University of New England - Australia

Faculty Member, Archaeology & Palaeoanthropology

Australian Research Fellow

About

I am an archaeologist with a particular interest in stone tool flaking methods.  My interest in this began as a child, when I self-taught myself stone flaking techniques in an attempt to duplicate the stone points found on my father's farm in Indiana.  I attended junior high and senior high fieldschools with Northwestern University at Kampsville and finished my BA in anthropology at Indiana University in 1987.  I began my MA studies at the University of Alaska, Fairbanks, in 1987 and I attended Jeff Flenniken’s Fieldschool in Lithic Technology in 1988.  I completed my anthropology MA in 1990 and worked as a lithic analyst at the Tosawihi Quarries in Nevada.  I emigrated to Australia in 1996 and continued as a consultant until 2002, finishing my PhD in archaeology at the University of New England in 2005.  I was the lithic analyst for the research team that discovered Homo floresiensis at Liang Bua, Flores, Indonesia in 2003 and I continue to collaborate with colleagues in Flores research.  I was a Lecturer in Archaeology and Palaeoanthropology at the University of New England in 2005 and 2008.  The Australian Research Council awarded me a three-year Postdoctoral Research Fellowship (2006-2009, as sole investigator) and a five-year Australian Research Fellowship (2010-2014, as sole investigator) to continue my research into stone tools and evolution.

My research specialization is reconstructing the methods and techniques used in prehistory to flake stone into tools.  One of my research interests involves the ‘design space’ of stone flaking and the implications of this for the ‘standard sequence’ and hominin evolution and behaviour in Australasia and beyond.  My fellowship is experimentally-based and explores the range of variation in core shapes generated by simple stone flaking techniques in the absence of hominin ‘intent’.  A second area of research involves reconstructing and interpreting Australian and Indonesian stone reduction sequences and in developing and refining analytical methods for reduction sequence analysis.  At present I am analysing a number of stone artefact assemblages from collaborative research in the Kimberley region of Northwest Australia, Southeast Queensland, the Soa Basin on Flores, and the Wollanae Basin on Sulawesi.  An ongoing project is to refine my stoneworking skills through the exploration of various knapping techniques.  Right now these include the intricacies of serial pressure flaking, including transverse-parallel and collateral techniques; and indirect percussion, including notching techniques like that seen on certain Midwestern points and quadrifacial flaking used to made adze blanks in parts of Indonesia and Denmark.

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