Prince Henry Hospital, Sydney

The Prince Henry Hospital site, formerly known as the Prince Henry Hospital, Sydney, is a heritage-listed former teaching hospital and infectious diseases hospital and now UNSW teaching hospital and spinal rehabilitation unit located at 1430 Anzac Parade in the suburb of Little Bay in Sydney, New South Wales, Australia. It was designed by NSW NSW Colonial Architect and NSW Government Architect and built from 1881 by NSW Public Works Department. It is also known as Prince Henry Hospital and The Coast Hospital. The property is owned by Landcom, an agency of the Government of New South Wales. It was added to the New South Wales State Heritage Register on 2 May 2003.

The greater Sydney region has been inhabited by Aboriginal people for at least 20,000 years with dated sheltered occupation sites occurring in the Blue Mountains and its foothills. Aboriginal occupation of coastal NSW has also been dated to extend back to at least 20,000 years before present at Burrill Lake on the South Coast and 17,000 years before present at Bass Point. At the time of these periods of occupation, both sites would have been located within hinterland areas situated some distance away from the coast. In the case of Burrill Lake, the sea would have been up to 16 km further east than at present and the site would have been located within an inland environment drained by rivers, creeks and streams.

There are no other Pleistocene sites recorded on the Sydney Coast. There are however two sites that have been dated to the early Holocene around 7,000 to 8,000 years ago. These are located at the current Prince of Wales Hospital site (a hearth dated to 7,800 years ago) and a rock shelter site at Curracurrang. It is likely that many coastal Aboriginal sites of a similar age within the Sydney region have been submerged and/or destroyed by sea-level changes which have occurred in eastern Australia during the last 20,000 years. In general terms, the majority of sites recorded within the Sydney Basin investigated to the present are dated to within the last 2,500 years that in most cases demonstrate Aboriginal exploitation of marine resources at the current sea levels.

Available evidence indicates that Aboriginal occupation of the Sydney region was initially sporadic, and that population numbers were fairly low during the earliest periods. From around 5,000 years ago an increasing and continued use of many sites investigated through archaeology appears to have ensued. Evidence for the Aboriginal use and occupation of the Sydney region from this period is therefore far more "archaeologically visible" than for previous periods.

In the South Sydney region at least three archaeological sites have produced dates of Aboriginal occupation that range from between 3,000 and 5,000 years ago. From about 3,000 years ago to Contact the number of occupied sites appears to have increased dramatically. This may reflect a "real" increase in the number of sites (and hence people) in the region, or may reflect preservation factors (particularly associated with shell midden deposits) where older sites have been destroyed by thousands of years of erosion, and accelerated by development in the post-Contact period.

Over the 20,000 years of Aboriginal occupation in the region, and in particular the last 5,000 to 8,000 years, numerous changes in excavated stone tool assemblages have been observed. Various temporal markers have been established by archaeologist in an attempt to distinguish what are considered to be the more significant changes in tool types and tool kit composition. The assumption being that changes in one (or more) components of the excavated material culture may reflect changes in other aspects of past Aboriginal social, economic and technological practices.

These arguments are based upon changes in stone tool assemblages and observable changes in the use of certain types of stone used in Aboriginal tool manufacture. Excavation of a number of rock-shelter occupation sites in particular indicates that the earlier phases of occupation are largely characterised by the presence of large cores and scraper tools. This appears to be followed by the addition of a variety of smaller backed implements (known variously as backed blades, geometric microliths or Bondi Points) to the toolkit previously dominated by larger tools at around 5,000 years ago. By around 1,500 years ago the smaller backed forms appear (on available evidence) to have gone out of use and excavated site assemblages are characterised by quartz bi-polar artefacts and more opportunistic or undifferentiated small tools. It is reasonable to assume that the many artefacts made by Aboriginal people from shell, bone or wood as observed at Contact were also used in the past but these materials have not survived in the archaeological record.

Research indicates that coastal sites in the Sydney region have been largely ignored by archaeologists until relatively recently. Prior to work completed over the last two decades, the majority of Aboriginal archaeological sites investigated were located south of Sydney and the Georges River. Previous focus of investigations was frequently on the stone artefacts made by Aboriginal people in the past, the sequence of changes in their form and composition, and upon comparisons between coastal and inland sites that sought to understand how people used the landscape as a means to characterise Aboriginal life on the eastern coast of NSW prior to Contact. More recent archaeological studies have focused upon the way Aboriginal people adapted to the coastal environment and the immediate hinterland, and how other aspects of the archaeological record (such as food, art, site complexity and composition, and site distribution data) can contribute to our understanding of prehistoric Aboriginal life.