Piers Kelly

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 the Top End, Queensland and New South Wales.

 

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. 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.