An Australian research team planning to excavate a remote site in eastern Burma hopes to unearth fossilised human remains of Asia's first people.
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National Museum curator
and archaeologist Mike Smith
with a llama on
show in Extremes.
Photo: Dragi Markovic,
National Museum of Australia.
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National Museum of Australia archaeologist Dr Mike Smith said the team was looking at Burmese limestone caves which have perfect conditions for preserving bone.
"There's been no systemic archaeological work in Burma since the 1940s, in fact nothing much at all since radiocarbon dating became available in the late 1950s," Mike said. "Any fossil finds in this area, even a human tooth crown, would be big news."
The Burma project is funded by an Australian Research Council grant and has potential to find new evidence about the migration of early humans into South East Asia and Australia.
The team is particularly interested in remains between 50,000 and 500,000
years old. The recent Homo floreiensis
find on the Indonesian island of Flores
shows the great potential for extending
current knowledge.
"Flores is a great example of exploratory archaeology leading to fundamental changes in thinking, and shows how little we know about the archaeology of our region."
Mike is busy preparing for his stint in the Burmese jungle after spending most of his working life in Australian deserts.
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The Strzelecki Desert
near Moomba.
Photo: Richard Woldendorp.
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He worked on the Puritjarra rock shelter 350 kilometres west of Alice Springs for 15 years, excavating stone tools, ancient ochres and plant micro-fossils. Puritjarra is now one of several Australian desert sites with cultural and environmental histories stretching back 30,000 years.
Mike was also part of a team
which used state-of-the-art luminescence
techniques at Malakunanja, near Kakadu, to show
that people first colonised Australia 55,000
years ago. At another early site south of Perth, Devils Lair, Mike worked with a team including ANSTO scientist Ewan Lawson to apply new dating methods to show people first used the cave 50,000 years ago.
"Advances in the 1990s revolutionised the way we dated Australia's Aboriginal past and sparked a gold rush to go back to existing sites and apply the new dating techniques.
In the new National Museum exhibition, Extremes, Mike extended his research in Australia's deserts to the history of their southern counterparts.
Curating Extremes took Mike to Africa's Namib desert, the oldest desert in the world and the first settled by people; and the Chilean Atacama, the driest place on Earth.
The exhibition follows the Tropic of Capricorn, unravelling 300,000 years of survival and desert lives shaped by dramatic environmental and social change.
"The world's great southern deserts are dotted with extraordinary human histories," Mike said. "To understand Australia, we need to understand our vast desert region, by comparing ourselves and our survival with these other great desert stories."
Travelling through these extreme deserts and visiting museums in southern Africa and South America, Mike chose exhibition pieces for Extremes. Objects include a 4000-year-old Chinchorro mummy mask from Chile, where human remains are extraordinarily well-preserved in the arid conditions.
Other objects on show in Extremes include iron age pottery from the Kalahari and Aboriginal stone tools, alongside more recent objects like Dr Livingstone's compass and cap and an EJ Holden from the Bush Mechanics TV series.
Extremes is on show at the National Museum of Australia, Acton Peninsula, Canberra from 26 December 2004 to 9 October 2005. Mike and the team leave for Burma early next year.
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