Study Archaeology

Amy Roberts, a Matthew Flinders Professor, is an archaeologist and anthropologist who is committed to meaningful and long-term collaborations with Traditional Owners. She primarily works with Aboriginal communities in South Australia. In particular she has worked closely with Aboriginal peoples from the River Murray and Yorke Peninsula regions. 

Amy is a Future Fellow for the ARC project 'From Baskets to Boomerangs: Lifeways, Knowledges and Colonial Legacies', the lead investigator for the ARC Linkage projects 'Rockshelters and Rock Art in the River Murray Gorge: New Data and Syntheses' and 'White People had the Gun: Interrogating the Riverland's Colonial Frontier' and is a CI on the following Linkage, Discover and LIEF projects 'Co-designing Aboriginal Digital Museology Frameworks in the Southern Gulfs', 'Ochre Archaeomicrobiology', 'A National Facility for the 3D Imaging of the Near Surface' and 'Australian Microarchaeology and Palaeosciences Facility (AusMAP)'.

Prior to her appointment as an academic at Flinders University Amy worked as an expert to the Federal Court for a number of native title cases – including for the First Peoples of the River Murray and Mallee Region which achieved a successful determination. She continues to work in a consulting capacity on native title, Aboriginal heritage and stolen generations matters. She is currently a member of the ARC's College of Experts.

Claire Smith is an anthropological archaeologist whose research focusses on how Indigenous knowledges can enrich archaeological theory, method and practice.

With Wiradjuri archaeologist, Kellie Pollard, Claire is Co-Lead of the Australian Hub for the Center for Braiding Indigenous Knowledges and Science. Claire's deep research into Aboriginal ways of being, knowing and doing is based on long-term relationships of trust. She has worked with Aboriginal people in the Barunga region, Northern Territory, every year since 1990, with Ngadjuri people since 1998, and with Adnymathahna people since 2020. 

Claire was the principal supervisor for the first two Aboriginal people to be awarded a PhD in archaeology: Dr Chris Wilson in 2017 and Dr Kellie Pollard in 2019. 

As the twice-elected President of the World Archaeological Congress (2003-2014), Claire is dedicated to advancing academic knowledge by expanding opportunities for Indigenous peoples and scholars from countries with low exchange rates.

Dr Ian Moffat is an archaeological scientist who mainly works with geological techniques. His principal research focus is examining the effect of climate variation on human evolution based on sediments from archaeological rock shelter sites in South Africa, Indonesia and Australia. Applying methods including geophysics, sediment analysis and isotope geochemistry, he is developing new climate proxies and understanding the depositional history of these sites.

A related area of interest is the isotopic and trace element analysis of biogenic materials (including tooth, bone and otoliths) to examine mobility, diet, maternal behaviour and climate. This includes the analysis of the mobility of animals in Palaeolithic France and Israel, the maternal behaviour of early hominins and the diet and mobility of colonial era migrants in Adelaide, using recent developments in the field of laser ablation analysis to undertake spatially resolved in-situ measurements.

Professor Liam Brady is originally from Canada with West Indian (Trinidad & Tobago), Venezuelan and Irish heritage. He completed his undergraduate studies in sociocultural anthropology at Wilfrid Laurier University (Waterloo, Ontario) and was then awarded a scholarship to travel to Monash University to undertake his PhD studies on the rock art of the Torres Strait Islands.

Prior to joining Flinders University in 2020, he was a tenured Senior Lecturer and Associate Professor at the Monash Indigenous Studies Centre (Monash University), and an ARC Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Western Australia’s Department of Archaeology.

Over the last 20 years he has crafted his research program around multidisciplinary approaches to Indigenous cultural heritage with a focus on integrating Indigenous knowledge into understanding the "archaeological record" (rock art, stone artefacts, rockshelter occupation sites etc.).

Mike is a geoarchaeologist with over 20 years’ experience working in both academic and commercial environments. His primary area of expertise is the study of archaeological site formation processes and the reconstruction of palaeoenvironments at various scales through the study of site micro- and macro-stratigraphy, geological sequences and geomorphological landforms. He is interested in reconstructing changes in geomorphological systems (e.g., river behavioural change) and the implications of these dynamics on humans (and hominins) living in—and interacting with—these landscapes. He has worked widely in Europe, North Africa (Sudan, Libya), southern Africa (South Africa, Lesotho), Middle East (Oman, Bahrain, UAE, Saudi Arabia) and Southeast Asia (Malaysia, Vietnam, Indonesia, Myanmar, East Timor).

Mike is currently an ARC Future Fellow, leading a project that will reconstruct the ground conditions present at various Late Pleistocene sites across Southeast Asia during periods of site occupancy and abandonment. He will use these data to gain a better understanding of the environmental conditions preferred by modern humans and other co-existing hominins as they dispersed through the region and ultimately onto the Australasian mainland.

Growing up in the Netherlands, a nation famed for its maritime heritage, Wendy van Duivenvoorde became fixated on the sea. Drawn to archaeology at university, she jumped at the opportunity to volunteer on dives at maritime archaeological sites, sealing her fate as a scholar captivated by the histories of the deep. 

Dr van Duivenvoorde came to Australia to be involved in the study of the Batavia, a Dutch East India Company vessel built in Amsterdam that was wrecked on its maiden voyage on the West Australian coast, at a time when the waters of the southern hemisphere were largely uncharted – and 150 years before Captain Cook mapped Australia’s eastern coastline. The loss of the Batavia and the trail of mutiny and murder that followed the disaster fostered huge interest in the excavation of the wreck after it was rediscovered in 1963.