Veronica Walker Vadillo is the PI of this Three-Year Research Grant project funded by the University of Helsinki. She holds a BA+MA in Spanish and European History (2005, Universidad de Alcala), an MA in Maritime Archaeology (2008, UCL, UK), and a DPhil in archaeology (2017, St. Cross College, Oxford Centre for Maritime Archaeology, University of Oxford, UK), after which she earned a position at the Helsinki Collegium for Advanced Studies (2018-2020). Since completing her MA, Walker Vadillo’s work has been devoted to Southeast Asia, looking specifically at the role of waterways in the development of the Angkor Empire. She has successfully applied the Maritime Cultural Landscape perspective for the first time in the Mekong, a fruitful approach that enabled her to further our knowledge on the study of human responses to amphibious landscapes and tease out Angkor’s fluvial (riverine) cultural landscape. She is currently finalizing her work at Collegium, which centres on human-environment interactions in the Mekong river, especially in regards to fish migration patterns, fishing economies, and the rise of social complexity in the first millennia CE. The Ports and Harbours of Southeast Asia is a progression of her work on shipping logistics and the social processes involved in establishing shipping networks. You can find more about her previous work here.
Walker Vadillo is a very active member of the maritime archaeology community of Southeast Asia. She has been in the scientific committee of the Asia-Pacific Regional conference on Underwater Cultural Heritage since 2011, and a member of the organizing committee since 2012. She has organised numerous workshops, sessions, conferences, and seminars on maritime archaeology, including the Ancient Maritime World Seminar of the Oxford School of Archaeology, the 4th Postgrad Conference in Conflict Archaeology (University of Oxford), and the Maritime Archaeology Graduate Symposium MAGS (University of Southampton/University of Oxford), and is currently in the organizing committee of IKUWA 7, the largest conference on underwater and maritime archaeology. She is also the co-editor of the BAR Publishing series “Cultural Studies in Maritime and Underwater Archaeology.
Wesa Perttola is an archaeology instructor at the University of Helsinki, specialised in fieldwork and jack-of-all-trades in technologies applied to field archaeology (GIS, total stations, laser scanning, photogrammetry, archaeogeophysics etc.). He holds an MA in archaeology (2005, University of Helsinki). Wesa will join the team as a salaried PhD student supported by the University of Helsinki 3 Year Research Grant. His work will combine GIS and digital spatial data sets, along with archaeological and historical material to study the functioning of the maritime trade networks of Southeast Asia from an environmental perspective. The working title of his thesis is: ‘Ports of Call on the Silk Road of the Sea: Geospatial Analysis of a Maritime Trade Network and Human Interaction in Early Modern Southeast Asia’
Phacha Phanomvan is a consultant and Visiting Postdoctoral Researcher of the Ports and Harbours of Southeast Asia Project. Phanomvam is a historical economic geographer and global historian. She specialises in urban growth, trade, and institutional transformation of the global south, particularly looking at junctions between South and Southeast Asia. She is a GCRF funded grant holder to investigate the methods to build community resilience against art crime, and is currently coordinating a research led policy platform to develop tertiary cities with major historic built environment. In 2017, both Phanomvam and Walker Vadillo were invited to participate in the UNESCO Expert Meeting for the nomination of the Maritime Silk Road for the World Heritage list (You can download the event program here).