Staff profile

Dr Nicola Stern

Senior Lecturer, Postgraduate Coordinator (Archaeology)

Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences

School of Historical and European Studies

MB 159, Melbourne (Bundoora)

 

Qualifications

BA (Hons-Sydney), MA (Harvard), PhD (Harvard).

Area of study

Archaeology

Brief profile

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 the Early Stone Age in East Africa and the late Pleistocene of Australia. A general interest in the problem of how we know what we think we know about the distant past has spawned more specific interests, including investigation of the way sites form, the information that can be generated from chipped stone artefacts, and the 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 site formation processes and time structure the archaeological record and the implications of this for the information archaeologists can hope to generate about the past.

Research interests

Archaeology of Asia, Africa and the Americas

- African archaeology

- Australian archaeology

- Landscape archaeology

- Palaeolithic archaeology

- Site formation processes and issues of time & scale

- The evolution of human behaviour

Teaching units

  • ARC1DOH Dawn of Humanity
  • ARC23PAL Palaeolithic Archaeology
  • ARC23ANT Ancient Technologies
  • ARC23AFR African Archaeology

Recent publications

Books

  • Simon Holdaway and Nicola Stern, 2004. A Record in Stone: The Study of Australia's Flaked Stone Artefacts, Aboriginal Studies Press, Canberra and Museum Victoria, Melbourne.

Journal articles and book chapters

  • Frankel, D. and N. Stern. 2011. Karremarter—Mid to Late Holocene stone artefact production and use in the lower southeast of South Australia. Changing Perspectives in Australian Archaeology. Part V. Technical Reports of the Australian Museum, Online 23(5): 59–71.
  • Veth, P., N. Stern, J. Balme, J. McDonald, I. Davidson 2011. The role of information exchange in the colonization of Sahul, in R. Whallon, W.A. Lovis and R.K. Hitchcock (eds.), Information and Its Role in Hunter-Gatherer Bands. Ideas, Debates, and Perspectives 5, Cotsen Institute of Archaeology Press, Los Angeles. pp.209-220.
  • Stern, N. 2009. The archaeological signature of behavioral modernity: a perspective from the southern periphery of the modern human range. In D. Lieberman and J. Shea (eds.), 2009. Transformation in Prehistory. American School of Prehistoric Research, Cambridge, MA. pp.257-288.
  • Balme, J., I. Davidson, J. McDonald, N. Stern and P. Veth. 2009. Symbolic behaviour and the peopling of the southern arc route to Australia. Quaternary International 202: 56-68.
  • Stern, N, 2008.  'Stratigraphy, facies analysis and palaeolandscape reconstruction in landscape archaeology', in Bruno David and Julian Thomas (eds), Handbook of Landscape Archaeology, California, Left Coast Press, pp. 365-378.
  • Stern, N. 2008.  'Time Averaging and the Structure of Late Pleistocene Achaeological Deposits in South West Tasmania', in Simon Holdaway and LuAnn Wandsnider (eds),Time in Archaeology: Time Perspectivism Revisited, Salt Lake City, University of Utah Press, pp. 134-148.
  • Stern, N. 2004. ‘Investigations into the structure of an Early Stone Age archaeological record in northern Kenya’, in T Murray (ed.), Archaeology From Australia, Australian Scholarly Publishing, Melbourne.
  • Stern, N. 2004. ‘Recent excavations at FxJj43 in the Okote Member of the Koobi Fora Formation, Northern Kenya’, Proceedings of the Prehistoric Society, 70: 233-258.
  • Stern, N. 2002. FxJj43, an Early Stone Age locality in northern Kenya. Antiquity 76: 925-6.
  • Stern, N., N. Porch & I. McDougall. 2002. ‘FxJj43: a window into a 1.5 million-year-old palaeolandscape in the Okote Member of the Koobi Fora Formation’, Northern Kenya. Geoarchaeology 17: 349-392.

Research projects

Human responses to long term landscape and climate change in the Willandra Lakes World Heritage Area.

The Willandra Lakes World Heritage Area is an icon of Australia’s Indigenous past and the continent’s ‘Ice Age’ history but surprisingly little is known about the lives of the people who once lived this area. This multi-disciplinary endeavour, which is being undertaken in close collaboration with the Elders’ Council of Willandra Lakes World Heritage Area, is designed to build a systematic record of the technological and economic strategies and social networks that people devised to deal with the dramatic and long term changes in landscape and environment that have characterized this climatically sensitive area on the edge of the continent’s arid core.

Research Grants

2010-2012: ARC Discovery Project, Human responses to long term landscape and climate change in the Willandra Lakes World Heritage Area, with Colin Murray-Wallace Kathryn Fitzsimmons

2007-2009: ARC Linkage Project, Environmental Evolution of the Willandra Lakes World Heritage Area, with Rainer Grün, Ed Rhodes, Steve Webb, and Andrew Fairbairn