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The archaeologist Mike Morwood, who has died of cancer aged 62, led the Australian-Indonesian team that in 2003 found a diminutive skull, then further bones, at the cave of Liang Bua on the Indonesian island of Flores. He called on a colleague, Peter Brown, to make the initial description of these skeletal remains and together they decided that it was a new species related to humans, Homo floresiensis.
The find was dubbed "the Hobbit" and the name stuck. Controversy – including the removal of the bones to a rival laboratory, where they were damaged – dogged the find for a variety of reasons, many of which were described in Mike's book A New Human: The Startling Discovery and Strange Story of the "Hobbits" of Flores, Indonesia (2007).
The dating of the find was remarkable, as it seemed to suggest that the Hobbits were in Flores as early as 70,000 years ago – before modern humans were anywhere in the region – and survived as recently as 13,000 years go, long after the arrival of modern humans in Australia and New Guinea more than 50,000 years ago. Yet there were no remains of modern humans, or other evidence of them, in Flores until after the Hobbits became extinct. One of my last conversations with Mike was about the implications of (still unpublished) dating determinations that put the fossils at much earlier dates.
In many ways, the controversies surrounding the find exposed the weak foundations of physical anthropology and archaeology. Different scholars have claimed that the closest relationships of the creature were with Australopithecines, which are otherwise unknown outside Africa or after 1.5m years ago. Others suggested that its closest relationship was with Homo erectus, known to have reached Indonesia more than 1m years ago.
Another group of scholars suggested that the bones were of modern people who were very small through natural causes, and a bizarre variation of this theory attributed the small size to one or other pathology. A discipline that cannot decide where a relatively complete skeleton fits into the full range of possibilities in human ancestry can be said to have some problems.
Mike had selected a small number of stone tools to illustrate in the original paper, with an eye for those that looked most modern. Some archaeologists wedded to 19th-century European classification methods pontificated that such artefacts could only have been made by modern humans. Doctoral research by Mike's colleague Mark Moore has demonstrated how inappropriate that judgment was. This was published, along with other definitive studies of Liang Bua, in a special issue of the Journal of Human Evolution, edited by Mike, in 2009. Such publications have disposed of many of the stupidities that were published subsequent to the initial announcement.
Mike was born in Auckland, New Zealand, studied archaeology at the University of Auckland and gained his PhD at the Australian National University in Canberra. From a position in the Queensland Department of Aboriginal and Islander Advancement – the public service body with responsibility at that time for Aboriginal cultural heritage – he joined the University of New England (UNE), in Armidale, New South Wales, in 1981, and worked there until 2007. Mike then moved to the University of Wollongong, also in New South Wales.
In his PhD thesis, on the rock art and archaeology of the Carnarvon Ranges in Central Queensland, Mike had pioneered the inclusion of rock art into other archaeological studies, and continued to work on projects which sought such integration until his death. He turned his UNE course on the archaeology of rock art into the book Visions from the Past (2002).
In the mid-1990s he undertook a multidisciplinary study in Cape York Peninsula, Queensland, involving many experts from other fields and very large numbers of students. The resulting volume, Quinkan Prehistory (1995), is one of the most detailed reports of an archaeological field project in Australia. Mike documented early occupation of the region at more than 32,000 years ago. Subsequent research led to even earlier dates.
After the Cape York book appeared, he began research in Indonesia. As his head of department, I advised him this was premature and that he should instead write a synthesis of his book as a journal article so that people could take in the many innovations it represented. It turned out I was wrong.
First he took over some work by Dutch and Indonesian archaeologists on the island of Flores. The Dutch had demonstrated that stone tools made by human ancestors, known for some time from amateur excavations, were older than about 800,000 years. This was unprecedented. Mike worked with colleagues to provide a numerical age for these stone tools – 880,000 years.
The subsequent research by teams he led has taken the dating of human ancestors on Flores back beyond 1m years. Mike passed that work on to PhD students and colleagues at UNE. The happy coincidence that UNE also employed a geologist, Ian Metcalfe, who had unravelled much of the movement of continental elements that now make up the islands of Indonesia, led to a highly successful collaboration between Mike and Ian on a conference and book, Faunal and Floral Migration and Evolution in SE Asia-Australia (2001).
But Mike's name will always be associated with his other project on Flores. His thorough scholarship of the archaeology of Indonesia and south-east Asia showed him that there were still sites where excavations had not reached the bottom of the site and that they could be safely extended by shoring up the trenches. This led to the finding of the skull; and the initial description of Homo floresiensis was published in 2004 in the journal Nature. Mike subsequently worked elsewhere in Indonesia, on the island of Sulawesi, with as yet unpublished results that are also groundbreaking, and had recently completed a research project in Kimberley, Western Australia.
Mike inspired devotion among his students. He embodied what archaeology in a university department should be about – both creating and passing on knowledge about the past.
One of my strong memories is of a conversation with Mike about the small stature of the skeleton his team had discovered. Although a fully grown adult, she was, he said, exactly the same height as his daughter Jarla, who was then three years old. He had a tennis-ball-sized version of the skull of Homo floresiensis made for her.
Jarla died of brain cancer at the age of 10 and Mike determined to help understand why such young children die of the condition.
Mike is survived by his wife, Francelina; by a daughter, Catherine, from his first marriage, to Kath; and by two grandchildren, Deaglan and Riley.
• Michael John Morwood, archaeologist, born 22 October 1950; died 23 July 2013
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