Ambrose Wallace

Wallace Raymond Ambrose, 25 July 1933 – 9 January 2024

Wal began his archaeological career with Jack Golson in NZ in 1954 and joined Jack at the ANU in 1963, to set up an archaeological conservation lab. He remained a stalwart of the Department of Prehistory, in the Research School of Pacific Studies and after that department disappeared in the late 90s, he continued active research for another 20 years.

He worked with Jack during the 1950s on excavations in NZ, and in Tonga, Samoa and New Caledonia. He was an early secretary of NZAA, editor of the early Auckland Newsletter issues and an energetic site recorder, notably of South Island rock art.

In Canberra, he made pioneering and innovative contributions to the conservation of archaeological materials, especially wet wood, to the sourcing and dating of obsidian, and to archaeological field research, especially in Papua New Guinea.

Wal was an esteemed and valued colleague and mentored numerous PhD students over more than five decades. In a 1997 tribute, Jack Golson described his friend as an archaeological boffin. He borrowed a comment from noted Australian commentator Phillip Adams, about another Australian luminary, that Wal was inclined to hide his light under other people’s bushels. He was a person of remarkable talents: he repeatedly reinvented the light and reanalysed the bushels. As his obituary notice said, he was “an archaeologist, inventor, artist, photographer, builder, wine connoisseur, and cricket and tennis tragic”