Emeritus Professor Ian Lilley FSA FAHA (BA Hons, MA Qld, PhD ANU) is an internationally-renowned leader in archaeology and heritage across Australasia, the Asia-Pacific and globally.
Ian is based in the UQ School of Social Science, to where he moved in retirement in 2019 after 25 years leading the academic program in UQ's Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies Unit (ATSIS). From 2015, he was also the invited inaugural Willem Willems Chair for Contemporary Issues in Archaeological Heritage Management at Leiden University in the Netherlands, from which he retired at the end of 2022. Leiden is continental Europe's leading university in archaeology and among the global Top 10 in the discipline. Ian has an exceptional research record and remains research active. He is currently a CI on an NHMRC Medical Research Future Fund proposal concerning the mental health impacts of climate change damage to heritage as well as a member of the Policy Working Group on an ARC Centre of Excellence proposal on Transforming Human Origins Research. In addition, he is an Advisor to the Centre for Global Heritage and Development based in Leiden's Faculty of Archaeology and an Honorary Professor in the Centre for Heritage and Culture within the Institute for Resilient Regions at the University of Southern Queensland, Ian has supervised over 20 PhD and MPhil research projects to completion in many different schools across UQ as well as others at Leiden and as external supervisor at several other universities in Australia and overseas.
Ian's pioneering Honours and Masters research examined the precolonial archaeology of Southeast Queensland. Following ground-breaking work in Papua New Guinea with the Australian Museum during time out from his MA, Ian then did his PhD on ancient maritime trading systems which linked the New Guinea mainland and nearby Bismarck Archipelago. During his PhD, he took time out to lead a team in PNG's Duke of York Islands as a part of the international ANU-National Geographic Lapita Homeland Project. He then built on his PhD with a UQ Postdoctoral Fellowship, for which he won National Geographic funding to return to PNG. He has since undertaken archaeological and cultural heritage research, consultancies and advisory missions throughout Australasia and the Asia-Pacific and in Europe and the Americas, most recently with the Asian Development Bank regarding its heritage safeguards and the Chilean Ministry of Culture and Heritage concerning proposed new national heritage legislation. Ian's current work focuses primarily on global issues in World Heritage, particularly in relation to Indigenous and other traditional/ descendent communities He is also involved in the fight against looting and cultural trafficking, in collaboration with the Antiquities Coalition in Washington DC. In 2024, he published a policy brief with the Coalition regarding the G20's plans for heritage protection. In addition, Ian is an accredited Subject Matter Expert with the US Defense POW-MIA Accounting Agency (DPAA), which endeavours to find and repatriate the remains of missing service personnel. In that broad connection, he undertook a project with Dutch partners including the Netherlands Ministry of Defence and funded by the Netherlands Embassy, concerning the WWII headquarters of the Netherlands East Indies government in exile, which were located at Wacol just outside Brisbane.
Ian is a Fellow and past International Secretary and Vice President of the Australian Academy of Humanities, a Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries of London and a member of the Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies, a federal statutory body. At UQ, Ian is an emeritus member of the UQ Centre for Marine Science. Externally, Ian is a member of Australia ICOMOS, for which he convenes the Strategic Advisory Reference Group, an ICOMOS World Heritage Assessor and past Secretary-General of the ICOMOS International Committee on Archaeological Heritage Management (ICAHM). In these connections, he sat on the Conservation Advisory Committee for the Port Arthur World Heritage site complex and on the Scientific Advisory Committee for the Willandra Lakes World Heritage region. In addition, he is a member of the IUCN World Commission on Protected Area, for which he is a member of the World Heritage Specialist Group, and the IUCN Commission on Environmental, Economic and Social Policy. In these capacities, he undertakes IUCN assessments of World Heritage cultural landscapes. He was also a member of the Advisory Group for a major IUCN-coordinated multi-agency project to reshape the assessment of protected area management effectiveness to include cultural as well as natural factors. ICOMOS and IUCN are the statutory independent Advisory Bodies to UNESCO on cultural and natural heritage respectively, and Ian is one of the few people globally who is a member of both world bodies. He is also immediate past Secretary-General of the Indo-Pacific Prehistory Association, the region's peak professional archaeological body, past Chair of and continuing Advisor to the International Government Affairs Committee of the Society for American Archaeology, the world's largest professional archaeological body, and served three consecutive terms as President of the Australian Archaeological Association. Ian's other professional interests are archaeology and social identity, archaeological ethics, and the role of archaeology and archaeological heritage in contemporary society.
