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Samantha Bolton
What
is your current position?
PhD student, University of Western Australia. I also do tutoring at the university and some consultancy work for Eureka Archaeological Research and Consulting.
Where
did you study archaeology?
I did a Bachelor of Science at University of Sydney, but I wasn't enjoying it so I did a Bachelor of Arts (Honours) as well. I'm now doing my PhD at the University of Western Australia.
How
did you become interested in archaeology?
Hating my science degree, I decided to take a year off. I couldn't find anything to do, so I decided to study archaeology and medieval history for a bit of fun and it all went from there. It was great to be listening to lectures in something that was really interesting, and after I went on my first excavation I knew my fate was sealed.
What
archaeological projects are you working on at the moment?
I am studying late 19th and early 20th century settlement sites between Perth and Kalgoorlie, Western Australia. I am about to go to the Pilbara region in WA to excavate an Aboriginal shell midden and the Recherche Archipelago, off the south coast of WA, to survey and excavate a sealers' and a whalers' camp from the 1800s.
Tell
us about one of your most interesting archaeological discoveries.
While doing some consultancy work in England, I got to work on a Roman site in Southampton. We were excavating a house, and right in the middle of one of the rooms was a dog skeleton. It had a couple of other artefacts placed with it, and we realised that it was actually buried there, possibly by some distraught owner.
Tell
us about a funny/disastrous/amazing experience that you have had
while doing archaeology.
We were looking for the possible location of Louis and Rose de Freycinet’s camp in Shark Bay, Western Australia. de Freycinet was a French explorer who was known to have camped somewhere in the vicinity in 1818. We were investigating a possible site, and the only way to get to the site each day from our camp was by jet ski. Ahhhh… what an amazing way to get to work each day.
What’s
your favourite part of being an archaeologist?
I suddenly realised one day that all the various career choices I had (sometimes) briefly followed involved solving a mystery, and archaeology was no different. I love the process of tracking down as much information as possible and using it to work out what happened. I also enjoy the mix of physical work outside and the intellectual stimulation from interpreting the information you record. I have worked in some amazing places, including Central Australia, the Pilbara, Angkor in Cambodia and Pemba Island, off the coast of Tanzania, that I wouldn’t have otherwise visited.
Follow
up reading:
I co-edited a book about fieldwork that was happening at the University of Sydney in the 1990s:
Petrie, C. and Bolton, S. (eds) 1997 In the Field. Sydney University Archaeological Methods Series 4. Archaeological Computing Laboratory, University of Sydney, Sydney.
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