Archaeologists excavate the site of the Ann Jones Inn in
2008. (Courtesy Adam Ford, DIG International)
A percussion cap and other munitions used
by the Kelly gang were uncovered. (Courtesy Adam Ford, DIG International)
Final Resting Place of an Outlaw
Ned Kelly's life ended on the gallows, but it
climaxed at the Ann Jones Inn in Glenrowan in
June 1880. Equipped with metal armor made from
plows, the four members of the Kelly gang held off the police
who peppered the rustic building with shots for hours.
Adam Ford, founder of archaeological consulting firm
DIG International, led a 2008 excavation of the site where
the inn once stood. The plot had seen three different structures:
the first Ann Jones Inn, which burned down at the end
of the siege; a second hotel built by Jones, which was also lost
to fire; and a brick wine shanty (a sort of unlicensed watering
hole) that was demolished in the 1970s. Ford worried
that construction and decades of artifact collection—which
began feverishly immediately after the siege—would leave
little evidence behind. "I was quite fearful that I'd get there
and there wouldn't be any remains left," Ford says. But the
site was surprisingly intact: Around and beneath the foundations
of the wine shanty were carbonized wall and floor timbers,
bits of ceramic and melted glass, and, most importantly,
nearly 100 pieces of ammunition.
Ford and his team approached the
site as a battlefield, looking for patterns
that might say something about
the shootout between the gang and
police. The archaeologists found a line
of some 40 deformed bullets where
there had been a wall separating the inn's front and back
rooms. Behind that wall, in just one square yard of space,
the team found approximately 30 cartridges and percussion
caps, including one that matched a gun said to be Kelly's.
The pattern suggests that the gang found little protection
in the inn's three front rooms, so they retreated to the back
rooms to reload before coming out to resume firing. "We
were able to identify the actual movements, and perhaps even
the motivations, of the members of the Kelly gang in their
final hours," says Ford. "It is a powerful vision of these four
young men who, for whatever reason, had got themselves
into a situation they were never going to get out of."
For more information on Australia's convict period, go to
archive.archaeology.org/convict
Samir S. Patel is deputy editor at ARCHAEOLOGY.
