Historical Archaeology and the Historian

The archaeology of an historic site is meaningless without history; and the history of such a site is impoverished without archaeology. In the context of Australia since 1788, the paper examines some reasons why relations between the complementary disciplines are often less than ideal. It looks at case histories of sites in New South Wales outside the Sydney metropolitan area, examining the degree to which archaeology supplies vital evidence rather than data merely supporting or illustrating documentary sources. It emphasises the particular value of archaeology in assisting the historic documentation of less visible, less articulate people of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, such as the Overseas Chinese, and asks for more constructive two-way co-operation between archaeologists and historians. The impact of history on historical archaeology is inescapable. During the heated debate in 1972 which preceded the approval of Historical Archaeology as a University of Sydney course, Alexander Cambitoglou claimed the site of Torone for historical archaeology because he had begun the excavations by reading Thucydides. The distinction between Torone and,