And it has provoked the question among heritage experts and historians in Ballarat: why did Bendigo go through such a rigorous archaeological program, when Ballarat did not?

The Courier has uncovered the answer.

When excavation began on Ballarat's nearly completed GovHub project two years ago, it was the builder who discovered a trove of relics lying beneath the soil of the former market site - and sadly consigned much of what was unearthed to the tip before Heritage Victoria stepped in to stop work.

The discovery caused excitement - and anger - among those with an interest in Ballarat's rich colonial history.

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How did a building site in the middle of a city which claims to be a home of history in Australia and is seeking UNESCO world heritage status fail to be studied properly before construction started? It was not as though precedents hadn't been set across the country for undertaking historical assessments before building on previously inhabited locations.

Now the Department of Environment, Land Water and Planning has revealed the bottles, crockery and other artefacts discovered on the Mair Street project had in fact been dumped sometime in the last 60 years.

According to DELWP, an archaeologist determined that the objects found on the GovHub site "must have been included in backfill introduced when the 300 Mair Street property was raised to street level for construction of a car park, sometime between 1957 and 1974".

A program of archaeological investigations was nevertheless required and the executive director of Heritage Victoria issued a consent under the Heritage Act 2017 to authorise the work in May 2019.

That program of archaeological investigations determined that the site was of low significance, and did not contain the remains of any buildings or other features. Instead there were scatters and deposits of artefacts that had been discarded or removed from another location.

No other significant archaeological remains were uncovered on the site.

"After a program of investigations the Ballarat GovHub site was found to have low level archaeological significance and therefore did not require extensive excavation," a DELWP spokesperson told The Courier.

"In comparison, the Bendigo GovHub site contains an extensive, largely intact archaeological landscape that includes the remains of industrial, commercial and residential structures."

The Bendigo site is now the largest archaeological dig site in regional Victoria's history, revealing the footprints of multiple former buildings including homes and the Sandhurst Hotel; finding everything from buried pet cats to a gun left in a cesspit, according to the Bendigo Advertiser's Tom O'Callaghan.

The historians are now digging through the 1880s period of what was once the Sandhurst Hotel, which stood on the corner of Lyttleton Terrace in Bendigo. They've uncovered the obvious relics of what would be expected on the site of a public house, including crockery, bottles, oyster shells and coins, as well as textile remnants, possibly leather footwear, and children's toys.

The Bendigo site contains more than 50,000 artefacts, significant because they are being excavated and recorded in the location where they were used, discarded or lost, the department says.

Prior to those buildings, the site was home to Bendigo's market. While Ballarat's GovHub is also being built on the city's original Market Square (or Haymarket), prior to the construction of Civic Hall in the 1950s, there had been several other agriculturally related businesses and buildings on the site since its establishment.

A photograph from the 1920s or 1930s shows a number of rustic sheds at the rear of where GovHub will be situated, while a row of terraces and a substantial brick building line the north side of Mair Street, where the two palms at the entrance of Civic Hall stand and where the skate park once was.

That site later became Beaurepaire's service station, and was not demolished until the realignment of Mair Street sometime in the 1960s. The site was repeatedly razed and graded over the years, removing any trace of previous buildings and changing the landscape. It was presumably around this time the fill was brought in.

Another area of the Bendigo excavation is revealing homes which stood nearby the hotel, as well as other structures which stood into the 20th Century before the City of Bendigo office buildings replaced them in the 1960s.

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