Unearthed

In AD 79, the eruption of Mount Vesuvius devastated Pompeii, burying much of the Roman city beneath layers of volcanic ash and pumice. Yet within this destruction lies a paradox. The very forces that brought life in Pompeii to an abrupt end also helped preserve evidence of the civilisation that once flourished there.

For centuries, much of Pompeii lay concealed beneath volcanic deposits. Excavations began in 1748, nearly seventeen centuries after the eruption. Beneath metres of accumulated material lay the remnants of an ancient city: its streets, homes, public spaces and traces of everyday life.

Walking through Pompeii in 2008, I watched archaeologists carefully brushing away layers of material, gradually revealing fragments of the ancient city. Among them appeared to be students, participating in the painstaking work of unearthing its past. The streets beneath my feet, now travelled by visitors from around the world, had been brought back into view through generations of excavation.

The earliest excavators worked largely by hand, removing layers of volcanic material with picks, shovels and baskets. Over generations, their methods became increasingly systematic and precise. Yet the very act of uncovering Pompeii exposed its fragile remains to the elements from which they had been sheltered for centuries. What had preserved the city now had to be carefully removed, presenting another challenge: how to protect what had been unearthed.

What does it take to preserve something once we have brought it back into the light?

Within Pompeii's Forum Baths stood a marble basin, its craftsmanship enduring for almost two thousand years. Yet it was the inscription that captured my curiosity. Who designed it? Whose hands shaped the marble? Who commissioned its creation, and what did those carefully inscribed words reveal?

The inscription records the names of two Roman officials who commissioned the basin, together with its cost of 5,250 sesterces from public funds. Yet the artisans who shaped the marble remain unnamed. Unlike the impressions left by passing chariot wheels, these words were deliberately set in bronze to preserve a record of those responsible for its creation.

When History Travels

From the cobblestone streets of Pompeii to the sandstone formations of Uluru, walking through these ancient landscapes reveals different ways humanity has left its mark. Along Uluru's base walk, another relationship between people, nature and the preservation of knowledge comes into view.

For generations, Aṉangu people have lived in close relationship with Country, finding shelter among Uluru's rock formations and passing knowledge through stories, teachings and art. Within sheltered rock faces, paintings express aspects of Tjukurpa, the law, knowledge and cultural traditions that continue to guide Aṉangu life. These are not simply traces of the past, but expressions of a living culture.

Unlike inscriptions carved into stone or words impressed into clay, much of this knowledge has traditionally been preserved through living practices, storytelling, ceremony and custodianship of Country. The landscape itself becomes part of the record.

Stories carved in stone, knowledge carried through generations - Uluṟu, Australia.

In 2012, fragments of one of humanity's earliest civilisations arrived on Australian shores. The Wonders of Ancient Mesopotamia exhibition at Melbourne Museum brought ancient artefacts across continents, including records impressed into clay more than five thousand years ago. Unearthed, studied and preserved, these objects offered visitors an encounter with a civilisation whose written records had endured across millennia. Beyond safeguarding the artefacts themselves, museums make ancient knowledge accessible across geographical and cultural boundaries.

Among the earliest surviving records of ancient Mesopotamia are clay tablets documenting something remarkably ordinary: grain. Fashioned from the earth of the Tigris and Euphrates river plains, these tablets received impressions made with reed instruments while the clay was still damp. Quantities of grain and other commodities were recorded, creating some of humanity's earliest administrative records.

The grain has long since disappeared, yet its record remains. Some tablets survived beneath layers of earth; others were hardened by fires that consumed the buildings around them. An ordinary material, shaped for the practical needs of its time, became an extraordinary vessel for preserving human thought across millennia.

While the Tigris and Euphrates offered clay upon which human activity could be impressed, another great river sustained a different writing material. Along the Nile, papyrus flourished in its wetlands, its fibrous stems providing the raw material for a lighter, more portable surface upon which to record human thought.

During a visit to Cairo, I watched a demonstration of traditional papyrus-making. The plant's green outer covering was peeled away to reveal its pale inner pith, which was sliced into thin strips and arranged in two overlapping layers, one horizontal, the other vertical. Pressed and dried, these strips became a smooth, flexible surface upon which words and images could be recorded.

Ancient Egyptian scribes used reed pens to apply ink to papyrus, commonly black pigments made from carbon and red pigments derived from ochre. Unlike the impressions pressed into Mesopotamian clay, these marks rested upon the prepared surface, giving written expression a different material form.

Papyrus was only one of the materials upon which ancient Egyptians recorded their thoughts. From stone and wood to precious metals, their inscriptions preserved not only accounts of everyday life, but beliefs about what might lie beyond it.

Memories of Cairo, reimagined through papyrus fibres.

Storehouses of Memory

In 1922, British archaeologist Howard Carter and his Egyptian excavation team uncovered the tomb of Tutankhamun in the Valley of the Kings, supported by Lord Carnarvon. Within its chambers lay thousands of objects, many preserved for more than three millennia, an extraordinary record of ancient Egyptian life, craftsmanship and beliefs about the afterlife.

Before uncovering one of archaeology's greatest treasures, Carter had worked as an archaeological artist, meticulously recording ancient Egyptian monuments and inscriptions through drawings. Years later, he would uncover the golden funerary mask of Tutankhamun, made from gold and adorned with coloured glass and precious stones.

On the reverse of the golden mask, hieroglyphic inscriptions invoke divine protection, drawing upon a funerary spell from the ancient Egyptian Book of the Dead. These words were intended to safeguard Tutankhamun in the afterlife, preserving not simply a record of his existence, but the beliefs of a civilisation about what might endure beyond death.

Over the following decade, Carter and his team meticulously catalogued, photographed and documented the tomb's contents. Through their work, an ancient collection became part of a new archaeological record, preserved through the instruments and methods of the twentieth century.

Concealed within the Valley of the Kings, Tutankhamun's tomb had been designed to safeguard the pharaoh and his possessions for eternity. Its sheltered environment helped preserve an extraordinary collection for more than three thousand years, despite evidence of ancient intrusions.

Not every storehouse of human knowledge would share the same fate. The Great Library of Alexandria, established to gather the knowledge of the ancient world, housed collections of papyrus scrolls carrying the observations, discoveries and ideas of generations. Unlike Tutankhamun's concealed tomb, this celebrated centre of learning would eventually lose its collections.

The disappearance of the Great Library is often attributed to a devastating fire, yet its history is far more complex. Political upheaval, destruction and gradual institutional decline are said to have contributed to the loss of its collections over time. No papyrus scrolls can be securely identified as surviving from the original library, nor has its building been conclusively located. Much of what we know of its existence survives through the writings of others.

A tomb concealed from the living preserved much of its contents, while a library created for the living ultimately lost its collection.

Among those who documented Alexandria's intellectual world was the Greek geographer Strabo, who visited Egypt in the first century BCE. His observations reached subsequent generations not through the survival of his original manuscripts, but through successive copies. The materials upon which his words were first recorded have disappeared, yet his writings endure.

Each successive copy passed through another human hand, carrying the possibility of changes in language, interpretation or meaning. While the original material might disappear, its contents could endure, preserved, reproduced and sometimes transformed through the very process that carried them forward.

Across generations, the preservation of knowledge became inseparable from its curation. Each surviving account carried not only the observations of its originator, but also the choices of those who copied, translated and safeguarded it. Perspectives accumulated, sometimes converging, sometimes diverging, leaving fragments from which later generations would piece together their understanding of the past.

When we unearth the past, are we discovering history as it happened, or assembling our understanding from what has survived?

From Papyrus to Paper

Even as materials evolved, their names sometimes endured. The ancient Egyptian papyrus plant became known to the Greeks as papyros, a word that travelled through Latin and eventually gave rise to the English word paper. Yet while the name survived, the material itself underwent a remarkable transformation.

Unlike papyrus, formed from overlapping strips of plant pith, paper is made by breaking down plant fibres into pulp, suspending them in water and gathering them into sheets. This innovation transformed how writing surfaces could be produced, opening new possibilities for recording and sharing information.

The origins of papermaking take us to ancient China, where archaeological discoveries have revealed paper fragments dating to the second century BCE. Among these early finds are fragments of a map, preserving representations of place upon a remarkably different writing surface. Centuries later, the Chinese official Cai Lun was credited with refining papermaking techniques around 105 CE, helping establish a material that would eventually transform how information travelled across the world.

Early Chinese papermakers worked with plant fibres, including hemp, tree bark and discarded textiles. Soaked and beaten into pulp, the fibres were suspended in water before being lifted on a fine screen. As the water drained, the fibres settled into a delicate sheet, which was then pressed and dried.

From these humble beginnings, papermaking spread beyond China, travelling through Asia and the Islamic world before reaching Europe. Materials and techniques evolved across cultures, yet the essential process remained: plant fibres suspended in water, gathered into sheets and dried. What began as a handmade surface would eventually become one of humanity's most widely used materials for recording and sharing information.

Perhaps there is a little Back to the Future in every time capsule we create. Photographs, letters and small keepsakes, carefully chosen and entrusted to an unknown future.

Perhaps we become time travellers ourselves when we encounter the remains of another age. Walking through Pompeii's ancient streets, imagining the movement of carts and the rhythms of everyday life, or standing before artefacts brought across continents to a museum, we find ourselves momentarily transported into worlds beyond our own.

Where preservation has allowed the physical world of another era to endure, imagination begins to restore something of the life that once animated it.

The Life of a Fibre

Today, paper surrounds us in forms so familiar that we rarely consider its origins. From the pages of a notebook to the wrapping of a parcel or the cardboard box delivered to our door, its versatility extends far beyond the written word. Each form reflects centuries of innovation in how fibres are transformed to meet different needs.

During the nineteenth century, advances in mechanical and chemical processing established wood pulp as a major source of paper fibre. Softwoods such as pine contribute longer fibres that provide strength, while hardwoods such as eucalyptus offer shorter fibres suited to smoother, more uniform sheets. Bamboo and agricultural residues provide further alternatives, each bringing different characteristics to the finished paper.

What once required the careful hands of a papermaker has evolved into a highly automated process. Modern machinery transforms prepared pulp into continuous sheets, pressing and drying the fibres while controlling the paper's weight, texture and finish. Yet the underlying principle remains remarkably similar to the methods developed centuries ago. Alongside modern production, traditional papermaking continues to be practised, preserving the skills and craftsmanship passed down through generations.

Among the advances in modern papermaking is the ability to recover used paper, returning its fibres to the production process and giving the material another life. Today's paper can be made from virgin fibre, sourced directly from plants such as trees; pre-consumer material, including offcuts recovered during manufacturing; or post-consumer fibre, collected from paper products that have already served their purpose. Each offers a different pathway from raw material to finished sheet.

Recovered paper undergoes a process of sorting, cleaning and repulping, with inks removed where necessary. The reclaimed fibres are then prepared for a new sheet, allowing material that has already served one purpose to take on another.

Once associated with muted greys, visible fibres and rougher textures, recycled paper has undergone a remarkable transformation. Advances in fibre processing and finishing now allow recycled sheets to achieve the brightness, smoothness and refined texture traditionally associated with virgin paper. What was once readily distinguishable by appearance can now be remarkably difficult to tell apart.

From the delicate pages of a notebook to the sturdy layers of corrugated packaging, paper takes on remarkably different forms. Its strength, absorbency, flexibility and texture are shaped by the fibres and processes used to create it, each variation designed to serve a particular purpose.

Even the weight of a sheet can change the experience of writing. Measured in grams per square metre (GSM), paper weight contributes to its feel, flexibility and how it responds to ink. From the delicate turn of a lightweight page to the reassuring substance of a heavier sheet, each offers a different experience beneath the pen.

Beyond its appearance and feel, paper carries another story: where its fibres originated, how they were processed and what becomes of the material after use. From responsible sourcing to recycled content and durability, these considerations increasingly shape the choices available to us.

There is also a distinction between recycled content and recyclability. One tells us where a material has come from; the other, where it might go next.

The Records We Leave Behind

From stone and clay to papyrus and paper, humanity has long relied on physical surfaces to preserve its thoughts. Today, much of what we record exists beyond the printed page, stored electronically and accessible at the touch of a screen.

More than five thousand years separate the clay tablets of Mesopotamia from the electronic tablets we hold today. Where ancient scribes pressed their records into damp earth, we now touch illuminated glass, creating and sharing words, images and ideas almost instantaneously.

While technology has transformed how we access and share information, the challenge of preserving it remains. Digital records depend on storage systems and formats that may become obsolete. Information can be reproduced almost endlessly, yet it can also be altered, lost or separated from its original context.

As access to information expands, so too does the importance of discernment. What has been preserved, what has been omitted, and through whose interpretation do we encounter it? These questions, as relevant to ancient manuscripts as they are to electronic archives and artificial intelligence, remind us that access to information is not necessarily the same as understanding it.

Some records were created to endure; others survived by circumstance. Tutankhamun's tomb sheltered its treasures, Pompeii lay concealed beneath volcanic ash, while the Great Library of Alexandria lost its extraordinary collection. Yet among the fragments of history, even the simplest messages can retain their meaning.

Among Pompeii's surviving mosaics is the image of a dog accompanied by the Latin inscription Cave Canem, meaning "Beware of the Dog." Crafted from individual pieces of stone, the mosaic has endured for nearly two thousand years, its warning as recognisable today as it was to those who first crossed its threshold.

Not every surviving record speaks as clearly. Many reach us through generations of copying, translation and interpretation, each adding another thread to the tapestry of history. To unearth the past is therefore more than recovering objects; it is an invitation to consider the lives, intentions and circumstances that shaped what remains.

Just as we encounter the traces of those who came before us, future generations may one day discover what we leave behind. The materials and methods will continue to evolve, but the human impulse to observe, express and preserve remains.