Associate Professor Heather Burke

Head of Department

Bachelor of Arts (First Class Honours) UNE
Doctor of Philosophy (Archaeology) UNE

Room: 108 Humanities
Phone: (08) 8201 3795
Fax: (08) 8201 2784
Email: heather.burke@flinders.edu.au

Research Interests

• European constructions of cultural landscapes
• Standing structures, style and social identity
• Ideology and capitalism
• Mining
• The frontier and contact
• Working class archaeology
• Women in historical archaeology
• Heritage interpretation and the uses of archaeology
• Archaeology of the Chinese in Australia

Recent Publications

Burke, Heather, Claire Smith, Lippert, Dorothy, Watkins, Joe and Larry Zimmerman (eds) 2008  Kennewick Man.  Perspectives on the Ancient One.  Left Coast Press, Walnut Creek, CA.

Burke, Heather, Claire Smith and Larry Zimmerman 2008  The Archaeologist's Field Handbook.  North American Edition. Altamira Press, Walnut Creek, CA.

Domingo, Inés, Heather Burke and Claire Smith 2007 Manual de Arqueologia de Campo. Ariel Editorial, Spain.

Smith, Claire and Heather Burke 2007 Digging it Up Down Under: A Practical Guide to Doing Archaeology in Australia. Springer, New York.

Burke, Heather and Claire Smith (eds) 2007 Archaeology to Delight and Instruct: Active Learning in the University Classroom. Left Coast Press, Walnut Creek.

Burke, Heather and Claire Smith 2007 'Seven degrees of archaeology, or diverse ways of interpreting the past'. In Archaeology to Delight and Instruct. Left Coast Press, Walnut Creek.

Smith, Claire and Heather Burke 2007 'The skin game: Teaching to redress stereotypes of Indigenous people'. In Archaeology to Delight and Instruct. Left Coast Press, Walnut Creek.

Smith, Claire and Heather Burke 2007 'Lectures as usual? Teaching archaeology for fun.' In Archaeology to Delight and Instruct. Left Coast Press, Walnut Creek.

Burke, Heather 2007 'The future of historical archaeology'. Entry in the Elsevier Encyclopaedia of Archaeology.

Burke, Heather 2006 'Ideology and the Material Culture of Life and Death.' In Stephen W. Silliman and Martin Hall (eds), Historical Archaeology. Blackwell Studies in Global Archaeology, London : pp. 128-146. ISBN 1-4051-0750-2.

Smith, Claire and Heather Burke 2006 'Glass ceilings, glass parasols and the disciplinary culture of Australian academic archaeology'. Australian Archaeology 62: 13-25.

Current Research Projects

• Myth, Memory and Material Culture: The Archaeology of the Repat Air Raid Shelters
  In 2004 staff and students at Flinders University began an ongoing investigation of the air raid shelters built at the Repatriation Hospital at Daw Park during World War II.
• Historical Archaeology of Adelaide Database
  Each year, work by students in ARCH2002: Australian Historical Archaeology contributes to a growing database of the historical archaeology of South Australia. This database is publicly available for research purposes and contains material on South Australian cemetery monuments, public monuments and 19th and early 20th century buildings.

Currently Supervising

• Robert Stone (PhD)
• Martin Wimmer (PhD)

Currently Teaching

In 2009, Heather is teaching ARCH1001 Introduction to Archaeology and ARCH2002 Australian Historical Archaeology.

Overview

Heather is an historical archaeologist with research interests in the archaeology of standing structures, social memory and the creation of cultural landscapes, as well as the public interpretation and presentation of heritage sites. She graduated with a PhD from UNE in 1996, and has worked on historical and indigenous archaeological sites throughout New South Wales, Queensland and the Northern Territory. Her PhD looked at the construction of social identity through style in architecture and the uses of the past in the present. Her current projects include an investigation of Indigenous-settler contact on the mining frontier in western Arnhem Land, and the archaeology of World War II in Adelaide. 

Heather is currently a series editor for the Global Cultural Heritage Manuals Series, published by Plenum/Kluwer Academic Press, New York, and the Worlds of Archaeology Series, published by AltaMira Press, Walnut Creek, California.