THE OLWEN TUDOR JONES SCHOLARSHIP FOR ARCHAEOLOGICAL FIELDWORK IN THE MEDITERRANEAN

In December 2001 the SoMA council voted to rename its annual undergraduate travelling scholarship in honour of Olwen Tudor Jones (1916-2001) in thanks for her constant support of young students throughout her association with the University of Sydney from 1979 till her death in 2001. Subsequently the scholarship has been endowed with a capital preserved trust from her family that will ensure the existence of the scholarship for years to come.

The vitality that Olwen showed throughout her life, as well as her willingness to get her hands dirty, was already in evidence in her teens. Having left school at 16 to work as the receptionist to Mr L.J. Hooker, she saved her wages to take flying lessons in the newly popular bi-plane the Tiger Moth.  During the Second World War she was a dietician with the US Army, while in the fifties and sixties she and her sister supported their families by renovating the then unloved slum houses of Paddington.

Inspired by living in Athens for 2 years with her daughter Tory in the mid '60s, Olwen returned to Sydney to begin a degree in Archaeology. Unfortunately her plan was delayed for a number of years since on her first day of lectures she was hit by a car while crossing City Road. It is typical of Olwen's tenacity and lack of self-pity that contrary to medical opinion she not only survived but regained the use of her legs within a couple of years of the accident. She returned to campus to begin her degree in 1973.

While an undergraduate, Olwen studied among other things Classical Archaeology, and Ancient Egyptian, and was also was one of the first students to take up the newly created discipline of historical archaeology with Judy Birmingham, participating in early Sydney excavations as well as those at Hill End.

On completing her Bachelor of Arts, Olwen was offered the job of research assistant by Professor Alexander Cambitoglou. From 1979 until 1993, Olwen presided over the Zagora Room and its files, and became a cornerstone of the Torone excavations, organising the archives, running the pot-shed and serving as general house mother to the team.

During this time the publication of Zagora 2, and the Andros Museum Guide to the Zagora material and its revised edition were undertaken under her watchful eye. More recently the mammoth Torone 1 could not have been published in its current form without her diligence, hard work, attention to detail and above all her love for the site.

Olwen's friendship with Judy Birmingham brought her back to historical archaeology in 1994, and she spent many hours bossing around students in the Transient Building, helping with cataloguing and data-entry.  In the years 1994 to 2000 she was also busy assisting her daughter Helen Jarvis in preparing her Cambodian research for publication.

Her post-graduate research similarly reflects her broad interests and ability to embrace new ideas. Her Masters thesis (finished in 1987) on the pottery from a sealed classical deposit at Torone included one of the first PIXE-PIGME analyses of ancient ceramics conducted at Lucas Heights, which she used as a check on the more traditional stylistic and typological approaches that formed the core of her study.

There are too many friends and colleagues to name here, either still working in Archaeology, or who have gone on to follow different careers, for whom Olwen was pivotal in inspiring them to pursue their dreams, regardless of obstacles. The students Olwen encouraged as they passed through the University of Sydney and the sites she worked on remain an enduring testament to her influence in Archaeology in Australia.

We have dedicated this scholarship in Olwen's memory because her opened minded approach to life and research reflects the broad regional and chronological scale of the scholarship's frame of reference. The generous donation from her family will ensure that she will continue to support students young and old, and her name will remain linked to Archaeology at the University of Sydney.