What archaeological projects are you working on at the moment?
My company has just finished a six month project in western Sydney salvaging eight archaeological open sites which will be impacted upon by urban development. We had a team of 15 archaeologists and almost as many Aboriginal people from the local Aboriginal communities. The project retrieved over 35,000 stone artefacts. I am about to head into the Western Desert (near the Canning Stock Route) with my partner to do some fieldwork with the Martu on the most remote and spectacular rock art sites on the continent.

Tell us about one of your most interesting archaeological discoveries.
One of the exciting things about being an archaeologist in Australia is that you often find and record archaeological evidence which has never been documented before. My honours thesis looked at kangaroo tracks and I discovered that different kangaroo species could be distinguished in ancient engravings in western NSW. My PhD was on Aboriginal rock art in the Sydney region. . While I had done a lot of bushwalking and pic-nicking in the National Parks around Sydney as I was growing up, I didn’t know then what an amazing set of sites (paintings, drawing, engravings and stencils) were there on our doorstep. In 1988 I excavated a site for the Police when some human bone was found by some children in a rockshelter. This was the first excavation that the Police had done with archaeologists and it proved to be a learning experience on both sides! The police now regularly use a consultant archaeologist to assist them in their enquiries!

Tell us about a funny/disastrous/amazing experience that you have had while doing archaeology.
Doing fieldwork is ALL about having fun! Occasionally there are hazards - like that king brown snake in the back of the rockshelter we were recording; and the funnel web nests we excavated (>30 spiders per square metre!) many of which ended up wriggling in the sieves; or the day that we patched and changed eight inner tubes when surveying through mulga; and the time the Uni Department’s 4WD vehicle slid sideways down a steep slippery hill and stopped from disaster by a mere sapling (a difficult ding in the panel to explain later!).

What’s your favourite part of being an archaeologist?
Seeing a lot of Australia, meeting and working with fantastic people (black and white) all over the country, getting the opportunity to apply practical bush skills and technology to achieve a scientific outcome …

Follow up reading:
McDonald, J.J. 1992 The Archaeology of the Angophora Reserve rockshelter: helping the police with their enquires. Environmental Heritage Monograph Series No. 1, NSW NPWS.
McDonald, J.J. 1999 Bedrock notions and isochrestic choice: evidence for localised stylistic patterning in the engravings of the Sydney region. Archaeology in Oceania 34(3): 145-160.
McDonald, J.J. 2000 Media and social context: influences on information exchange networks in prehistoric Sydney. Australian Archaeology 51: 54-63.