Dr Andrew Sneddon on why heritage is “the greatest show on Earth”

At the beginning of his career, an extraordinary discovery instilled in Dr Andrew Sneddon a lifelong passion for uncovering the everyday stories of archaeology.

Andrew Sneddon was completing his Honours year at the University of Queensland when he got the opportunity to go to Greece for ten weeks to work on an excavation.

On the site of the ancient city of Toróne, working for three months overlooking the Aegean Sea, he was tasked with emptying out a 2,400-year-old cistern. “It was used to store water for the ancient town, so it was like emptying a swimming pool,” says Andrew. “It took ages.”

But when he got to the bottom, he made a discovery. There, buried for millennia, was a simple human error—the plasterer had dropped his bucket of plaster, and spilt it all over the ground. “You could see where he’d tried to scrape it up,” laughs Andrew.

It was a small moment, but for Andrew, it was one that resonated as much as any historical epic.

“I connected to this person straight away,” he says. “Just a human doing human things, perhaps trying to hide his mistake.”

The incident sparked a lifelong love of the overlooked stories in archaeology. Soon his interest developed from “the top point two per cent” (“the Julius Caesars and the Heracleses”) to the real-life human stories. “Most of human society is just ordinary people like you and me. You have to dig into their cooking hearths and their living spaces to get a sense of who they are.”

In his decades-long career, Andrew has worked on projects around Australia and in countries from Cambodia to Italy, but Queensland is in Andrew’s blood. Now, as an Extent Heritage Director, Andrew is passionate about celebrating Queensland’s many stories.

“There's always more we could be doing,” he says. “Queensland’s history is often overlooked in favour of New South Wales or Victoria, but there are so many stories here.”

He's particularly passionate about recording the stories of Queensland's Aboriginal population, from remote communities to Brisbane, which is home to the country's second biggest Aboriginal community after Redfern. “The state is brimming with stories,” he says. “They need to be collected and told.”

Extent Heritage is developing new and innovative ways of recording oral histories, including through filmography. “It's important to put a face to the stories,” says Andrew. “Aboriginal heritage isn’t just stone artefacts, it is the broad spectrum of Aboriginal experiences, including ones from the quite recent past – attending a rural school in the 1960s or playing rugby league in the 1970s. It's an ongoing, living story. We need to be receptive to all kinds of heritage, and we need to be imaginative.”

For Andrew, it's the human stories that resonate, like the hapless plasterer he encountered in Greece--there, right where Andrew was brushing and scraping with his trowel, another man had stood, 2450 years earlier, with his own trowel.

“People are endlessly creative,” he says, “endlessly inventive, and even in the grind of everyday life, they find time to make beautiful things.”

“Heritage is millions of little stories. On their own they don’t mean much, but when taken together tell a grand story,” says Andrew. “It’s the greatest show on Earth. And the beauty of it is that the story keeps getting bigger and longer, because we keep writing new chapters.”