Claire Smith

Claire Smith (born 15 July 1957 in Sydney, Australia) is an archaeologist. She is an Associate Professor with the Department of Archaeology at Flinders University, Adelaide, Australia, and President of the World Archaeological Congress.

She obtained a Bachelor of Arts degree with First-Class Honours in Archaeology and University Medal from the University of New England in 1990, and a PhD on "social and material context in an Australian Aboriginal artistic system" from the same university in 1996. After that she held an Australian Research Council Postdoctoral Fellowship and a Fulbright Postdoctoral Fellowship.

Claire Smith specialises in Indigenous archaeology, especially rock art. She works with her anthropologist husband, Gary Jackson. They have conducted long-term fieldwork with Aboriginal people in the Barunga region, Northern Territory, and with the Ngadjuri in South Australia. Smith is politically active within Australia, especially in terms of Indigenous rights.

Claire Smith's books include Indigenous Archaeologies: decolonising theory and practice, co-edited by H. Martin Wobst, published by Routledge, 2005, The Archaeologist's Field Handbook, co-authored by Heather Burke, published by Allen and Unwin, 2004, Archaeology to Delight and Instruct: Active Learning in the University Classroom, published by Left Coast Press, 2007, and Digging it Up Down Under, co-authored by Heather Burke, published by Springer, 2007.


Read more about Claire Smith:  Selected Publications

Famous quotes containing the words claire and/or smith:

    The role of the stepmother is the most difficult of all, because you can’t ever just be. You’re constantly being tested—by the children, the neighbors, your husband, the relatives, old friends who knew the children’s parents in their first marriage, and by yourself.
    —Anonymous Stepparent. Making It as a Stepparent, by Claire Berman, introduction (1980, repr. 1986)

    Not ringed but rare, not gilled but polyp-like, having sprung up
    overnight—

    These mushrooms of the gods, resembling human organs uprooted,
    rooted only on the air,
    —William Jay Smith (b. 1918)