Don Ranson

This article has multiple issues. Please help improve it or discuss these issues on the talk page. (Learn how and when to remove these messages) The topic of this article may not meet Wikipedia's notability guideline for academics. Please help to demonstrate the notability of the topic by citing reliable secondary sources that are independent of the topic and provide significant coverage of it beyond a mere trivial mention. If notability cannot be shown, the article is likely to be merged, redirected, or deleted. Find sources: "Don Ranson" – news · newspapers · books · scholar · JSTOR (November 2014) (Learn how and when to remove this message) This biography of a living person relies too much on references to primary sources. Please help by adding secondary or tertiary sources. Contentious material about living persons that is unsourced or poorly sourced must be removed immediately, especially if potentially libelous or harmful. Find sources: "Don Ranson" – news · newspapers · books · scholar · JSTOR (November 2014) (Learn how and when to remove this message) (Learn how and when to remove this message)

Don Ranson is an Australian archaeologist who played an important role in the discovery and recognition of the antiquity of Aboriginal archaeology in Tasmania.^[1] This discovery has been documented in many subsequent histories of Tasmanian Archaeology, including that dedicated to the expedition itself,^[2] as well as video documentaries of the find.^[3]

Ranson was born in Sheffield, England,^[4] subsequently migrating to Australia and undertaking his PhD fieldwork in 1978 on the excavation of one hut depression in a cluster of three at Sundown Point, Tasmania.^[5]

Ranson was one of the people credited with the discovery of Fraser Cave (later renamed Kutikina Cave), with Rhys Jones in Tasmania's West Coast,^[6] which established the Pleistocene occupation of the Tasmanian highlands.^[7]

In the 1990s he was senior archaeologist with the Department of Parks, Wildlife and Heritage Tasmania. He has most recently been with the Aboriginal Heritage Office, in the Cultural Heritage Branch, DPIWE, Tasmania.

Ranson was also a pioneer of the application of remote sensing techniques for the discovery of archaeological sites in Australia, one example being applied to the Aboriginal burials at Wybellina.^[8]