Ask an Archaeologist - Benjamin WhartonAsk an Archaeologist - Benjamin Wharton 

What inspired me to get into archaeology was a love of history and our human past that we can only discover that through archaeological practice and research. Also bringing that to the present day for future generations as well.

Well, the study that allowed me to become an archaeologist was an undergraduate degree at the University of Sydney majoring in archaeology and history, and then also honours as well.

Experience-wise, what really helped was all my previous work before I studied. I started studying in my late 20s, so I had a good 10 plus years of work experience before that. Everything from farming to engineering, being a fitter and turner, as well as drafting work. All of that came to help me later in archaeological work.

One of the most surprising things to me, perhaps not a surprise but more of just a moment of being taken aback, was excavating a cottage from the 1860s and just behind the front steps of the porch there was a group of child's marbles.

I could just imagine from the 1860s a young boy had just hidden his marbles behind those steps and it wasn't until now that they were recovered and that hit me quite a bit emotionally.

I've had a number of different roles in my archaeological work so far. 

A lot of those have been in historical archaeology, and that's been predominantly digging, and from my drafting background, doing site plans as well, and from other backgrounds doing artefact cataloguing. So, that's been quite different from what I'm doing now at the National Maritime Museum.

Maritime archaeology differs from other disciplines of archaeology such as historical archaeology in that it focuses mostly on the watercraft and the water and the ways that people lived and worked with the water in the past.

The highlight of my career has been working with colonial-era boats from New South Wales, in particular the Barangaroo boat, but it has also been the most challenging. 

During the excavation period, it was many hours for all of us involved, often seven days a week, to recover every piece of the boat and meticulously record it so that we could put it back together in one day. 

It's also a boat that is unidentified, so there's a lot of historical work and research to do around that. But at the same time as that, we've also been using a lot of digital technology today to help us better understand it, so combining traditional craft with modern digital work has been really quite a highlight.

Some advice I'd give would be to, during your undergrad study, is plan ahead of what subjects will help you get further into masters or honours, because when I went through, you weren't employable unless you had a masters or honours degree. So you had to really plan from the first year of undergrad to get to that point.

Why I think archaeology matters to the world is that it's able to give voice to those of the past that did not have a voice. History is often written by the victors and can be constructed to form a narrative, but the archaeology is the truth in itself of what it is.

I also like the time travel aspects of when you're on a dig site. You're bringing the site back down to different time periods in the past, and you can be standing in a field in 1860 with the remains of a cottage and farming, and you're there on the landscape in that time. It's a different place. Back to the marbles, I was just sitting there, I was sitting there with the marbles and the steps, and then I looked out and just over there were some planting rows and we were still able to excavate the little rows, a tree stump burn over there and boom, you're right there on the landscape, two metres down, back in the 1860s.