The remit of the Centre extends to:

• Enhancing excellence in scholarship by research staff and students and promoting understanding of world archaeology and palaeoanthropology, especially in the Indo-Pacific Region (southeast Asia, Australia, the Pacific Rim and Oceania)
• Encouraging cooperative and collaborative research programmes involving Archaeology and other disciplines, within the framework of the ANU, and between the ANU and other institutions, both within Australia, and worldwide
• Appointing Visiting Fellows of international distinction in the fields of Archaeology and Palaeoanthropology, and stimulating international exchange programmes for scholars and postgraduate students

The Centre builds on a rich inheritance of forty years leading international research at the ANU, into the antiquity of human occupation of Australia, southeast Asia, and the Pacific, and related innovative approaches to Quaternary dating, modelling climatic change, and past environments.

Additionally, the University structure encourages a wide spectrum of interdisciplinary research and supervision e.g. through cognate Research Centres and Departments of Linguistics, Anthropology, Human Geography,

the John Curtin Medical School, and Earth Sciences, both in the Faculties and Research Schools. CAR has national research links and collaboration with ANSTO, CSIRO, AIATSIS and the National Museum of Australia, most Universities in Australia, and international links with UNESCO projects, the International Geosphere-Biosphere Programme (IGBP) and PAGES, research centres at the Universities of Auckland,Colorado, Oxford, Cambridge, Hawaii, and National Museums throughout the Indo-Pacific, such as the Vanuato National Museum.

This tradition continues with major research foci in areas as diverse as:

• Pleistocene archaeology and environments of Sunda and Sahul, particularly the chronology and styles of human settlement, rock art, lithic technologies and culture-environment interactions
• The colonisation and earliest settlements of the Pacific, particularly Lapita Cultures, during the later Holocene
• Direct dating of hominids (using ESR and Uranium series methods) in Africa, Australia and the Middle East, and studies of their evolution
• The scientific study of ancient materials (eg. obsidian, ceramics, textiles, pigments and residues), living and extinct faunas, and past continental and island ecosystems
• The archaeology of culture contact (both in historical periods eg. Indonesian-Australian contact from the 17th century) and in early Island Melanesia and Polynesia
• Development of method and theory in stone artefact studies, including advanced image analytical and morphometric approaches
• Development of culture and civilisations, in South America and Southeast Asia, including transitions in agriculture, maritime exploitation and trade
• Integration of archaeological and historical linguistic information to examine macro-level distribution of the world's language groups in their historical context