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KS2 British Prehistory – Dorstone Hill weeks 3 and 4

Nancy Detchon

Jul 27, 2015

KS2 British Prehistory – Dorstone Hill weeks 3 and 4

As promised Ian visited a number of excavations last week including Dorstone Hill – here’s his report. Hi everyone! Nice to be back after a whirlwind trip to Wiltshire and Herefordshire. I caught up with the team digging on top of Dorstone Hill in Herefordshire and as you see by the pictures, there have been significant developments – not least in the weather. Work on the excavation over the final two weeks has revealed more of the stone bank identified in earlier seasons. Pr

Nancy Detchon

Jul 20, 2015

KS2 British Prehistory – a summer of action pt2!

The summer of fantastic excavations on some of the most interesting sites from British Prehistory continues and now you can see some of what is being found! There are also some short video clips which reveal some of the life of people living in both the Mesolithic and Neolithic. Up in North Yorkshire, the team of Dr Nick Milner and her colleagues at the Mesolithic site of Star Carr have found even more of the fantastic Red deer skulls, which are thought by many to be part of

KS2 British prehistory – Dorstone Hill week 2

Nancy Detchon

Jul 16, 2015

KS2 British prehistory – Dorstone Hill week 2

Things are going nicely on top of Dorstone Hill. The second week of the excavation has revealed more of the structure and is looking rather good. As ever, as the work progresses, the students get to see more of how archaeologists work and practice some of the skills. In the pictures here, we see two of the students excavating ‘features’ on the site. ‘Feature’ is the term we use to cover what might be a multitude of differences in soil colour and texture, and which may turn ou

KS2 British Prehistory – Dorstone Hill excavations

Nancy Detchon

Jul 8, 2015

KS2 British Prehistory – Dorstone Hill excavations

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

KS2 British prehistory – a summer of action!

Nancy Detchon

Jul 6, 2015

KS2 British prehistory – a summer of action!

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

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

Catching up with Castleton: this year’s excavation.

Nancy Detchon

Jun 5, 2015

Catching up with Castleton: this year’s excavation.

Colin Merrony (with his back to us!) of the Archaeology Dept, University of Sheffield talking to Dave Barratt, Derbyshire County Archaeologist at this year’s Castleton excavations. As you may know ETA is based in the beautiful Derbyshire Peak District and we do like our local archaeology! We do try to get to see as many sites and projects as we can and we finally made it to this year’s excavation in Castleton. The excavation was part of an on-going project – The Search for Ca

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

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 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

Nancy Detchon

Mar 24, 2015

Stone Age to Medieval – now that’s a multi-use site!

Down in South Devon a team of local enthusiasts and volunteers have just completed a two week excavation of a site which looks as if it could have a really interesting mix of finds! It all began when Howard Jones set himself a challenge – to find the oldest settlement in the area where he lived. The story is one of persistence and a bit of Google. Mr Jones used Google maps to identify the possible site of such a settlement and eventually gathered enough evidence to convince t

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 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

Nancy Detchon

Nov 30, 2014

Back to the Stone Age for Ormskirk!

Y3s at Aughton St Michaels CE Primary School in Ormskirk became archaeologists for the morning when they excavated artefacts from the Stone Age. Over three hours, the children were ‘trained’ to become archaeologists, to think like archaeologists and to understand how we excavate. Armed with these skills, they dug up objects from the Palaeolithic, Mesolithic and Neolithic and analysed what they had found, thinking about what objects can tell us about how people lived in the pa

Nancy Detchon

Nov 19, 2014

Archaeology Day at Garstang

I love delivering Archaeology Days, because Archaeology Days allow time for me to really develop children’s interest and enable them to progress from one activity to another. Hopefully, by the end of the day they leave for home with a good grasp of what archaeology is, what it sets out to achieve and some information about the period they are studying, as well as smiling faces at a day well spent! One such day was had at Garstang Community Primary School in Lancashire, when w

Nancy Detchon

Oct 4, 2014

Third Year of the Trojan War!

After being invited back for the third year in a row, we are top news story on the Derby High School Website! Read all about it! http://www.derbyhigh.derby.sch.uk/ #workshop #excavation #school #KS3amp4 #artefact #stratigraphy #education #Archaeology #timeline #dig

Nancy Detchon

May 28, 2014

Prehistoric Archaeology Workshops

I’m pleased to announce that over the past few weeks I have delivered my first archaeology workshops relating directly to the new primary history curriculum – namely “changes in Britain from the Stone Age to the Iron Age” a.k.a. prehistory. Two of these covered the whole of prehistory – an overview from the Palaeolithic to the end of the Iron Age – one over a whole day, the other over an afternoon. That was some feat I can tell you! Of course, we couldn’t cover everything in

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