The Chancellor's column

July 2008

Meet the Monash archaeologists

On what would otherwise have been an ordinary Sunday afternoon I was privileged to launch the 'Meet the Monash archaeologists' seminar at the National Gallery of Victoria. Masterminded by Professor Marika Vicziany from the Monash Asia Institute and Dr Lucia Lancellotti from the School of Geography and Environmental Science in the Faculty of Arts, the seminar was an opportunity for Monash to showcase its archaeological research. There were five stimulating presentations, but I'll only mention two of them here.

The first was by Professor Yidilisi Abuduresule, the Research Director of the Xinjiang Archaeological Research Institute and a collaborator of the Monash Asia Institute. Professor Yidilisi described the 4,000 year-old mummies of the Taklimakan Desert in western China, astonishingly well-preserved by the dry desert air. The photographs of their desiccated faces showed some that looked aristocratic and youthful, others that looked haggard and old. The racial origin of the mummies is controversial. Based on their features and artefacts, it has been suggested they are of Indo-European origin. DNA testing already underway may yield the answer.

The second presentation was not so much about archaeology as the communication of archaeology. Archaeological data in academic papers is opaque to the layman and not very user-friendly to professionals either. As an IT specialist, masters student Matt Coller (MMM 2005) has developed an interactive map that shows geographical and population information. Unlike an ordinary map, Coller’s map has the unusual ability to fly backwards in time.

Twenty-five thousand years ago, when the sea levels plunged nearly 140 metres below their current levels, the map shows you that Australia was much bigger, so much so that it incorporated New Guinea. Instead of the Gulf of Carpentaria, there was a huge inland lake. Migration from Indonesia to Australia along the archipelago of islands was easier at that time. Watching the sea levels rise and fall, it is easy to imagine how climate change dramatically affected migration patterns.

Slide the time point back 100 million years and the map shows Australia migrate south and merge with Antarctica to form Gondwana.

Smoothly shift the time point from a mere 200 years ago to the present and you see the population spread along the east coast of Australia driven by the initial European settlement.

Presumably Matt Coller’s work foreshadows the addition of the time dimension to Google Earth in the near future. If you want to try out this visualization, go to www.sahultime.monash.edu.au. The 'Meet the Monash archaeologists' seminar is an annual event, so look out for it in May next year.

Dr Alan Finkel AM (BE 1976, PhD 1981)
Chancellor
Monash University