Rate My Professor Emilie Dotte

Dr. Emilie Dotte is a Senior Lecturer in Archaeology within the School of Social Sciences at the University of Western Australia, where she leads the Archaeobotany Lab and serves as Archaeology Honours Coordinator. She holds a double cotutelle PhD in Prehistory from the Australian National University, awarded in 2011, and a PhD in Archaeology from Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne, awarded in 2010, both for her thesis entitled 'The Ancestor Wood: Precolonial Kanak Occupation, Forests and Trees in New Caledonia (Tiwaka Valley, Grande Terre)'. Prior to her doctoral research, she studied History, Cultural Anthropology, and Archaeology at the Universities of Montpellier (Paul Valéry), Minnesota in the USA, and Sorbonne-Paris I. Her professional trajectory includes serving as a Research Associate in the UWA School of Social Sciences from 2011 to 2015, Postdoctoral Research Fellow on the ARC Laureate Project 'The Collective Biography of Pacific Archaeology' at the Australian National University from 2015 to 2020, ARC Discovery Early Career Researcher Award (DECRA) Fellow at UWA from 2020 to 2024, and ongoing Associate Postdoctoral Researcher with the Equipe d'Ethnologie Préhistorique at the CNRS in France since 2010. Dotte teaches units such as ARCY3011 'Australia in the Indo-Pacific: the last 65,000 years' and ARCY2220 'Doing Archaeology: Fieldschool', and contributes to editorial boards of the Journal de la Société des Océanistes and Journal of Polynesian Archaeology and Research.

Dotte's research centers on relationships between people and forests across Australia and the Pacific, archaeobotany in the Indo-Pacific region, and the historiography of archaeology, with a focus on women's hidden contributions documented in her ARC DECRA-funded 'Pacific Matildas: Finding the women in the history of Pacific archaeology' project, which developed the Pacific Matildas Bibliographic Database and Geographical Visualisation tools. She leads additional funded initiatives, including the ARC project 'How the land became Country: the archaeology of people and trees in Oceania' (2026-2030), 'Investigating the archaeological values of Marra cultural heritage sites' (2024-2028), and international collaborations like 'PASTAtolls: Multidisciplinary Approach of Polynesian Atolls Socio-ecosystems in Time' with the French National Research Agency. Her prolific output exceeds 40 items, featuring peer-reviewed articles such as 'A micro-geoarchaeological investigation of a cultivation pit (maite) on Teti'aroa atoll, Central-East Polynesia' (2025, Archaeology in Oceania), 'Collaborative anthracology and cultural understandings of wood charcoal in Marra Country (northern Australia)' (2024, Archaeological and Anthropological Sciences), 'THE SIZE INHERITED AGE EFFECT ON RADIOCARBON DATES OF ALLUVIAL DEPOSITS' (2024, Radiocarbon), 'Inherited age of floating charcoal fragments in a sand-bed stream, Macdonald River, NSW, Australia' (2023, Holocene), and 'How Linguistic Data Can Inform Archaeological Investigations' (2023, Open Archaeology). Through these contributions, Dotte advances inclusive histories of science and methodological innovations in archaeobotany.