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Nancy Detchon

Jun 19, 2015

Iron Age Orkney – follow The Cairns Project now!

Thank goodness for the internet. Can you imagine the trouble we’d have catching up with excavations from all corners of the country without it? I say this as a really interesting project has just started this season’s dig. In archaeology-speak season really means year! Anyway, what I want to draw your attention to is The Cairns Project which is based on South Ronaldsay. As with many other projects, there is a history of excavation going back many years, in this case over 100;

Places we visit – A weekend at Bryn Celli Ddu and more!

Nancy Detchon

Jun 17, 2015

Places we visit – A weekend at Bryn Celli Ddu and more!

As we hit summertime, well in theory anyway, archaeologists up and down the country can be found out doing what most people think they do all the time – excavating! Well, it is the traditional time for excavating, especially for University departments and volunteer groups. So for the next few months Ian and I will be trying to get to more excavations around the country covering as many periods as we can to let you know what’s happening. We kick off this weekend with a visit t

Nancy Detchon

Jun 15, 2015

Tools and evolution – worth revisiting.

Back in January BBC Radio 4’s History of Ideas broadcast a piece by Dr Matt Pope of University College London in which he explored the idea and use of technology and how it helped drive human evolution. If you missed it, don’t worry as you can now access it on the Radio 4 website and listen to the podcast. It is only 10 mins long but it packs a lot into it! There are themes in there which can be linked to a number of areas of the National Curriculum which can feed into progra

What do archaeologists actually do? Refitting or piecing together the past .

Nancy Detchon

May 27, 2015

What do archaeologists actually do? Refitting or piecing together the past .

Here’s the second in our occasional series of what archaeologists actually do, beyond excavating. You might want to look at What do archaeologists actually do? for the first. One of the activities I use in workshops for children is called “Piecing together the past ” where they try to figure out what the artefacts found during excavation are and whether they are complete. As part of this activity, I ask them to try to fit the pieces of the object back together again. This is

KS2 and Mesolithic Britain: “what did they eat?”

Nancy Detchon

May 19, 2015

KS2 and Mesolithic Britain: “what did they eat?”

In this peek into the Mesolithic of Britain we are going to look at how the archaeology of the period can tell us how how people subsisted – that’s to say how they supported themselves in terms of food. For the most part, the general picture of life in the Mesolithic was that people lived a nomadic hunter-gatherer lifestyle, living off the land hunting, fishing and foraging for edible plants. One feature which has been found in a number of sites from the Hebrides to Dorset ar

Stone circle found on Dartmoor but which is it?

Nancy Detchon

May 14, 2015

Stone circle found on Dartmoor but which is it?

Barbrook I stone circle in the Peak District. There is a great deal of interest currently in a stone circle, which has been found on Dartmoor. Stories about the find have made the mainstream press e.g The Plymouth Herald and The Guardian which of course is good news – we like to see archaeology in the news from time to time. Well, we’ve been sifting through the various elements and presentation of the story and have come up with a few interesting things. Let’s begin with the

Nancy Detchon

May 13, 2015

Mesolithic Britain: First things first!

Welcome to part one of our look at the Mesolithic period in the Prehistory of Britain! In this, we try to include the basics – what you really need to know – and some interesting things that you might never have thought of. By way of an introduction, it might be useful to consider the words of Prof Penny Spikins of the University of York, who wrote that “Mesolithic Europe was a world in which there were towering glaciers, cataclysmic floods, tsunamis, and rising and falling

Stones of Power? Megaliths and Politics.

Nancy Detchon

May 11, 2015

Stones of Power? Megaliths and Politics.

War Memorial at Saltburn, N Yorks Hot off the press is the latest blog from one our favourite archaeologists – The Urban Prehistorian (Miliband’s Megalith) in which the role of megaliths (trans. big stones) in a modern context is explored You may be surprised to learn that #Ed’sStone is just the latest in a long line of big stones used by politicians. Some of you may be asking is this relevant to, say, teaching prehistory at KS2? All of us recognize monuments don’t we? They

Nancy Detchon

May 1, 2015

KS3 @TMAKirton uncover the past!

KS3 at Thomas Middlecott Academy in Kirton, Lincs get to grips with archaeology! Yesterday Enrichment, in the form of Ian and I, were at Thomas Middlecott Academy in Kirton (Lincs) where we took part in their Enrichment Week. We ran a total of 8 workshops between us during the day covering a range of archaeological skills – some of which the children didn’t know they already had! We worked on excavation, drawing and photography, aretfact analysis and that old favourite strati

Nancy Detchon

Apr 28, 2015

Roman London – a new perspective.

One of the things we try to do here at Enrichment is bring you news of lectures, seminars and other presentations where you can get to hear the latest findings from experts in the field. Next month, for example, sees the annual London Archaeologist’s lecture. This year it is presented by Dr Dominic Perring of University College London’s Institute of Archaeology, a leading specialist in the subject of Roman London. The lecture, entitled “Making sense of Roman London: a new arc

Nancy Detchon

Apr 23, 2015

The things you find when you upgrade a railway: prehistoric butter churn?

There has been a lot of talk in the media over the years about developments such as Crossrail, HS1 and HS2, especially about the cost of such ventures. In case you didn’t know, part of the cost of these major projects, and a lot of smaller ones too, is for archaeological work to be undertaken. What sort of archaeological work? Well, a simplified version of the process is that when such developments are being planned, one of the steps taken is to assess the impact of the work

Nancy Detchon

Apr 21, 2015

FAO teachers in Cheshire: July excavation at Norton priory

One of the things we want to do here at Enrichment is to let people know about the world of archaeology. I bet that the first thing that comes to mind when you think about archaeology is . . . excavation! So, we are going to do our best to let you know about a range of excavations over the summer months which teachers and parents, primarily, can go to see what an excavation entails. First up is an excavation taking place at Halton Castle, nr Runcorn which is planned for July.

Nancy Detchon

Apr 7, 2015

Keep on track with an archaeology app?

There’s an app for everything right? Well it certainly seems that way, and like many other things in our increasingly busy lives, archaeology has apps too. So what I thought I would do is to ‘road-test’, as it were, some of the apps. A number of organisations like the National Trust and English Heritage have their own ‘apps’, and I’m going to use the English Heritage app to look at some of the things it can do and tell me about heritage and archaeology around where we live. T

Nancy Detchon

Apr 3, 2015

What do archaeologists actually do? A HERO from Cheshire!

I am often asked, “well, what do archaeologists actually do? Well, actually there are a lot of different answers to that question. The thing that comes to most people’s minds when they think of archaeologists is, dare I say, a heroic Indiana Jones-like figure. I wish! For most of us archaeologists, a large chunk of our work is office-bound. Paperwork, reports, briefs, project design, planning regulations and even writing a book or lesson plans are all part of what an archaeol

Nancy Detchon

Apr 2, 2015

A matter of life and death: large medieval cemetery in Cambridge.

A report published yesterday has revealed a large cemetery in Cambridge which has been dated to the medieval period. The site was excavated by the Cambridge Archaeological Unit (CAU) between 2010-2012, but the report has only just been published. It tells the story of a cemetery used over several generations, not only of people but of the cemetery itself. Each cemetery has a life-span and a generation is quite simply the amount of time before the site is full, and another rou

Places we visit: Eyam isn’t just the plague, try the Museum too!

Nancy Detchon

Apr 1, 2015

Places we visit: Eyam isn’t just the plague, try the Museum too!

As archaeologists Ian and I love nothing better than wandering around archaeological sites, ruins and museums. Of course this doesn’t always sit well the the children! However, our children have visited an extraordinary number of sites, ruins, museums and more. Our firstborn had been to several museums and an academic conference before she was 3 months old! They’ve also been on excavations and had a go at excavating for real! One of our boys joining in the excavations at Durr

Nancy Detchon

Feb 16, 2015

Classics Day in Loughborough

I was privileged enough to be invited to take part in the Year 9 Classics Day at Loughborough High School. Designed to encourage the girls to think about the relevance of Classics beyond the classroom and to try to promote the three Classical subjects (Latin, Greek, Classical Civilisation) that they offer at GCSE, the day involved a number of workshops focusing on different ways of engaging with the Classical World. Alongside in-house workshops and one delivered by Sonya Nevi

Nancy Detchon

Jan 19, 2015

Stone Age to Iron Age in Cheshire

What a wonderful day we had in Cheshire! Armed with our trenches, tools and artefacts, Dr Ian Parker Heath (trusty archaeologist husband and colleague) and I, made our acquaintance with Lower KS 2 at Offley Primary School in Sandbach. We explored prehistory from the Palaeolithic to the coming of the Romans, covering what the new primary history curriculum calls ‘Changes in Britain from the Stone Age to the Iron Age’. After ‘training’ to get the children thinking like archaeol

Nancy Detchon

Jan 18, 2015

Teaching ‘changes in Britain from the Stone Age to the Iron Age’

At the end of my prehistoric archaeology workshops, teachers often say to me that they have learned as much as the children have. Of course, they may just be being polite, but after further conversation, it transpires that many teachers are, in fact, learning alongside the children they are teaching. After even further conversation, it becomes apparent that they might just appreciate a bit of a helping hand. So, with this in mind we (my archaeologist husband and I) have set a

Nancy Detchon

Jan 17, 2015

Prehistoric Levenshulme!

After delivering a workshop covering the Stone Age to Iron Age to Y4s at St Andrews CE Primary School in Levenshulme in October, the beginning of 2015 saw me returning to delve deeper into the Stone Age with Y3s. The second visit saw me ensconced in a brand new ‘dance studio’, which proved to be the perfect place for our excavations of the Palaeolithic, Mesolithic and Neolithic. Animal bones, charcoal, waste flakes and artefacts of each period (with ‘toolkits’ provided by the

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