At this months YAC meeting, we were looking at diseases from the past and some that also affect archaeologists today.
First members were given a talk all about the diseases with lots of gruesome pictures and yucky facts. After this we split into groups for three activities. One group used UV glow gel to look at how well they washed their hands. The gel shows every bit of dirt you’ve missed and shows how important it is to wash your hands well after digging!
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This month at our YAC meeting, members were lucky enough to get some hands-on experience on a REAL ARCHAEOLOGICAL EXCAVATION!
We all met up at Down Farm in Dorset on Saturday the 8th of September. Down Farm, however, is no ordinary farm, its owner Dr Martin Green is also an excellent archaeologist and he’s been excavating on his land since the 1970s.
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In the medieval period a king needed strong castles to defend his borders. The massive buildings made his own people feel safe and sent out the message ‘don’t mess with me!’ to his enemies.
So what makes a good castle? We reckoned the best way to find out would be to build one ourselves.
We started by making the ‘stone’ building blocks – and it takes quite a few blocks to build a castle – as you can imagine!
On Saturday May 5th there were more of us than usual, as we welcomed members of the Young Wiltshire Archaeology and Natural History Society for the morning.
Together we tried our hands at recording – all the different ways of keeping track of the information uncovered during an excavation.
We had a go at finds illustration – and found that some of us had a natural talent for it!
Recording our mini-sections was quite a challenge, especially setting up the posts and tape, but we all managed it and can be proud of the results.
Drawing a plan of a trench to scale isn’t easy either – and some of us would have liked to carry on a bit longer so we could finish and puzzle over our interesting sites!
At the end of the meeting, as a reward for our efforts, we visited the Tudor hands-on exhibition in the Museum, but no-one really deserved to be put in the stocks after working so hard!
We couldn’t have had better weather for our April visit to Stonehenge! It was warm and sunny for our costumed pilgrimage to the Cursus Barrows, where we met another visitor from the past.
The Amesbury Archer (Gareth Owen, from Wessex Archaeology!) had been born and brought up far away in the Alps. He showed us his rare copper knife and flints before joining us for our (mostly!) Bronze Age feast.
Duly refreshed, we all returned to the car park – and the twenty first century – before going to see the Stones themselves. There we asked the Guide lots of questions and then found a good place to sit in the sun and sketch.
This month at YAC the topic was Aerial Photographs (APs). First members learnt about different types of AP, such as Verticals (photos taken from directly above the ground) and Obliques (photos taken at an angle). Then we asked ‘But what do archaeologists look for in an AP? This led us on to crop-marks, low profile sites, excavations and much more!
In teams we were given the challenge to sort 15 aerial photographs into these different categories. Then came the scientific (i.e. messy!) bit. Each group made a model crop-mark, using soil, gravel and grass seed. Some made positive crop marks – where the grass should grow taller over the archaeology, others made negative crop-marks – where the grass should grow shorter over the archaeology.
We finished off by looking at aerial photos of Salisbury from the 1940s,50s,60s and 70s. Members spotted lots of changes that had taken place and used the photographs to draw maps.
It’s that time of year again and the first (and probably best) Christmas party of 2006 was held at Salisbury Museum when the South West Wilts YAC celebrated in fine style with lots of delicious food (thanks to Cally!) and plenty of games with an archaeological twist (thanks to Cat!).
First though, we had to try to recognise each other as members and leaders arrived heavily disguised. Bailey and Brannon won the prizes for the best fancy dress. The leaders decided not to have their photos taken – their costumes weren’t in the same league as these!
Some of the games involved thought and decision making – like building the tallest tower possible with newspaper and Sellotape – and the competition was a close run thing.
Some games were more about speed and determination and the winners deserved their success, risking bruised toes for a prize of a bag of sweets – and the glory of course!
The prize for the best folders went to Brannon and Charlotte who had both worked really hard to produce an exciting record of the archaeology they found interesting this year. All the leaders were very impressed. It made all their work over the last year seem well worthwhile!
This month our meeting fell on the 11th November – Remembrance Day, and we remembered in a rather special way.
Martin Brown, Archaeologist for the MOD (Ministry of Defence), based on Salisbury Plain, invited us to join him in a tour of the First World War Training Trenches near Bulford, to see the place where so many young men learned about trench warfare before crossing the Channel to fight in France and Belgium. It was absolutely freezing but so interesting we hardly felt the cold!
We felt very sad and thoughtful as we stood for our minute’s silence at eleven o’clock. But it was good fun tracing the remains of the trenches on the side of the hill, and in some places they were still deep enough to hide in.
Martin told us about excavations he has been doing on First World War battlefields and we could all imagine how terrible it would have been to be living and fighting for real in trenches.
Before we left we laid flowers in some of the trenches and beside the Kiwi, a chalk figure carved on the hillside to commemorate the New Zealand soldiers who served in the war.
It was a rather special YAC meeting and we are very grateful to Martin for giving up his Saturday morning for us.
In October the South West Wilts YAC group were invited to the annual conference of the CBA (Council for British Archaeology). But we weren’t there just to listen to the speeches – we were there with Julian Richards to educate and entertain the adults with a short history of burial practices through the ages.
With Julian’s help we ‘buried’ a number of rather well-known archaeologists one by one as they would have been laid to rest in different periods.
Our Neolithic victim was buried in a long barrow!
And the Bronze Age leader was laid out with his Beaker and flints under a barrow of chalk.
One of our corpses was even important enough to be buried with his horse!
After this rather impressive theatrical lecture, we left the CBA members to their business and went upstairs for a well-earned drink and biscuit. Once we had recovered from being on stage in front of so many people there were two activities to do.
We were very pleased to have Wendi Terry, YAC Network and Events Officer to lead one of them. She invited everyone to ‘excavate a poo’ (not real ones, but the play-dough looked horribly like it!).
Wendi explained that archaeologists can find out a lot about what people ate long ago by examining the tiny fragments surviving in their poos!
Our second activity was challenging in a different way. Two teams were given a burial to investigate (no, it wasn’t a real skeleton either!) and had to see which team could find out most about it. But there was an added difficulty. Just like real archaeologists they had to pay for specialist information, so the winners were those who found out most – without breaking the bank!
Our September meeting was full of monk-ey business as we discovered what life was like in a medieval monastery! No one felt like joining a monastery when they had found out more about the rule of silence (now there’s a thought….!) and the hard work. The idea of being woken for a church service in the middle of the night wasn’t very appealing either.
However, everyone felt like making a cardboard monk and soon there was a rather impressive monastery too!
