Hello again! Now, as I blogged briefly the other day, a team from the University of Manchester led by our friend Prof Julian Thomas, has started this year’s excavations at Dorstone Hill in Herefordshire. With the aid of modern technology, we are going to keep you up to date with what’s been going on. We want to thank Prof Thomas, Dr Irene Garcia Rovira and Ms Janey Green for permission to use their images. The team arrived last week and, as with most excavations, the first co

If you are a Key Stage 2 history teacher/co-ordinator, this summer sees some really important excavations on famous and less famous sites. Right now there are excavations in Wiltshire and Herefordshire which are hoping to shed further light on life and death in the Neolithic (or New Stone Age) between 4,000 and 2,000 BC. We hope you can get to visit some of the excavations we will feature over the summer, including those we highlight today! The much eroded ditch and bank at M

While we specialize in archaeology here at Enrichment, we’re not averse to giving mentions to heritage-related events that catch our eye. There’s one coming up in Manchester which we like the look of. It takes place on Sunday the 5th July at the Angel Inn, Rochdale Rd in the Northern Quarter. Co-produced by the Band on the Wall and Edward II ( a folk/roots reggae fusion band much loved by Ian) it details and draws upon the social history Manchester in the 19th century. At the

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

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

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

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

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

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