Rate My Professor Jane Balme

Jane Balme is Emerita Professor and Senior Honorary Research Fellow in Archaeology in the School of Social Sciences at the University of Western Australia. She holds a Bachelor of Science with honours from the University of Western Australia and a PhD from the Australian National University, completed in 1989 on Pleistocene fishery on the Darling River in western New South Wales. Her interest in archaeology originated while working for the Western Australian Museum on cave sites in southwest Australia. Balme served as Lecturer in Archaeology at the University of New England from 1986 to 1996. She then joined the University of Western Australia, advancing to Professor of Archaeology and Associate Dean (Research). Her research encompasses subsistence and social organisation in Pleistocene Australia, the development of gendered social organisation, and archaeology as a discipline. Key areas of expertise include Indigenous Australian archaeology, Pleistocene archaeology, archaeology of gender, ecological archaeology, faunal analysis in archaeology, and hunter-gatherer archaeology. She has undertaken extensive fieldwork in Indigenous archaeology across northern New South Wales, the Northern Territory, and Western Australia.

Balme's influential publications include the co-edited book Archaeology in Practice: A Student Guide to Archaeological Analyses (2006, revised second edition 2010 with Alistair Paterson), which provides practical guidance on archaeological methods. Other notable works are '30,000 years of fishery in western New South Wales' (1995), 'Shell beads and social behaviour in Pleistocene Australia' (2006 with Kate Morse), 'Gender in Aboriginal archaeology' (1994 with Wendy Beck), 'New dates on dingo bones from Madura Cave provide oldest firm evidence for arrival of the species in Australia' (2018 with Sue O'Connor), and recent contributions such as 'Ancient genomes reveal over two thousand years of dingo population structure' (2024) and 'Arboreal Alterations: An Introduction to Culturally Modified Trees (CMTs) in Australia' (2025 with Sue O'Connor and others). In 2018, she was elected Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities (FAHA). Her scholarship has advanced understandings of early human adaptations, dingo history, and social dynamics in prehistoric Australia, with over 2,000 citations across 89 publications.