Alan Williams

Background

About Alan Williams

I am one of the leading archaeological consultants in the Australia, having undertaken work in every Australian State and Territory. I have over 25 years’ experience in cultural heritage management (CHM), specialising in Aboriginal heritage and stakeholder engagement, and have acted in a range of public and private sector roles. My clients include Commonwealth and State government, property development, mining, energy, transport and infrastructure. Across my career, I have mentored over 30 heritage professionals (many now leading teams themselves), routinely manage project portfolio's of several million dollars per year, and have completed over 400 projects. I regularly supervise large-scale archaeological excavations and am frequently sought out to troubleshoot complex and/or controversial projects. My academic research includes over 40 publications, book chapters and public outreach pieces, in journals such as Nature, Proceedings of the National Academy of Science, Proceedings of the Royal Society B, Quaternary Science Reviews and Journal of Archaeological Science. They include a number of important and well-cited research outputs in the field of sum probability analysis (radiocarbon data as a proxy for past human activity), providing a series of continental and regional models of demographic change for researchers to utilise as a framework, ground-truth, and refine into the future. I am considered one of the leaders of palaeo-demography in Australian archaeological research. Globally, my analyses remain at the forefront of Australian archaeological research, and are routinely used, applied and critiqued across the world. I also have a strong passion in broader publication of CHM investigation and studies, and have a number of outputs on projects I have led, including deep-time archaeology in Sydney, the first use of luminscence dating of colonial (historical deposits) in Windosr, and more recently on frontier violence and its impacts in the New England Tablelands. I have been part of the Australian Archaeology journal's editorial advisory board, am currently on the membership committee for the Australian Association of Consulting Archaeologists Inc, commitee member for EIANZ's Heritage Special Interest Section, and chairperson of AINSE's Archaeology, Geosciences & Environmental Sciences (AGES) grant program based at the Australian Nuclear Science and Technology Organisation.