Vito Hernandez

Vito is an environmental archaeologist and geoarchaeologist. He has two decades of field research experience in archaeology, heritage and environment working in the academic and commercial sectors across Australia, Southeast Asia and Europe. He is a specialist in the study of archaeological site formation in tropical environments through the investigation of sediment micromorphology and different scales of site stratigraphy (micro to macro).

Vito was a recipient of a Flinders University International Postgraduate Research Scholarship (2020-2024). He wrote a PhD on the early dispersals and occupations of humans in the Pleistocene of Southeast Asia through a micro-geoarchaeological approach.

His PhD research forms part of the larger Australian Research Council (ARC) Future Fellowship research project of Professor Mike Morley. This larger project aims to reconstruct the ground conditions present at various Late Pleistocene sites across Southeast Asia during periods of site occupancy and abandonment to better understand the environmental conditions preferred by modern humans and other co-existing hominins as they dispersed through the region and ultimately onto the Australasian mainland. 

Currently, Vito holds a balanced (teaching and research) position at the University. Here, he teaches various topics in the undergraduate program of Archaeology and, as part of the ARC Future Fellowship project of Associate Professor Martin Polkinghorne, Resilience and Relocation: Unravelling the end of Angkor, researches the unresolved issue of Angkor's decline, among the largest pre-industrial cities on Earth, by examining human settlement, landscape management, and resilience to climatic and demographic changes.   

Vito is a member of the Flinders Microarchaeology Laboratory and an affiliated researcher of the Biogeography, Environment, Evolution and Climate Laboratory of the University of the Philippines' Institute of Environmental Science and Meteorology in Diliman, Quezon City (Philippines).