Time and Archaeology

Tim Murray is an archaeologist, professor, and executive Dean based in Melbourne, Australia. His interest in the material culture of the past began as a child collecting stone tools on his family property in rural New South Wales. He was educated in Sydney and embarked on an arts degree at the University of Sydney in the late 1970s, combining philosophy, anthropology, and history. He graduated with a double honors degree in history and anthropology, exploring the life and career of Gordon Childe (anthropology) and nineteenth-century race theory (history). After fellowships in Cambridge and the University of Arizona, he returned to Sydney to complete a doctoral dissertation, entitled Remembrances of Things Present: Appeals to Authority in the History and Philosophy of Archaeology.Tim Murray joined Professor Jim Allen in his newly formed archaeology department at La Trobe University in Melbourne, Victoria, in 1986 and was appointed to the Chair on Allen’s retirement in 1995. He became Head of the School of Historical and European Studies in 2001 and Dean of the Humanities and Social Sciences in 2010. At this time he was appointed Charles La Trobe Professor in recognition of his distinguished service to the University in research. Throughout his career, Tim Murray has pursued ambitious academic research while managing senior administrative duties. He remained active and engaged in the international research community as a research fellow and has held visiting professorships in France, the United Kingdom, and the People’s Republic of China. He was made a Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries of London and Australian Academy of the Humanities in 2003. Tim Murray is best known as a theoretical archaeologist. In the 1980s and 1990s, he was one of a small group of archaeologists instrumental in focusing on the importance of temporality in the archaeological record that has come to be known as time perspectivism (Murray 1999a). He has been a vocal critic of theoretical approaches that reduce archaeology to a kind of “palaeo-ethnography” by adopting models from anthropology with little consideration about how to adapt these to make them more appropriate to prehistoric archaeological contexts (Lucas 2007: 156). Throughout his career, these concerns have underpinned a broad engagement with all levels of archaeological enquiry, its history, and politics. His early research on the prehistory of Australia and the Pacific was in the field of settlement patterns and frontier modelling. He has conducted pioneering research into contact societies and the history of the Van Diemen’s Land Company. Following a dispute with traditional owners in Tasmania in the early 1990s, his contentious pursuit of access to archaeological data drew global attention to the negotiation of cultural rights of archaeological recourses. Many years after the resolution of the debate (Lucas 2007: 156), Murray continues to comment on the maturing relationship between archaeologists and traditional owners of Australia’s prehistoric archaeological information (Murray 2011).