The week beginning the 25th March 2012 is the first week of the ALEP excavations this year and we have invited local schools to come and join us. We are so pleased with the response, with enquiries from Monyash Primary School, Curbar Primary School, Harpur Hill Primary School, Fairfield Endowed CE Junior School and Buxton Infant School, as well as Melland High School in Manchester and the The Institute of Life-Long Learning at the University of Sheffield. In fact there is onl

The Drs Parker Heath are currently very busy organising this year’s archaeological investigations close to Arbor Low and Gib Hill. The licenses from English Heritage have arrived, permissions from landowners have been given, but most excitingly local schools are beginning to sign up to come and have a tour around the ancient monuments, visit the dig site and get their hands dirty! So far we have heard from Monyash Primary School, Curbar Primary School, and Harpur Hill Primary

Yesterday, 25th February 2012, saw the 2nd Dearne Valley Archaeology Day at Wath Trinity Methodist Church. What a great day! I heard some very interesting papers on the South Yorkshire Archaeology Service (Andy Lines), the (missing!) Minoan town at Knossos (Colin Merrony), community archaeology (Tim Cockerell), charred plant remains (Angela Walker), stable isotopes results from the Ukraine (Malcolm Lillie), Archaeology at Staveley Hall (Mike McCoy), excavations at Vimy Ridge

On Friday 10th February, I visited parents and children from the Buxton Area Home Education Group with my archaeological tools and artefacts for a 1 hour workshop. After receiving a lovely warm welcome, I introduced the group to the idea of stratigraphy and set them a task of deciding which artefacts belonged to which layer. They thought hard about this, including whether some of shiny gold items were necessarily newer than other items less shiny. I was also given a few thing

The brief from Burbage Primary School was quite specific – a day that would take the children away from the school grounds, discover the archaeology of the area but without the need for transport. To fulfil this I developed a walking field-trip to some of the prehistoric sites of Buxton. The children, using picture clues, led the way to the site of Lismore Fields where Neolithic structures were excavated before modern housing was built in the 1980s.  After considering the sim

The activities carried out at St Anne’s RC Primary School were designed to complement the Y3/4 Romans topic. After discussing the Romans in the Peak District and looking at maps of Romano-British settlement in the area, the children enthusiastically excavated genuine Roman pottery out of sand trays. They took their excavated sherds, washed and recorded them and developed ideas of how they may have once looked and for what purposes they may have been used.  At the end of the d

Hollinsclough is a very small village school which has opened its doors to home educators and their families every other Friday.  The workshops were carried out over two of these Fridays with children ranging from 4 to 14 years. We considered stratigraphy, the Law of Superposition, tried out archaeological tools, and excavated artefacts ranging from Neolithic scrapers and Roman mortaria to recent door numbers. We washed what we had found and recorded details about them on for

A flexible approach was needed with a group so disparate in age and previous knowledge, but everyone was able to get their hands dirty as soon as possible after a brief introduction to the tools of the trade. Luckily for the home educators, Highfields Adventure Playground in Sheffield, where they meet once a week, did not mind us digging up their grounds. The children soon found many artefacts, such as hinges and cupboard door handles. We were able to consider what they were

We have now finalised the dates for the test-pitting in a field near Arbor Low. This phase of the project will run from 26th March – 7th April 2012, and will attempt to ascertain whether the spread of material recovered from field-walking is true representation of past activity or whether archaeology towards the bottom of the field has been hidden by colluvium and other deposits. We intend to dig approximately 125 1m x 1m pits! Members of ARTEAMUS have signed up to help as ha