Staff Profiles

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, for the last fourteen years, 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. 

At the heart of my archaeological research is a long-standing interest in exploring the ways that past people, when faced with particicular 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 research fellowship at Newcastle takes my training in British landscape archaeology and subsequent 14-year immersion in Hong Kong's socio-historical and archaeological context, and exploits their contrasts and synergies using state-of-the-art GIS-based mapping, analytical, and interpretive techniques to advance our understanding of Hong Kong’s historic landscape, in particular in the mountainous uplands. 

My undergraduate and postgraduate teaching over the last decade in Hong Kong included courses on: 

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

• Atha M. Ephemeral Landscapes. In: Howard P; Thompson I; Waterton W; Atha M, ed. Routledge Companion to Landscape Studies. London: Routledge, 2019, pp.113-126.
• Atha M, Howard P, Thompson I, Waterton E. Introduction. In: Howard P; Thompson I; Waterton W; Atha M, ed. Routledge Companion to Landscape Studies. London: Routledge, 2019.
• Howard P, Thompson IH, Waterton E, Atha M, ed. The Routledge Companion to Landscape Studies. Abingdon: Routledge, 2019.
• Atha M, Yip K. 南丫沙埔拼圖：考古調查與景觀重建 (Piecing Together Sha Po - Chinese version). Hong Kong: HKU Press, 2018.
• Atha M, Yip K. Piecing Together Sha Po: Archaeological Investigations and Landscape Reconstruction. Hong Kong: HKU Press, 2016.
• Atha M. A neglected heritage: towards a fuller appreciation of the landscapes and lifeways of Hong Kong’s rice farming past. Asian Anthropology 2012, 11(1), 129-156.