DrAmy Way

Project Opportunities
Title: Stone artefacts

Summary of opportunity:
Amy Mosig Way is a research archaeologist in a jointly held position between the Australian Museum and the University of Sydney. Amy is an Early Career Researcher who works closely with First Nations communities to study past human behaviour. Her expertise is in high-resolution stone artefact analysis and supporting community projects. Before coming to the Museum, Amy worked as a Native Tile anthropologist for the Northern Land Council and held a Postdoctoral Fellowship at the Evolutionary Studies Institute, University of the Witwatersrand, South Africa where she worked on Middle Stone Age stone artefact assemblages. In her Master of Archaeological Science degree, conferred at the Australian National University, Amy examined human-environment interactions in arid South Australia. Amy completed her PhD research at Weereewaa (Lake George, NSW), where open-air excavations revealed multiple tool crafting events. This research focused on the development of a new method for separating mixed groups of stone artefacts, with a view to describing individual stone-working activities. Amy is currently building field-based research projects with First Nations groups in NSW.

Opportunity synopsis:
Amy studies the richness of past human behaviour through high-resolution stone artefact analysis. In Australia, stone artefacts are regularly the only surviving evidence of past human activity, and often this evidence becomes mixed over time, making it difficult to reconstruct specific activities and see detail in the archaeological record.
Amy employs raw material unit analysis and refitting to identify single stone working activities. This allows spatial and temporal inferences on settlement dynamics to be constructed from specific activities. This is important because mixed artefact assemblages are a universal phenomenon of the archaeological world, and this research demonstrates their potential to contribute to the construction of high-resolution occupational sequences.
Amy works with First Nations communities to bring science and culture together to create deep, culturally meaningful histories.