Prof Rowley-Conwy, who was born of Welsh and Danish parents, is a professor of archaeology at Durham University, England.
He gave a public lecture at Otago University this week on "Antipodean Archaeology and the Wider World".
The ancient voyages of discovery and settlement that brought people across thousands of kilometres of the Pacific, from New Guinea to Fiji, by about 3000 years ago, and further major voyages, about 2000 years ago, were "fantastic" achievements, he said.
These ancient Pacific journeys ranked alongside the Eskimo settlement of the Arctic and the flights to the moon as "the three most remarkable things the human race has ever achieved," he said.
Two of those feats had also been accomplished using Stone Age technology, he added.
The achievements of early Pacific voyagers, which had been clarified with the help of New Zealand and Australian archaeologists, also had potential wider significance in interpreting the development of early agriculture in the northern hemisphere, he said.
European anthropologists had long believed that the spread of early agriculture into Western and Northern Europe had been mainly by people moving on foot.
However, given the effectiveness of early Pacific boating technology, he was sceptical of oft-repeated claims that it had been "too early for boats" in Europe.
Major rivers like the Rhine and the Danube may have been used to move people and some of their animals by boat into previously hunter-gatherer domains in Europe, given that huge forests and boggy areas, where wolves and bears also lurked, would be difficult to cross on foot, he said.
The Otago University department of anthropology, gender and sociology was internationally respected as a centre for archeological science.
Several current and former Otago University anthropologists, including current departmental head Prof Glenn Summerhayes, Prof Atholl Anderson and Prof Charles Higham, were internationally well known.
Several archeological sites in New Zealand, including the Shag Point settlement area in Otago, were also well-known abroad, and Prof Rowley-Conwy regularly included that Otago site in his teaching.
