Dr Piers Kelly
DECRA Fellow - School of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences
Email: pkelly26@une.edu.au
Biography
Dr Piers Kelly’s research is on graphic codes in small-scale societies. His focus is on Australian message sticks: marked wooden objects used for long-distance communication across Indigenous Australia. As an ARC DECRA fellow, Dr Kelly is examining rare message sticks in world collections and conducting fieldwork with senior knowledge holders in Arnhem Land and the Tiwi Islands. Concurrently, he is employed as a consultant curator at the Australian Museum, Sydney, specialising in the provenance and interpretation of message sticks.
The Australian Message Stick Project website can be viewed here: https://messagesticks.com.au/.
Dr Kelly’s research also encompasses the isolated creation of new writing systems in traditionally non-literate societies of West Africa, Southeast Asia and the Pacific. He maintains that these rare inventions reveal important insights into our relationship with the written word, and have the potential to shed light on the origin and development of writing itself, arguably the world's most transformative yet misunderstood technology.
In 2013, Dr Kelly completed a PhD in linguistics at the Australian National University. Later, as a postdoctoral researcher, he worked at the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History in Jena, Germany, and as a Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft fellow at the University of New England. Dr Kelly has since taken up a DECRA project on message sticks within the university's Department of Archaeology, Classics and History.
