Humanities and Social Sciences

Archaeology Program

Staff Directory

Dr Nicola Stern

Senior Lecturer & Postgraduate Coordinator Room:Martin Building, Room 159 Tel: (61 3) 9479 2429 Fax: (61 3) 9479 1881 Email: n.stern@latrobe.edu.au Qualifications: BA(Hons) Sydney, MA Harv, PhD Harv.

Dr Nicola Stern is a Palaeolithic Archaeologist interested in the contribution that archaeology makes to our understanding of the narrative and dynamics of human evolution. Her research interests straddle both ends of the time scale, and include investigation of Early Stone Age sites in Kenya and late Pleistocene sites in Australia. A general interest in the problem of how we know what we think we know about the distant past has spawned a series of more specific interests. These include investigations into the way that sites form, the information that can be generated from chipped stone artefacts, and the palaeoecological and behavioural information that can be generated from agglomerations of material remains scattered across ancient landscapes. She has a particular interest in the way in which the passage of time impacts on the structure of the archaeological record and the implications of this for the information archaeologists can hope to generate about the past.

Research Projects

FxJj43: investigating the behavioural and evolutionary significance of the earliest archaeological traces FxJj43 is one-and-a-half million-year-old locality in the Koobi Fora Formation on the eastern side of Lake Turkana, in northern Kenya, preserving the activity traces of early African Homo erectus.

The Southern Forests Archaeological Project