Jo McDonald
Australian archaeologist
Dr Josephine McDonald is an Australian archaeologist and Director of the Centre for Rock Art Research + Management at the University of Western Australia. McDonald is primarily known for her influence in the field of rock art research and her collaborative research with Australian Aboriginal communities.
Education
McDonald received her undergraduate training at the University of Sydney and her PhD from the Australian National University. Her PhD research, titled Dreamtime Superhighway: An analysis of Sydney Basin rock art and prehistoric information exchange, supervised by Andree Rosenfeld, Isobel McBryde, and Anthony Forge was completed in 1994 and a revised and expanded version was published by Terra Australis in 2008. This work was influential in demonstrating the cultural and social influence of rock art through research in the Sydney Basin. Her doctorate research also helped to create an understanding of radiocarbon direct-dating on pigment rock art, an innovation in Australian archaeology.
Career
McDonald's early career was as a cultural heritage consultant primarily based in New South Wales. McDonald was Director of Brayshaw McDonald Pty Ltd before founding her own company Jo McDonald Cultural Heritage Management Pty Ltd. In addition to her research in the Sydney Basin, her work as a consultant on the Cumberland Plain in Western Sydney, which focused on the excavation and management of open stone artefact sites, was particularly influential. As a consultant, McDonald was also involved in the excavation and subsequent research into Narrabeen Man.
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This entry incorporates text from “Jo McDonald” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.