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83Number 68, June 2009
Obituaries
and dividing the pulped meat, blood, bone, guts and brains into
shares. Su’s ‘nurse anthropologist’ insights into the health and
diet of the desert people were unique.
The increasing fragility of her mother, and her own declining
health brought Su back to Sydney where the last position she
held was in a post-natal ward at the Royal Hospital for Women,
reassuring and encouraging new mothers. She was depressed
when ill health forced her to give up nursing altogether.
After her mother Olga passed away Su moved to Armidale.
The internet opened up Su’s world at this time and she joined
online lists and discussion groups in prehistory and actively
participated in the debates. As chronic poor health curtailed her
outside activities she discovered and developed an interest in
genealogy. She constructed a ‘tree’ with some 2000 branches and
twigs and generously devoted time to helping the many family
contacts and friends she found online. Her last publication was
with another researcher in the British Family Tree magazine.
Her contribution to archaeology will never be fully
appreciated as so much of her work is unpublished, but that
which she did publish is well-cited and of course appears in
the basic text on taphonomy that all students (and researchers)
dive into from time to time, Lee Lyman’s Vertebrate Taphonomy.
Although she did not complete her postgraduate studies, she
continued researching and teaching aspects of taphonomy, as
well as mentoring students.
Su was a real force amongst the archaeologists who knew her.
She demanded intellectual honesty and called a spade a ‘bloody
shovel’. She had a fierce loyalty for her friends and received
loyalty from them in return. Su lived her life fully, rich, diverse
and certainly not mundane. Su Solomon truly deserved the
accolade of being ‘larger than life!’.
Su is survived by her Uncle Laurie, children Rachel, Edmund
and Dominic and grandchildren Neil, Amy, Kimberly and Sarah.
Judith Field, Denise Donlon, Dominic Hanlon, Edmund
Hanlon, Rachel Hanlon, Cassie Thornley and Sarah Martin
ANdRÉE JEANNE ROSENFELd (1934–2008)
Sometimes giants are softly spoken. Sometimes they are not very
tall. Sometimes they do not tower, because they have created a
field of towers. Such was the case with Andrée Jeanne Rosenfeld.
Andrée was born in Belgium in 1934, five years before the
start of World War II. She had a younger brother, Jean, who
became a research scientist. Her mother, Dr Yvonne Rosenfeld
(née Cambressier) was one of the first women in Europe to
obtain a PhD in physics. Yvonne was a great photographer, with
a wonderful sense of light and composition, and bequeathed to
her daughter a fine aesthetic sense. Andrée’s father, Professor
Léon Rosenfeld, was a world-renowned physicist, founder of
the journal Nuclear Physics, and a colleague and friend of Niels
Bohr who shared his investigations of quantum theory. In 1940
Léon Rosenfeld accepted the Chair of Theoretical Physics and
Mechanics at Utrecht University, which he held until 1947. When
the Nazis invaded Holland he gave seminars secretly in his home
to Jewish students and he supervised young Jewish scholars,
including Abraham Pais, the American physicist and biographer
of Alfred Einstein, who had to submit his thesis by 14 July 1941,
after which date the Nazis had decreed that no Jewish scholar
could be granted a doctorate.
The primary language of the Rosenfeld family home was
French, though they were also fluent speakers of Dutch and, later,
Danish and English, and in the 1970s Andrée became proficient
in Spanish. Her upbringing was middle-class, middle-century
European – cultured, ordered, under-stated. Andrée carried
these qualities with her all her life.
After the war, the family moved to Manchester in England.
Both Andrée and Jean followed their father into science. Andrée
enrolled in a Master of Science, later upgraded to a PhD. Her
thesis topic was the sedimentology of caves, consistent with her
scientific interests, but it did not satisfy her interest in the human
dimensions of the past. Though she did not pursue this line of
research, the scientific training informed her subsequent work.
Andrée accepted a post as a curator at the British Museum
in London, and gave guest lectures for the Department of
Anthropology, University College London (UCL). She was an
enthusiastic and accomplished teacher, who mentored young
scholars who would later become leaders in the anthropology
and archaeology of art, including Howard Morphy, of the
Australian National University (ANU), and Robert Layton, of
Durham University. In collaboration with Peter Ucko, Andrée
was a major force in the establishment of material culture
studies at the Institute of Archaeology at UCL and, later, in
her own right at the ANU. At UCL, she undertook ‘practice-
led research’ that involved marvellous and memorable
experiments, including the digging of earth ovens and the
brewing of beer, and at the ANU she integrated ethnographic
dimensions into the study of art, including an Iban weaver as
a scholar in residence.
Andrée’s first book, The Inorganic Raw Materials of Antiquity
(Rosenfeld 1965), was a seminal exploration of the importance
of raw materials in terms of their source and transportation to
the sites where they were used. In this book, Andrée provided
critical demonstrations that Egyptian expeditions were mounted
to Sinai to obtain supplies of turquoise and tin and that lapis
lazuli occurred in restricted areas in Western Asia and flowed
Figure 2 Su on her first field trip with Mike Morwood to Maidenwell
Shelter c.1983. L-R: David Rhodes, Barbara Mason, Su Solomon and
Mike Morwood (Photograph: Denise Donlon).
84 Number 68, June 2009
Obituaries
along trade routes from these points. While subsequent studies
have shown the value of this area of research, Andrée’s role was
that of trailblazer.
While she was in the United Kingdom, Andrée and her
then partner Peter Ucko produced the classic Palaeolithic Cave
Art (Ucko and Rosenfeld 1967), a volume which has not been
surpassed, and which is still quoted extensively, over 40 years later.
When she came to Australia in 1972, Andrée had an
established international reputation in archaeology. In 1973,
she accepted a post at the newly-established Department of
Archaeology and Anthropology at the ANU, and taught courses
in the Archaeology of Art, Material Culture and the Prehistory of
Australia. She remained a member of this Department until her
retirement in 1997. During this period she established rock art
research at the ANU and actively promoted it as a serious field
of research in Australia.
After her appointment at the ANU Andrée initiated a number
of projects that were critical to the development of archaeology
in Australia. She undertook ground-breaking excavations at the
Early Man site in Cape York Peninsula (Figure 1) that related rock
art to changes in excavated evidence and produced the first firm
demonstration of the Pleistocene antiquity of Aboriginal rock
art (Rosenfeld et al. 1981). A little later, she undertook a study
for the Australian Heritage Commission, Rock Art Conservation
in Australia (Rosenfeld 1985), the book she enjoyed writing the
most, which laid the groundwork for rock art conservation in
Australia. In 1988, she convened a session at the First Congress of
the Australian Rock Art Research Association in Darwin, which
produced a major book on the subject (Bahn and Rosenfeld 1991).
At the ANU Andrée was supervisor and/or mentor to many
of the current generation of rock art researchers, including Mike
Morwood, Jo McDonald, Kelvin Officer, Darrell Lewis, Paul
Taçon and Ursula Frederick. In recognition of her service the
ANU is establishing the Andrée Rosenfeld Foundation Chair
of Rock Art Research, and her former students and friends are
making a serious attempt to establish an International Centre of
Rock Art Research in Australia.
Andrée’s work transcended the divide between the Humanities
and Science. At the celebration of her life in Canberra on 6
March 2009, her friend and colleague, Mike Smith, mentioned
that she had once described rock art research as a field with ‘a
lunatic core and a sane fringe’. Andrée’s steadying influence on
this subdiscipline, and her application of scientific rigour to the
archaeological study of art produced substantive outcomes for
the discipline, both nationally and internationally.
Andrée retired from the ANU in 1997 and then moved to
Rathdowney in Queensland, where she developed her interest
in designing and producing textiles. Her notes on this material
demonstrate the blend of scientist and humanist. She always had
dogs and usually a cat, and at Rathdowney she added donkeys
that she saved from the knackery. Her mind was always active
and she made some wonderful new friendships in retirement, not
only with textile makers and members of the local community,
but also with new researchers who sought her wisdom, such as
June Ross, of the University of New England. Andrée’s influence
went far.
Her smooth adjustment to retirement was due to the quality
of her personal life. She told me once that she never worked on
a Sunday, and she always advocated keeping a sensible balance
between personal and professional lives. While Andrée enjoyed
the good things of life, she did not accumulate possessions
mindlessly. Her friend and colleague, Mary-Jane Mountain, said
that Andrée discarded one item of clothing whenever she bought
a new garment. Over five decades these two were joined by a deep
friendship, regularly cemented by a love of ‘creamy, sticky cakes,
strong coffee and ice-cream’.
Andrée Rosenfeld’s passing leaves a beloved son, Bill, and
grandchildren who gave her great pleasure in her latter years.
However, there are many, many people whose lives were touched
by Andrée. I am glad to be among them. I shall remember her
for her elegance, grace, sharp intellect, intellectual generosity
and kindness. In his obituary for Leon Rosenfeld, G.E. Brown
(1974) states that Rosenfeld contributed more substantially
and influentially than he would allow people to say. Like father,
like daughter.
Claire Smith
Selected Publications
Bahn, P. and A. Rosenfeld (eds) 1991 Rock Art and Prehistory: Papers Presented
to Symposium G of the AURA Congress, Darwin 1988. Oxford: Oxbow Books.
Brown, G.E. 1974 Leon Rosenfeld. Nuclear Physics B 83(1):i-viii.
Rosenfeld, A. 1965 The Inorganic Raw Materials of Antiquity. London: Weidenfeld
and Nicolson.
Rosenfeld, A., D. Horton and J. Winter 1981 Early Man in North Queensland. Terra
Australis 6. Canberra: Department of Prehistory, Research School of Pacific
Studies, Australian National University.
Rosenfeld, A. 1985 Rock Ar t Conservation in Australia. Special Australian Heritage
Publication 2. Canberra: Australian Government Publishing Service.
Ucko, P. and A. Rosenfeld 1967 Palaeolithic Cave Art. New York: McGraw-Hill.
Figure 1 Andrée Rosenfeld at Early Man Rockshelter, Cape York
Peninsula, 1974 (Photograph: Darrell Lewis).
