This paper focuses on a collection of objects deliberately concealed beneath the verandah of a ward for middle-class, female, paying patients at Australia’s longest continuously operating mental health institution, the Royal Derwent Hospital in Tasmania. Cached in small discrete mounds across an area of some 50 square metres, the collection was probably concealed in the mid-20th century and contains over 1000 items of clothing, ephemera and other objects dating from 1880 to the mid-1940s. In achieving a possessional territory of such magnitude, this patient achieved a level of personal self-expression that is rarely encountered archaeologically, particularly within an institutional context. Analysis of this collection as an ‘underlife’ illuminates both functional aspects of the hospital and the hopes and desires of this particular, though still anonymous, patient and her vibrant world of things.

This report presents results of excavation and analysis of a shell mound deposit at Mandjungaar, near Weipa, Cape York Peninsula. This study was initiated as a cultural heritage management project focused on a shell mound damaged by unauthorised clearing of access tracks. This study included a small research component to establish a baseline understanding of longer-term use history of the Mandjungaar area at the request of Ndrua'angayth custodians. This included excavation and analysis of a test pit at the site. Results of the study are presented and contextualised in relation to previous research on the Weipa Peninsula in order to expand our understanding of the wider cultural history of the southern Weipa Peninsula. These results provide further support for the assertion that shell mound formation in the Albatross Bay region involved food production activities that were strategically focused on estuarine mud and sandflat ecosystems. In doing so, this dataset provides additional support for the previously proposed niche production model of shell mound formation.

In 2003 historical (non-Aboriginal) human skeletal remains archaeologically excavated from St Mary’s Anglican Church cemetery in Adelaide, South Australia were reinterred in a concrete subterranean crypt. This paper examines preservation status following 15 years of interment. Skeletal remains placed in sealed plastic bags inside plastic curation boxes provided the best method to ensure physical and chemical preservation. Prefabricated concrete containers offer a cost-effective solution for the reburial of human skeletal remains associated with a range of archaeological contexts, including eroding burial sites, urban development sites, or those derived from earlier archaeological excavations. In relation to Indigenous burial sites, in cases where considered culturally appropriate, onsite crypts allow storage or repatriation of ancestral remains ‘on country’. Concrete crypts provide cultural heritage management professionals and Indigenous communities with stable, dry, long-term burial sites that allow quick and easy access should ongoing management options, Indigenous cultural practices, or future research require re entry into the crypt.