which, as Ingold so beautifully put it, "is pregnant with the past".

My present Research Associate (Landscape Analyst) role is supporting the work of a Newcastle University and Northumberland CC team, comprising myself, Rob Collins, David Brough and Stelios Lekakis of UNEW and John Scott of NCC, tasked with conducting a pilot study for the Climate Change and UNESCO Heritage Project focused on the Hadrian's Wall WHS.

My recent MSCA fellowship at Newcastle took my training in British landscape archaeology and subsequent 14-year immersion in Hong Kong's Chinese socio-historical and archaeological context, and exploited their contrasts and synergies using state-of-the-art GIS-based mapping, spatial analysis, and interpretive techniques to advance our understanding of HK’s historic landscape. A key focus of the research was the long-abandoned, pre-colonial cultivation terraces that blanket the mountainous uplands in their thousands. Having identified suitable terraced slopes in remote sensing data (e.g. old APs & LiDAR), the team (myself, Sam Turner, Tim Kinnaird & Kennis Yip, supported by colleagues from the HK Antiquities and Monuments Office) visited HK in autumn 2023 and sampled 16 partially collapsed terraces in four mountainous locations using geoarchaeological and geoscientific (OSL) methods. The samples, which were processed and analysed in the CERSA luminescence laboratory at St Andrews by Tim Kinnaird and his colleague Aayush Srivastava, assisted by me, have yielded the first scientifically-dated chronology for upland land use in HK. Based on mentions of mountain tea growing in an early Qing dynasty historical document dated AD 1688, the terraces in the highest mountains of the central New Territories were conventionally assumed to be early Qing, or perhaps Ming, in date (c.C15-17 AD) but have now known to have been constructed between the C11th-17th AD (Song to Qing dynasties). In contrast, the terraces on Laughing Buddha Mountain (Nei Lak Shan), on Lantau Island, about which very little was known, were found to date from the C14-15 (Ming) but also included one terrace that surprisingly produced a date of construction in the Tang dynasty (C8th AD).

Teaching

My decade of undergraduate and postgraduate teaching at the Chinese University of Hong Kong included courses on: 

  • Archaeological Field Methods
  • Transdisciplinary Landscape Studies
  • Archaeology of Hong Kong
  • Introduction to Archaeology
Publications