University of Wollongong

Post-Doc, Centre for Archaeological Science

Australian Research Council Postdoctoral Research Fellow

About

I am a research fellow in archaeology at the Centre for Archaeological Science, University of Wollongong, Australia. 

At present I am involved in the search for the ancestor of Homo floresiensis (aka the ‘Hobbit’), the small-bodied hominin from the Late Pleistocene of western Flores, eastern Indonesia.  To this end I direct (with Mike Morwood) a five-year (2010-2015) research project based in the So’a Basin of Flores, 'In Search of the First Asian Hominins'.  The aim of this project, which is funded by the Australian Research Council and draws together a team of over 20 Indonesian, Australian, European and North American researchers, including archaeologists, paleontologists and geochronologists, among others, is to recover fossil evidence of the progenitor of the ‘Hobbit’. 

Elsewhere in Indonesia, I am involved with various fieldwork projects in the southwestern peninsula of Sulawesi, again with the aim of uncovering evidence for earliest human habitation on this fascinating Wallacean island, a crucial stepping-stone on the colonisation route to Flores.

I completed my Ph.D in archaeology at The Australian National University (Canberra) in 2007.  Since then I have held postdoctoral research fellowships at the McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research, University of Cambridge (2007-2009), and CAS (2009-present).  In addition to the project described above, I am chief investigator on a separate Australian Research Council project (2009-2012), looking at patterns of hominin stone reduction in Pleistocene Southeast Asia. 

Outside Indonesia, I have conducted grant-funded fieldwork and lithic analyses in India and England and contract-based archaeology in various remote parts of Australia, such as the Pilbara and the Barkly Tableland of northwest Queensland.

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