Forensic Investigation of Victims of the Batavia Mutiny, 1629
Seminar
On 4 June 1629, the Verenigde Oostindische Compagnie (VOC) retourschip Batavia wrecked on Morning Reef, in the Houtman Abrolhos, approximately 65 km off the Western Australian coast. The macabre events following the wrecking saw more than 100 individuals murdered over a three-month period, by…
Reckoning with Anthro-Cast: A Progress Report from the Wenner-Gren Foundation
Lecture/seminar
In 2024, Chip Colwell and I convened a Wenner-Gren Seminar that scrutinised the Foundation's ethical obligations in connection with the Foundation's legacy casting program, Anthro-Cast, a profit-generating enterprise that the Foundation ran between 1962-76 (see Colwell and Rutherford 2025)1.…
How to Control Fire on a Burning Continent
Lecture/seminar
This past summer, wildfires again washed across southeast Australian landscapes, affecting over 500,000 hectares. Many of the forests that have carried these combustive tides are regrowth of native forests industrially cleared for mining and then recleared for timber. Many of the grasslands that…
2026 Anthony Forge Memorial Lecture: "Just Sign for Her" - Proprioception and Consent
Lecture
This upcoming lecture is co-sponsored by the ANU Gender Institute and the School of Archaeology and Anthropology and is free to attend. Register your attendance through Humanitix to stay up to date with event information. Originally published on the ANU Gender Institute website.For the renegade…
Super Review of 1001 Nights in the Colony
Lecture/seminar
This seminar will take a different format. The idea behind a super review is to provide HDR students and ECRs with some insights into how a review conversation can be productive and exciting, and leads to stronger work, with the added bonus of making the audience aware of the manuscript, hopefully,…
Ritual Places, Ancestral Knowledge, and the Archaeological History of the Torres Strait Meriam Dauareb People
Seminar
In Mabo v Queensland (No 2) (1992), Meriam plaintiffs claimed that they had “continuously inhabited and exclusively possessed” the Murray Islands since “time immemorial”. These claims were subsequently supported by the findings of Justice Moynihan and became an evidentiary basis for the Australian…
Haunting Futures. Time, Affect and Crisis in Iceland
Lecture/seminar
The seminar engages with ethnographic exploration of how the 2008 economic collapse in Iceland sent its residents into a destabilising state with far-reaching, temporal and affective consequences. Drawing on extensive fieldwork in Iceland, I will show how the complex relationships of the past and…