We’re carrying out archaeological excavations in South Marston, Wiltshire, on behalf of Orion Heritage and Taylor Wimpey. This is the fourth in our series of blogs following the dig’s progress and sharing updates from the field. Thanks to South Marston CofE Primary School for sharing the photographs used in this blog.
Over the past few months, we’ve been going back to school! We’ve really enjoyed sharing our discoveries with the children of South Marston CofE Primary School, talking about our excavations, and explaining exactly what archaeologists do. The children also tried their hand at making brooches, inspired by some of the finds from our excavations.
Excitingly (both for us and the children) we also invited the school to visit our site and see archaeology in action. This was a great opportunity for them to experience different parts of archaeology – from the moment of discovery in the ground, to the trickiness of identifying what has been found.
The children walked the short distance from the school and had an important safety briefing which they all listened to very carefully. We then handed out specially designed ‘Archaeology Hunt’ sheets which encouraged them to look for different archaeological items they might find on site. This was very popular, with pupils excitedly counting the number of archaeologists and crowding around the finds table for their first glimpse of a piece of pottery.
The children showed off what they had learnt in our previous visits to their classes, including identifying some of the artefacts we had taken along, and talking about how we tell when pottery was made based on how it looks (such as patterns, clay type, colours, shape). They also learnt how archaeologists tell pottery from animal bone and wood (it’s not as easy as it sounds!), and which bone comes from what animal. Then they used their new knowledge to categorise some of our recent finds.
What have you enjoyed?
Sorting out the finds
I liked the artefacts!
What have you learned?
The dark bits are the best bits to dig
The greyer the soil the more archaeology
This was also a great opportunity for our team on site to share their expert knowledge and excitement for archaeology with the children.
It was great to show so many enthusiastic kids from the local school the areas we are excavating at South Marston. The excitement was palpable as one of the groups witnessed the discovery and excavation of artefacts within one of the enclosure ditches.
I was really impressed with the level of interest they showed, not only in the discovery of “old stuff”, but also the story of what people were doing on this exact spot 2000 years ago.
Simon Markus – Senior Project Manager
Talking with the school children was very interesting, we were showing them artefacts recovered from the site itself, and they seemed to really enjoy it. They were engaged in the items we’ve found and were asking such good questions about the site and archaeology as a whole.
The school visit went extremely well. The pupils loved being able to come down to the site to get a firsthand look at what an archaeologist actually does, as well as learning about the local Roman history so close to their school.
A standout moment was the children watching our discovery and excavation of a large animal bone. As more and more of the bone was uncovered, their jaws dropped, with many of them pointing to that as their favourite part of the site visit.
