In a non-descript office building out the back of Wollongong, a collection of skulls sits neatly atop the upstairs cabinets.
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“That’s a horse,” says archaeologist Lian Flannery, pointing to the biggest of them.
“Two cows, three sheep-slash-goats – sheep and goat skulls are very difficult to tell apart – three kangaroos, a wallaby, a fox and a cat.”
The skulls are English-born Miss Flannery’s reference points – useful yardsticks for excavations that can yield all kinds of old animal parts.
The work has taken her to sites in Pompeii and York - home to 2000 years of continuous human occupation and more bones than any Wollongong office cabinet could ever hope to bear.
She traveled to the Pilbara in Western Australia - where the worlds of big mining companies and Indigenous communities collide - before taking up a job in the Wollongong office of archaeological consulting firm Biosis.
On Wednesday Miss Flannery and Biosis colleagues will lead a public talk aimed at showing the importance of protecting Australia’s archaeological heritage.
Total preservation was not the end goal, Miss Flannery said.
“It’s all about preserving what should be preserved and understanding that some things need to go, because you also have to have progress,” she said.
“In terms of [Australia’s] European archaeology, people say, ‘well it’s only 200 years’. But if you always think like that we’re never going to save anything.
“It will get to six, seven, 800 years and … the first white settlers of Australia – that’s their history gone.”
Wednesday’s talk, part of National Archaeology Week, will detail the results of Wollongong’s biggest archaeological excavation.
Biosis undertook the dig in 2015 as part of the redevelopment of the former Dwyer’s car dealership bordered by Corrimal, Crown and Burelli streets.
The dig, required under state development legislation, unearthed more than 4000 items, some of which will now be incorporated into the new build, displayed or gifted to area museums.
Miss Flannery’s favourite find was the remains of a tiny porcelain doll with its arms long lost and a bonnet indicating its mid-19th century origins.
There were mangled old clocks, coins from the 1700s, a shattered chamber pot and a collection of limestone marbles.
Without a weekly garbage collection service, early households left some of their best archaeological finds to be discovered in a single spot, Miss Flannery said.
“Archaeologists love a good cesspit. That’s where all the good stuff is.”
Wednesday’s talk from is 7pm-8:30pm at Wollongong Art Gallery.
