Associate Professor, Department of Archaeology
Flinders University
Biography: Claire Smith is an Associate Professor with the Department of Archaeology at Flinders University, Australia. In 2008 she is on secondment at the University of Newcastle, NSW, as a Research Professor with the Institute of the Advanced Study for Humanity. Together with her anthropologist husband, Gary Jackson (Jacko), she conducts long-term fieldwork with Aboriginal people in the Barunga region of the Northern Territory and with the Ngadjuri people of South Australia. Phyllis Wiynjorroc and Peter Manabaru were the main people to teach Claire and Jacko about Indigenous cultural and intellectual property issues. Claire has a particular interest in bringing about sustainable, long-term changes in community attitudes to Aboriginal people through developing a national school curriculum that includes recognition of the unique accomplishments of Indigenous Australians. Claire's recent books include Country, Kin and Culture. Survival of an Australian Aboriginal Community (Wakefield Press, 2004) the Archaeologist's Field Handbook (with Heather Burke, Allen and Unwin, 2005) and the edited volume Indigenous Archaeologies: Decolonising Archaeological Theory and Method (with H. Martin Wobst, Routledge, 2005). She is currently working on another book with Martin Wobst, provisionally called Decolonisation in Action: Indigenous Archaeologies, which will be published by Springer. As President of the World Archaeological Congress, Claire has developed several key projects that build teaching and learning capacity in economically disadvantaged countries, including the Global Libraries and Archaeologists without Borders programmes.
