Ariana Lambrides

Ariana Lambrides.

Greek.

My dad is Greek and my mum is Scottish, but my name is principally Greek.

They might agree to disagree on that one.

Well, for us as archaeologists, we're interested in people's relationships with those fish.

So we're looking at ancient campsites, middens.

These are accumulations of shell and bone and stone.

And these are places that people return to over thousands of years.

So this is the kinds of signatures that we're looking for to give us that really rich record of people's interactions with fish.

While I do like walking along the beach and collecting shells that

that roll in from the waves.

We're not necessarily going there, though of course you can recover archaeological remains from submerged archaeological sites, and that's a whole other story, but we're looking for very specific contexts to be able to find these remains.

Principally, I am working with traditional owner communities from the Great Barrier Reef.

So working on Yiguru or Lizard Island most recently to look at their amazing cultural places.

And we've done lots of excavations on campsites and surveyed across many kilometres of their incredible country to document all of the wonderful cultural places associated with that island group.

And another sort of big aspect of what I do too is look at museum collections.

So there's a lot of work that's been done in Queensland, for example, over many decades and techniques have moved forward.

So we can actually go back without doing new excavations and do renewed analyses

on those existing collections.

So that's a big focus as well of the work that I do is not just going out and doing new excavations but working together as partners thinking about what new research questions that we can investigate using these collections that have been, you know, just sitting in a museum for two, three decades.