THE first physical evidence of illicit gambling by convicts has been uncovered at the Port Arthur Historic Site.

The World Heritage Listed site, which was recognised as the best tourist attraction in the country at last year’s national tourism awards, has kicked 2016 off with a bang.

On January 5, the site broke its record for most visitors in a single day — 4785, which included 2477 passengers from Golden Princess cruise ship — and now work is under way on its biggest ever excavation.

Archaeologists are painstakingly making their way through an excavation of the 500sq m of land behind the iconic penitentiary building.

Project archeologist Richard Tuffin said they had uncovered handmade lead and ceramic tokens, which supported stories from convicts about gambling and trading for the first time.

“The official history tells us convicts didn’t gamble — that it was heavily controlled — but accounts from convicts themselves told of this black market economy going on where services and rations are all being traded between themselves and gambling and gaming would have been part of that,” he said.

“So it’s nice to have the juxtaposition of the official history and then what we’re finding through the archaeology.”

He said the discovery of the tokens was a great example of the sort of illicit activities that would have been taking place at the prison.

“The lead would have been pilfered from the workshops, which were just around the other side of the penitentiary, so they probably just pocketed some offcuts and then snipped some little circles and squares themselves and inscribed lines on them,” he said. “So we can see they were some form of denomination — whether it was for a game or gambling.”

The ceramic tokens were fashioned from willow ware plates, he said.

Mr Tuffin said the excavation area was the site of the convicts’ washroom, toilets and day room and provides an interesting insight into day-to-day convict life.

“At morning muster, convicts had to present themselves with clean hands, had to roll up their trousers to show they had clean feet as well as a clean face,” he said.

“The rest of the body they didn’t worry about so much until Sundays. So this is partly the space where they would have done that daily ritual of washing.”

Mr Tuffin said the day room may have been the scene of the gaming and gambling.

“Those convicts who weren’t out working in the gangs could come in and they would have had time to themselves, although heavily supervised,” he said. “Artefact-wise, we’re also finding quite a lot of clay smoking pipes, which were like the cigarettes of the day.”