Research Staff
The department has a number of Research Fellows. Research staff also participate in supervision of graduate students and teaching in their areas of specialisation.
Dr Melissa Carter
Research staff, Postdoctoral Fellow, Teaching staff
Teaching and research interests:
Melissa Carter BA Hons (University of Queensland) PhD (James Cook University) joined the University of Sydney in 2008 as an ARC Post Doctoral Research Fellow. Melissa is investigating the pre-colonial archaeology of northwestern Santa Isabel in the Solomon Islands. Her research addresses broad archaeological questions about the timing and nature of human settlement, as well as the emergence of late pre-colonial cultural complexes documented elsewhere in the Solomons Archipelago and Island Melanesia. As an additional methodological tool Melissa is undertaking ethnoarchaeological investigations of marine and horticultural subsistence practices in Kia village. During her four-year appointment Melissa’s contribution to the teaching curriculum of the Department of Archaeology will reflect her background in Australian and Melanesian Archaeology, and archaeological methods and theory.
Dr Melanie Fillios
Research staff, Postdoctoral Fellow, Teaching staff
Teaching and research interests:
Melanie has carried out extensive fieldwork in the United States, Greece, Cyprus, and Australia as an archaeologist and faunal analyst. She has also lectured in Archaeology, Physical Anthropology and zooarchaeology. Melanie is currently engaged in experimental study of the taphonomy of modern animal bone in waterholes and open contexts in the semi-arid zone of NSW, Australia. Her research aims to enhance our understanding of the processes and factors that combine to produce fossil assemblages in these environments.
Dr Nicola Harrington
Research staff, Postdoctoral Fellow, Teaching staff
Teaching and research interests:
Nicola (BA and MA, Egyptian Archaeology, University College London; D.Phil. Egyptology, University of Oxford) joined the University of Sydney in January 2013 as a Post-doctoral Research Fellow. She is the author of Living with the dead: ancestor worship and mortuary ritual in ancient Egypt (2013), and contributed to Jean L. Keith’s Anthropoid busts of Deir el-Medina: catalogue raisonne (2011), as well as writing catalogue and dictionary entries, articles on Predynastic and New Kingdom material, and abstracts for the Online Egyptological Bibliography. A former tutor and lecturer at the University of Oxford, Nicola is currently researching the representation sub-adults in the ancient world (c.1550 B.C-395 A.D.) in collaboration with Dr. Lesley Beaumont. The interdisciplinary research project will involve a comparative analysis of the iconographic, and to a lesser extent, archaeological, bio-anthropological and textual evidence in order to illuminate the social perception, status and experience of childhood in ancient Egypt and Greece.