Sandor (Alexander) Gallus

Sandor (Alexandor) Gallus (15 November 1907 - 29 December 1996) was a Melbourne archaeologist, most famous for his investigations of Aboriginal occupation at Koonalda Cave in South Australia and the Dry Creek archaeological site in Keilor, Australia, which helped demonstrate the great antiquity of Aboriginal occupation of Australia.

Sandor Gallus was born in Sopron, Hungary in 1907, eventually obtaining degrees at both Szeged and Budapest Universities. He worked from 1931 to 1945 in the Prehistory Department of the Magyar Nemzeti Múzeum (Hungarian National Museum), becoming its director. His first substantial publication related to early Hallstatt Iron Age decorated pots from the barrow cemetery and fortified settlement, which overlooked Sopron (Gallus 1934). He also published on local Neolithic, Bronze Age and Iron Age material, as well as a newly identified Palaeolithic site (Gallus 1937).

Escaping the advancing Communist take-over in 1945 he moved to Austria, and then four years later, migrated to Australia in 1949.

Gallus's five years in Melbourne were spent in various unskilled jobs, a common experience of many Central European intellectuals and professional people. The lack of recognition of his qualifications and dearth of prehistory taught in Australian universities limited his options. John Mulvaney was the first archaeologist in Australia to obtain a lectureship when he was appointment in 1953 in the Department of History at the University of Melbourne.

Gallus took up a teaching position in the Victorian Education Department where he remained in one capacity or another until he retired. He pursued his archaeological interests through the Archaeological Society of Victoria becoming its President and then Honorary Member, and attracted a devoted and enthusiastic group of amateurs, physicists, geologists and even local professional archaeologists.In June 1983 the AASV dedicated a special volume of The Artefactto Gallus.

In 1963, Gallus became an Associate of Current Anthropology, in whose pages he was a frequent commentator on such various and varied topics as genetics, human migration, artefact typology and symbolic systems. Three years later, in 1966, he was elected a Member of the (then) Australian Institute of Aboriginal Studies from which he obtained some research funds.

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