Nick Jarvis
**The 2015 Advanced Archaeology Field School crossed a (large) number of things off the ‘to do’ list. With geophysicist Kelsey Lowe from the University of Queensland, students surveyed almost all of the open areas around the Willow Court buildings (including the Carlton Yard, the southern Allonah yard, the rear of Frescati and some areas behind the Barracks that are now private property. **
(If you guys remember the Old B and A Ward was roughly situated in the what is now the C Ward airing yard.)
Hopefully, when processed, this will show us clearly where building foundations are and how deep they are, as well as locate any other features that might be archaeologically interesting, like privies (toilets) or cesspits.
At the same time as the geophysical survey, the students also completely mapped the Council owned buildings, the geophysical survey areas and all other major features, giving us a complete and detailed survey plan of the site.
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The final major task was the completion of the cataloguing of the Council-held material left over from the closure of the hospital and the students were also lucky enough to be able to look at some of the privately held material that has been discovered in former hospital buildings. Because a lot of this was personal material, this made a nice contrast to the more impersonal, institutional furniture and larger items held by Council. Students also made a complete record of the old graffiti on the Barracks and at the rear of Bronte, and recorded various physical aspects of Frescati and the Barracks to understand their sequence of construction and changes that have been made to the buildings over time. All of this is very useful preparatory work to the actual excavation, which we hope to begin next year.
***Tell you what, I’m pretty excited about all this amazing work being done the crew at Flinders University, we are so lucky to have them on board. ***
Just how thorough they are being is awesome, I mean I wouldn’t have thought that they would take the time to catalogue some of the old graffiti. Just wait to they start excavating.