Archaeology

The aim of this article is to present a representative sample of the ceramic assemblage excavated from the 2008 to 2010 seasons at the Paionian city of Bylazora, with the intention of establishing the basic typological groupings essential for a future full typological analysis of the ceramics from this site

The 2010 excavations at Bylazora were conducted across two sectors of the acropolis: Sector 3 and Sector 6. In addition to the significant architectural finds in both sectors (see: Bylazora 2010 Summary Report), there were several stamped and inscribed ceramic finds representing a broad range of shapes, fabrics and decorative forms. The following catalogue is a representative selection of the finds, a continuation of the Preliminary Catalogue of the Stamped and Inscribed Ceramic Finds from the 2008 and 2009 Seasons by Mari Malmer. Each find is presented with a catalogue number (numerically following the 2009 catalogue), its basket number and sector (according to the locus system employed during excavations), and the type of fragment, followed by a short description of form and decorative features, stamps or markings. This catalogue is a preliminary presentation only. Further analysis of this material, already underway by several members of the excavation team, will address the significance of the individual finds and their role in understanding the material culture of the Paionians.

The excavations of 2011 at Bylazora have again yielded several stamped and inscribed finds related to the later periods of occupation at the site, corresponding to the ancient Greek late Classical and early Hellenistic periods. Presented here is a continuation of the preliminary catalogue comprised of selected examples from this season. Each find is listed with a catalogue number (numerically following on from the 2010 catalogue), the appropriate basket and sector numbers, and its name or the type of fragment. This is followed by a short description of its form, fabric, all stamps or markings and, where relevant, a note regarding its significance. This catalogue is a preliminary presentation only and thus should be read as an introduction to the types of materials and the stamps or markings being developed, used or imported by this Paionian city.

Ancient Paeonia, was a small region in comparison to its neighbours – Thrace, Illyria, Dardania and Macedonia- but played a significant strategic role throughout the Classical and Hellenisitc periods due to its central position in the Balkans. From the Persian Wars up until the Roman conquests, the lands of Paeonia were sought after by their neighbours, either as a thoroughfare for military movement or to act as a defensive buffer zone. It is primarily within this context that Paeonia appears in the ancient literary sources. There is little discussion, however, on the ethnic identity, language or cultural practices of the Paeonians.

The archaeological record of the Paeonians is equally scarce. There are few excavations of Paeonian sites and very little excavated material has been published or is accessible outside the Republic of Macedonia. One exception is the recent excavations at the site of Bylazora, the largest Paeonian city, conducted by the Texas Foundation for Archaeological and Historical Research. Material recovered from the 2008-2010 excavations of the Bylazora acropolis, have begun to illuminate some hitherto unknown aspects of Paeonian cultural practices and the impact of Hellenisation on Paeonia between the 4th and 2nd centuries BC. Of particular importance are two identical potters stamps impressed upon two very different types of local ceramic. The stamps were made using a particular type of double shank hair pin common throughout the region, with examples uncovered as far as Nemea, Greece and Bogazkoy, Anatolia, suggesting that Paeonia may belong within a much wider trade network than previously assumed.

This paper will present an overview of the excavations at Bylazora and the Paeonian region, with a particular focus on understanding the neighbouring regions and their relations and interactions over time. This shall provide a framework in which to examine these pottery stamps and their connections within the wide distribution of double shank pins across the Balkans and Northern Greece.

Sir Arthur Evans is one of the most memorable figures of archaeological discovery of the early 20th century. His discovery of the Palace of Minos at Knossos in Crete and study of Minoan culture made headlines world-wide and Evans became a household name and was knighted. However, long before stepping foot on the Greek islands, Evans had another life. Travel writer, political advocate, war-time correspondent and convicted traitor, this talk will explore the secret life of Sir Arthur Evans as a Balkan traveller.

William J Woodhouse (1866-1937), Professor of Greek, The Sydney University 1901-1937, travelled extensively throughout Greece between 1892 and 1935, capturing the archaeological sites and finds of Bronze Age and Classical Greece in over 1500 glass plate negatives. The photographic archive, now housed at the Nicholson Museum, records the landscapes of Attica, Aetolia and the Peloponnese often prior to extensive modern excavations, and key classical monuments before and during their early restoration phases. A selection of some of his earliest photographs were published by Woodhouse in Aetolia: Its Geography, Topography and Antiquities (1897). Recent scholarship has begun to re-examine the role of 19th century archaeological photography archives not only for their role in the development of archaeological photography but for their often ideological and political framing of the classical world. This paper will firstly contextualise the Woodhouse photographic archive in this growing area of research and analyse Woodhouse’s influences and ideologies as represented in his photography.

In 2017 two new initiatives were undertaken by the Nicholson Museum to document the Woodhouse photographic archive. The first was to crowdsource information, including locality data for each image, using Flickr (an online image sharing platform) and openly available satellite imaging using Google Earth. The second was to ground-truth this collected data through a photographic survey of targeted Peloponnesian archaeological sites and the site of Delphi (undertaken September 2017). This paper will present the results of these two initiatives and evaluate the usefulness of the citizen science model of documentation for archaeological photographic archives.

The tools of the museum archaeologist are forever expanding to draw upon the most recent advancements in imaging, material sciences and digital technologies to shed new light on old collections. The Nicholson Museum’s Roman collections were established in 1860 by Sir Charles Nicholson with loosely provenanced sculpture, epitaphs and ceramics. These collections were expanded in subsequent decades with, most significantly, the acquisition of archaeological assemblages from Roman Egypt through the Egypt Exploration Society’s excavations at sites such as Abydos and Diospolis Parva (Hu). Through partnering with Australian scientists and research facilities including the Australian Centre for Neutron Scattering (Dingo Imagining Station, ANSTO Lucas Heights), the University Veterinary Teaching Hospital (Sydney University), Hybrid Theatre Unit (Charles Perkins Centre, Sydney University) and Sydney Analytical, new light (quite literally) has allowed for new analysis of Egyptian animal mummy specimens and Greco-Roman transport amphorae.
This paper will present the preliminary results of two current research projects underway at the Nicholson Museum: ‘The Animal Mummies Research Project’ and ‘Provenancing Nicholson’s Transport Amphorae’. It will evaluate of the usefulness of different imaging techniques, in not only the understanding of mummified remains, but for ceramic analysis. Finally, it will introduce future plans for combining scientific results with digital technology for public engagement through new exhibitions at the University of Sydney’s Chau Chak Wing Museum (opening 2020).

In our modern world ‘reuse’, ‘recycling’ and ‘sustainable cities’ are phrases touted by politicians, debated in the media, researched at universities and are valued by communities. We are ever more concerned with protecting and engaging with tangible heritage, be that on a local or global scale. While these may seem like modern terms and ideologies, there is a strong precedence for the desire to use architecture and the built environment to reflect and engage with the past in the ancient Roman world. Rome wasn’t built in a day, rather it was reused, recycled and rebuilt again and again from antiquity to the present day.

In this talk Candace will explore the physical and ideological recycling of Roman architecture and sculpture within Rome and across the Mediterranean region.

In 2017 the Nicholson Museum at the University of Sydney launched a new crowd-sourcing initiative to identify and document the Woodhouse Photographic Archive using the online platform Flickr.[2] The archive contains 1800 glass plate negatives primarily taken in Greece between 1890 and 1910 by former Honorary Curator and amateur photographer William J Woodhouse (1862-1937). In itself, the archive is a rich source of documentary images of archaeological sites often before large scale excavation,[3] pre-industrial Athens, and the social history of villages including feast days, markets and farming activities. There are also nearly 300 images of Woodhouse’s family and home life in the Blue Mountains and Gordon NSW. The decision to upload all 1800 images to Flickr in their mostly undocumented state was an experiment, not only in crowd-sourcing a wide range of expertise and community knowledge for the archive’s documentation but also to digitally connect the archive with the communities where it holds the most value. This paper will introduce the Woodhouse archive and its contents, before analysing the curation of the crowd-sourced content a year after the launch of the project.

“I carry in my mind what perhaps no one else in Australia has, a series of pictures of Greece in her different stages of growth covering half a century of her existence.” W J Woodhouse, 27 April 1935.

Woodhouse delivered the lecture “Some Impressions of Greece” in 1935, just two short years before his death, recounting his last trip to Greece and remarking upon the rapid industrialisation of the country since his first trip in 1889. However, the images he held were not just in his mind. Woodhouse was an ardent photographer and amassed a collection of over 1500 glass plate negatives of Greece between the 1890s and 1910. Taken both before and after Woodhouse took up the role of Professor of Greek (1901) and Honorary Curatorship of the Nicholson Museum (1903), his photographs are a rich source of the archaeology, landscapes, villages and social life of Greece during this period. The collection was donated to the museum in 1984, by Woodhouse's daughter.

This talk will delve into the collection revealing Woodhouse’s love of Greece and his family, and discuss the significance of the archive. Candace will introduce the museum’s Flickr project where members of the public have contributed to the documentation of the archive and convey some of the incredible encounters she had while retracing Woodhouse's steps through Peloponnese in 2017.

A site in the Olympic Dam area, recorded during archaeological surveying as a silcrete quarry, was investigated. Hand-excavated squares and subsequent machine-excavated trenches revealed an ancient “mine” rather than a simple surface quarry. Blocks of high-quality silcrete were levered from below the ground surface and many were knapped in the immediate area. Rubble in the pit backfills included large numbers of flakes. Single-grain optical dates from sediments in the backfilled pits demonstrate that the silcrete “mining” occurred during a short period in the late Holocene.

Test-pitting is regularly conducted in NSW to investigate the presence, nature and extent of an archaeological deposit and consequently whether a proposed development activity has the potential to harm Aboriginal artefacts. The conditions for undertaking test excavation are specified in The Code of Practice for Archaeological Investigation of Aboriginal Objects in NSW (the Code). The Code limits test excavation in terms of test excavation unit spacing, size and extent in order to avoid or minimise the risk of harm to the objects under investigation. This paper argues that the focus on limiting the scope of test-pitting sits in conflict with its very purpose: to characterise the nature and extent of sub-surface objects. The evidence for this argument comes from archaeological work conducted at Lake George, NSW, as part of the author’s PhD research. Here a limited test-pitting program was employed and several of the test-pitted sites were subsequently excavated. A comparison of the characterisation of the sites from the test-pitting results, with the wider view afforded by the excavation data, demonstrates that limited test-pitting data can regularly under-report artefact densities and concentration frequencies. The inability to easily rely on limited test-pitting data for an accurate description of the density and distribution of artefacts has important implications for the subsequent assessment of potential harm that a proposed development activity may have on buried Aboriginal artefacts.

Subsurface sampling programs are regularly employed to detect buried archaeological material in open landscapes. Rarely, however, is the effectiveness of the sampling program assessed through subsequent excavation. Here, an optimal subsurface testing strategy is designed using Kintigh’s simulation approach to locate prehistoric knapping floors and is applied to an open landscape in southeastern Australia. Several prehistoric knapping floors were discovered using this strategy and nine of these were subsequently excavated to establish their diameters, densities, and density distributions. The results indicate that there is a high level of divergence between test-pitting data and excavation data. This demonstrates that test-pit data cannot be assumed to provide an accurate representation of site characteristics. It follows that an empirical validation of site characteristics through subsequent excavation is needed before a meaningful evaluation of the effectiveness of a sampling strategy can be conducted.

This study presents a new method for the detection of backed artifact industries through the identification of backing debitage. The waste flakes produced during backing retouch are found to have a combination of unique attributes which distinguish them from other small retouch and core reduction flakes. Experimentally produced flakes are compared with an assemblage from a mid-late Holocene site in south-eastern Australia, which contains multiple backed artifact production events, including a waste flake to backed artifact refit. It is shown that the waste flakes in the experimental work hold the same diagnostically distinct attributes as the flakes seen in the archaeological assemblage. This provides compelling evidence for the ability to classify backed artifact waste flakes and identify backed artifact production events in the absence of the finished artifact. The small size of the backing debitage, and the implications this has for screen size selection are also discussed.