On our journey to Yate last week we made the effort to visit the hamlet of Hawkesbury, which was just a short journey from our B’n’B on Hawkesbury Common. It was late evening when we got there but we were glad we did. Why visit there, well here are a couple of reasons. The Parish of Hawkesbury The parish of Hawkesbury has a long history. The parish as it is known today dates from the time of the Norman conquest and there is a really useful website provided by Hawkesbury Local

Well, what a busy time it’s been over here as we’ve had two projects running – Peeling Back the Layers and Arbor Low Environs Project. These have seen us excavating with community groups, volunteers and of course schoolchildren. Peeling Back the Layers is a community archaeology project funded by the Heritage Lottery Fund, the Council for British Archaeology, the Peak District National Park and English Heritage. We have been exploring the history and archaeology of a small fa

Paperwork! One of the teachers getting to grips with it! What a busy week we’ve had as we started work in earnest on Peeling Back The Layers at Under Whitle near the village of Sheen in northeast Staffordshire. If you are new to our site, we are part of a community archaeology project which is exploring the history and archaeology of a small farm, and the link will lead you to the project’s background. Monday and Tuesday saw us getting volunteers and teachers together to intr

Those of you you who regularly follow us will know that we are involved in a community archaeology project called Peeling Back The Layers. The project focuses on the history, and now archaeology, of a small farm on the Staffordshire-Derbyshire border in the upper Dove valley. Peeling Back the Layers is a hands-on educational project, run by the Tudor Farming Interpretation Group (TFIG).  TFIG are diverse group of people who are investigating the history and archaeology of a ‘

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

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

For the first time since the National Curriculum was put in place, prehistory is now part of the Primary History Curriculum.  Of course, for us archaeologists this is good news; it is something for which the Council for British Archaeology (CBA) has been campaigning for years. Recently, a group of like-minded archaeologists and educators met at The Hive in Worcester, to discuss how best we might be able to support teachers in an area of the curriculum they may never have taug

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