Palaeohydrology, climatic variability and water-use strategies in Australia from the late Pleistocene to the present.

As the driest inhabited continent, Australia has always been a challenging home for humans, with lifeways heavily shaped by the availability of water. This has affected the dispersal of Homo sapiens into the continent.

The project will explore how past climate fluctuations in the Australian desert influenced our species arrival in Australia and its occupations throughout the late Pleistocene and Holocene. The student will couple remote sensing and GIS techniques to map paleohydrology with analyses of climate proxy and model data to produce new frameworks for the changing distribution of water across the continent over time. The student will contextualise these findings with archaeological data from the literature and information from partnerships with archaeologists and Indigenous communities to assess human occupations, subsistence strategies and ‘water-tethering’ over time, as well as to explore the implications of the findings for future water scenarios in Australia. 

An important aspect of the project will be archaeological survey of key sites identified by the study, and community engagement and discussions with Indigenous Elders concerning past water sourcing and management strategies, as well as the effects of colonial water management. This project forms part of a wider cross-disciplinary Australian Anthropocene initiative together with the Universities of Griffith, Queensland, and Sydney, and the Max Planck institute for Geoanthropology.