Archaeological Field Skills

At our August session, we learned about the practical skills and techniques that archaeologists use every day, when they're out on site digging, and how they then make sense of some of the information they recover, using it to piece together the history of the site, to tell the story of how it developed and the people who lived there and used it.

We started off looking at what stratigraphy can tell us about how a site was formed and how archaeologists record what it tells them, creating written records and carefully measured scale drawings. The finds are also important in this process and we talked about how different objects recovered from different parts of the site can inform dating and can be used to add information about how the site was used.

After that, we went outside to get our hands dirty and practise actually digging up the past, learning about finds, different soil types and deposits, and uncovered a Roman hoard, not unlike some of the amazing discoveries which have been made recently and which have been widely publicised in the news.