PhD programme Diving into the Desert

“Diving into the Desert" is a 3-year Australian Research Council Linkage Project. Our project aims to discover how Indigenous communities managed cycles of drought and flood in the Lake Eyre Basin in arid Central Australia, and to learn from this to manage Australia’s inland rivers sustainably. By integrating archaeology – done underwater, on land and from the air – with Indigenous knowledge and environmental and flow modelling, the project expects to uncover a deep history of Indigenous environmental engineering in one of the world's last unregulated desert river systems . The project's outcomes – an Australian National Maritime Museum touring exhibition plus written, audio and 3D immersive communications – seek to benefit Australia's cultural life and flood mitigation, and to protect the Mithaka Aboriginal Corporation's culture and country.

 
We have a funded PhD at the University of Queensland  using remote sensing to find and analyse Indigenous fish traps, weirs and other flood plain resource management structures in Mithaka country, central Australia.  
The PhD will include:
•    an intensive survey of satellite imagery and historical aerial photography (particularly prior to the 1974 floods) and aerial drone imagery to identify locations of potential structures
•    palaeo-environmental modelling to generate detailed 3-D models (in GIS) of the past landscape around sites and features
•    Interpretation of the above data to understand how Indigenous people thrived in this extreme landscape
 
Interested students should send a CV, 1-2 page expression of interest and a piece of written work (10 000 words max.) to duncan.keenan-jones@manchester.ac.uk. Deadline 9 June 2025. “