Rate My Professor Michael Westaway

Westaway specializes in bioarchaeology across Australia and New Guinea, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander culture, language and history, archaeological science, zooarchaeology, paleoanthropology, environmental archaeology, human impacts on ancient environments, conflict archaeology, and Aboriginal settlement and food production systems. He leads Australian Research Council projects such as 'Diving into the Desert: Indigenous and Future Floodplain Management' (2023-2026) and 'Testing the Dark Emu hypothesis' (2022-2026). His ARC Future Fellowship (2019-2023) focused on new bioarchaeological perspectives on pre-contact lifeways in Sahul. Key publications include 'Re-evaluating the significance of the rock art of the Flinders Islands Group, north-eastern Australia' (Antiquity, 2025), 'Fish Traps, Seed-Grinding and Food Stores: Reconstructing Complex Mithaka Indigenous Economic and Water Management Technologies' (The Oxford Handbook of Global Indigenous Archaeologies, 2024), 'Transdisciplinary approaches to understanding past Australian Aboriginal foodways' (Archaeology of Food and Foodways, 2023), 'Papuan pasts: the origins of Papuan human remains collections in the world's museums, the issue of repatriation, and telling new stories with skeletal data' (The Routledge handbook of museums, heritage, and death, 2024), and 'Origins of the First Australians' (The Global Atlas of Archaeology, 2014). He supervises Doctor of Philosophy candidates, teaches human evolution, bioarchaeology, and forensic archaeology, and founded National Archaeology Week in 2002.