Archaeology

3D scanning the archaeological dog skeleton

A key component of Museum of Sydney’s interpretation is the archaeological remains of First Government House

Enough rope

More than a kilometre of rope suspended the hammocks required to sleep 600 or more convicts in the Hyde Park Barracks dormitories between 1819 and 1848

Landscape crop of surgeon bleeding a patient into a bowl.

How the ‘Sidney Slaughter House’ got its name

During archaeological excavations at the Rum Hospital south wing (now The Mint) on Sydney’s Macquarie Street in 1980-81, a few small traces of the site’s dark and often painful past were discovered

Person in red shirt kneeling in front of lifted floorboards removing debris.

Hyde Park Barracks: a keeper of lost things

Uncover and explore some of the items found inside the barracks

Convict Sydney, Level 1, Hyde Park Barracks Museum
Convict Sydney

Objects

These convict-era objects and archaeological artefacts found at Hyde Park Barracks and The Mint (Rum Hospital) are among the rarest and most personal artefacts to have survived from Australia’s early convict period

Assemblage of seeds and pits

Reviewing the menu: the hidden diet at the Hyde Park Barracks Immigration Depot

Forty years since archaeologists discovered a vast amount of material below the floorboards at the Hyde Park Barracks, PhD candidate Kimberley Connor is painting a more complex picture of 19th-century institutional life

Metal mouth harp and scrap of music paper.

The archaeology of music at Hyde Park Barracks

Hard as it is to imagine men and women in the government institutions at Hyde Park Barracks singing and dancing, archaeological evidence suggests that music may have been heard there from time to time

Clay pipe with effigial bowl, spur and part stem with relief script. Maker Samuel Elliott, Sydney

Up in smoke: clay tobacco pipes

From the earliest days of the colony, Sydney-siders smoked them, broke them, and discarded them into drains, rubbish piles, work sites and hidden cracks and crevices of buildings

Resource

What does archaeology tell us?

Who were the secret archaeologists living at the Hyde Park Barracks?