I had never intended to become an archaeologist. Archaeology is not the first profession that comes to mind for a child growing up, as I did, in Australia. However, history has always captivated me, its seeds perhaps planted on long ago Saturday afternoons when, with no other occupation, I would leaf through three huge scrapbooks that a great-great-uncle had put together in the 1880s. They transported me back to a different world, to a time that was somewhat obscure, yet somehow familiar, a sepia past of horse carriages, gas lamps, dark interiors with overly elaborate furnishings, bearded gentlemen in frock coats and top hats, women in black lace dresses with high collars, elaborate head gear, silk flowers, ribbons, and black jet jewellery, and children who might easily have stepped out of a Tenniel illustration from Alice through the Looking Glass. If the present sometimes seemed dull, the past appeared to be full of interest. And it may be that a curiosity about the Middle Ages began to evolve back then as well. A favourite children's book was Nicholas and the Wool-Pack by the English author, Cynthia Harnett, a tale about rural life in late medieval England. And I wonder if a fascination in medieval knights might have had its source in a famed national hero, an armour-bearing bushranger who, in his final showdown with the police, dressed himself and his gang members in medieval-looking suits of armour fashioned from plough mould boards. But certainly none of this would have led me down the path I have taken, were it not for the move my family made when I was sixteen, all the way across the world to a place where the past mingled with the present, a land of Biblical scenery, studded with walled cities, battlefields, and fortresses, where one could pick up an Iron Age stone tool in a field, speak and be understood in an ancient language, shop in a medieval bazaar, carry in one's pocket coins impressed with the same designs found on coins minted two millennia back.