[Aqualist] ARC Future Fellowships announced

[Simon Haberle]

Dear all,
A nice Christmas present for some of our finest mid-career researchers. Congratulations to all those who were successful in the recent announcement of ARC Future Fellowships for 2016.

Merry Christmas,

Simon


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FFs in Quaternary Research and related disciplines (incl Archaeology)

The Australian National University
Dr Timothy Denham
The project aims to address a major question in world archaeology: why did some people develop agriculture, while others did not? It plans to establish plant macrofossil and microfossil reference collections for three wet tropical regions: highland Papua New Guinea, Moluccas in eastern Indonesia, and western Arnhem Land in Australia. It then plans to use previously excavated archaeobotanical assemblages to establish robust plant-use chronologies for these regions. In this way, the project seeks to develop capacity for tropical archaeobotany within Australia and to revolutionise concepts of plant exploitation, domestication and cultivation in tropical Australasia and Wallacea during the Holocene (last c.11 500 years). $791,191

University of Wollongong
Associate Professor Zenobia Jacobs
This project will endeavour to yield new insights into human evolution by addressing the critical question of when Homo sapiens, Neanderthals and Denisovans occupied the Altai region of Russia: the only place on Earth where these three groups of humans are known to have existed. No consensus exists on the timing of key events, the nature of any interactions or the impact of environmental changes. This project plans to use optical dating to construct a highly resolved timescale for the archaeological and human fossil assemblages over the last 800 000 years. This may transform our understanding of the spatial and temporal patterns of human occupation by these three groups and their behaviours in similar or different environments. $946,035

Griffith University
Dr Mathieu Duval
The project seeks to contribute to our understanding of early human evolution in the Mediterranean and provide tested dating methods for Early Pleistocene sites. It aims to answer a major question in Quaternary geochronology and Mediterranean archaeology - when hominins reached the edges of the Mediterranean - by building more robust chronologies for Early Pleistocene sites located in non-volcanic context. After testing a series of dating protocols at known-age localities, the project plans to apply a new multi-technique dating approach combining different numerical methods and Bayesian modelling on a range of Lower Palaeolithic sites in three key areas: Southern Spain, Northern Africa and the Near East. $692,015

The University of Western Australia
Professor Alistair Paterson
This project plans to use archaeology to write the first modern synthesis of Australia's north-west: a region hosting significant cultural, natural and heritage values including two National Heritage List estates. The project plans to conduct work at significant sites and collections which will build on recent exciting archaeological and rock art discoveries and theoretical innovations to analyse the cross-cultural encounters between Aboriginal people, Europeans and Asians in frontier colonial society. The project aims to provide data and tools for understanding and managing nationally-significant threatened archaeological resources valuable for future tourist industries. $917,637