Even though archaeology happens all the
time in Melbourne it rarely happens on
the scale that we're seeing as part of
this Melbourne Metro project. We're not
just excavating one or two properties
we're looking at the area of a whole
community, it's half a city block in some cases.
(Evan:) We're doing this project and
opening up these areas that will
ultimately form entrances to the tunnels.
There's a real opportunity here to
recover some artefacts that will
hopefully help piece together some of
the history of Melbourne and contribute
to a different aspect other than just
delivering huge infrastructure.
Once archaeology has been impacted that's it
you actually don't get another
opportunity to investigate it. So it's
very important for a project of this
scale that the excavations occur so that
we get that information out of the
ground, so to speak, analyse it and
contribute to our understanding of the
history of Melbourne.
(Jeremy:) The site's really interesting 
because it has potentially a
range of different layers: it's got the
indigenous layer, the archaeology of
Aboriginal communities before European
settlement in the 1830s, and it's got
that pioneer generation of Buckley and
Faulkner and then of course Melbourne
has a massive period of transformation
in the 1850s with the discovery of gold
the population absolutely explodes, it
becomes a very wealthy city and the
architecture changes again, and then
throughout the 19th century we see
continual growth and change, so all 
these phases and they're all
different should be reflected in the
archaeology of these sites.
(Meg:) There's a huge opportunity for the
broader community to be exposed to the
archeology and this is really fantastic
because actually the broader community
owns this past and this is where
archeology is so exciting because you're
not reading about it, you're actually seeing it.
(Jeremy:) We expect to find two sorts of things: 
we'll find the remains of buildings
the foundations, the remains of fireplaces, doorsteps, gardens potentially, so a range of almost
architectural features, but we'll also
find a lot of artefacts that were used
and discarded by the people living in
Melbourne at this time. We could
potentially get over half a million
artefacts. Of course the value of the
artefacts is not in this sum total of
numbers that we find but it's in the
information that it gives us that we
don't already know about early Melbourne.
