María Cruz Berrocal is the leader of the NAO research line. While working on prehistoric settlement and rock art in Fiji, she became aware of the existing large gap in historical, anthropological and archaeological research in the Pacific regarding early
European colonialism (16 th -17 th centuries). In 2010 an opportunity to work on early colonialism in Taiwan arose out of the collaboration between her institution at the time, the CSIC, and the National Science Council of Taiwan. Since then, research on the colony of San Salvador in northern Taiwan has been ongoing, complemented by investigations on Alofi (Wallis and Futuna) and Rota (2022, 2024-2025).
María Cruz Berrocal is a researcher at the Institute of Heritage Sciences, CSIC, Santiago de Compostela, Spain. She has previously been a researcher in different institutions such as University of California, Berkeley; Academia Sinica (Taipei); the Zukunftskolleg, Universität Konstanz, Germany; and a tenured researcher at the International Institute of Prehistoric Research, Universidad de Cantabria, Santander, Spain.
