'Hooked on Australian work': Australian archaeologist Mike Smith dies

Mike Smith's career unfolded during the decades when archaeologists confirmed the extraordinary antiquity of human civilisation in Australia. In Mike's lifetime the span escalated from just a few thousand years to 65,000; his pioneering work contributed significantly to this revolution. His investigation of the Puritjarra rock shelter in central Australia deepened the chronology of human history in the heart of the continent from 10,000 to 45,000 years. And in 1989 he worked with Rhys Jones, Bert Roberts and Gaagudju elder Big Bill Neidjie in an excavation at Madjedbebe shelter in Arnhem Land which resulted in a likely date of 50-55,000 years for human occupation. Later Smith was part of a team reworking that site, led by Chris Clarkson and hosted by the Mirrar people, which pushed the date back to 65,000 years.

In 1961 aged six, Mike arrived in Australia from Blackpool, England. Soon his father's work as an electrician took young Mike for a few months to remote Ceduna, the last major settlement before crossing the Nullarbor Plain. In this town of sand and cinder-block houses, he remembered collecting lizards and playing in rusty cars. There he began to develop a taste for arid Australia: "the smell of the country, that light, the sense of openness and adventure". Although Mike came to know Australia as few do, he never lost his English accent and used to joke that it was a speech impediment.

Mike had decided to be an archaeologist before he finished primary school. Following correspondence with the South Australian Museum about reptiles, he was invited, aged 15, to join practical museum digs at Roonka on the lower Murray and at Koonalda Cave in the Nullarbor (with Alexander Gallus). Carrying buckets at dig sites introduced him to the well-known archaeologist, Rhys Jones, "a very inspirational man" who was happy to "talk to a kid". Even before he enrolled at the Australian National University in 1974 to study archaeology with John Mulvaney, he was "hooked on Australian work".

Soon after finishing a Masters degree, Smith got a job as field archaeologist at the Northern Territory Museum in Darwin where his brief was "to engage in the field survey and excavation of Aboriginal and Macassan sites". By the beginning of 1982 he was keen to move his base to Alice Springs for the Red Centre had got in his blood. Mike was fascinated by the mysterious world captured in Songs of Central Australia by the anthropologist T G H Strehlow and in the writings of Baldwin Spencer and Frank Gillen. He realised that "there was a rich, exotic Aboriginal cultural and political system out there. Central Australia is where I wanted to be."

Smith wanted to test the generally accepted belief that central Australia had been occupied by people only after the ending of the last Ice Age (about 12,000 years ago). For years he searched for a site where he could apply his stratigraphic skills in the red deserts. In 1986, following a hunch and with help from historian Dick Kimber, Smith visited the remote Cleland Hills in the west of central Australia. There he found "this absolutely huge rock shelter" known as Puritjarra. With a level sandy floor, it was "the site that would warm any archaeologist's heart."

Puritjarra occupied much of his archaeological attention for the next quarter century. Thanks to Mike's trusted relationship with its owners, the Multa family, it became one of the best documented and dated sites in the whole of Australia. With signs of occupation from 45,000 years ago (and continuously from 35,000), it confirmed that people survived cold ice-age droughts in the central deserts and sustained civilisation in the face of massive climate change. Puritjarra sits alongside Lake Mungo as a desert place of outstanding significance.

In 2013, Smith published the book that encapsulates his life's work, The Archaeology of Australia's Deserts (CUP). It tells the story of all Australia's arid lands: a vast region of drylands, dunefields, stony plains, ephemeral rivers, salt lakes and desert uplands, all quite different to the deserts of southern Africa, South America or North Africa. Smith explored these striking comparisons in a National Museum of Australia exhibition, Extremes: Survival in the Great Deserts of the Southern Hemisphere (2004-05) and a book co-edited with Paul Hesse: 23 Degrees South (2005). In the mid-1990s Smith was appointed senior curator at the National Museum of Australia where he led the team that created the Tangled Destinies gallery for the museum's opening in 2001.

Known affectionately by his museum colleagues as Dr Deep Time, Mike was so enamoured of stratigraphy that he got a grave-digger's certificate to learn the ins and outs of timber shoring. He was dedicated to the tradecraft of archaeology and steeped in the traditions of his discipline. But he also sifted the surface sands and histories of his beloved deserts with meticulous historical care. His Archaeology of Australia's Deserts ended with a cultural history of the last millennium and his Peopling the Cleland Hills (2005) offered a history of the social exchange and disruption generated across Kukatja country by the European invasion.

Smith identified intimately and philosophically with the Australian desert and its peoples. This bond was a source of the powerful poetic vision that illuminated his science. He saw his work as "something that sits next to the Dreaming. It doesn't displace it, but it's a rich history here, it's something to be proud of."

Mike is survived by his wife Manik Datar, his children Ben and Moshumi, their partners Kaen and Max, and his grandchildren, Bluebelle, Jasmin, Alice and Clara. There will be a morning tea in honour of Mike at the National Museum of Australia on December 8.