Week Ten, 4th - 8th Nov 2013

On Tuesday I met with Linda Hellyer from the Royal National College for the Blind (RNCB) in Hereford. We spent over an hour discussing having the students involved in a heritage or archaeology related project as part of their work experience week. A number of possibilities were floated regarding existing or upcoming projects and there is certainly scope to develop something specific to the visually impaired students at the college.

http://www.rncb.ac.uk/

There have been a number of archaeologically based initiatives focused on the subject of the visually impaired and there is certainly plenty of support out there for those who wish to tackle the issue. A good example of this is the Distance Learning Unit in the School of Archaeology and Ancient History, University of Leicester, who developed an introductory module in archaeology specifically for students with visual impairments.

The most popular option we discussed though seemed to be that the students should help design a project that has an outcome that they themselves would contribute to, rather than their involvement being the outcome. This suggestion will be discussed around the college and with some of the students and I will wait to hear back from Linda about what the likely involvement might be.

On Friday I was invited to a meeting with the Woolhope Club at the city library to discuss the topic of 'raising the profile of community archaeology in Herefordshire'. I had a few ideas in mind from previous conversations with the club on the topic and we decided together that the club would help front a new interactive e-newsletter/webpage/blog. The purpose of which would be to creating discussion and dialogue on the subject of archaeology, to advertise and update on excising and upcoming projects and to offer an outlet for gray literature.

A small committee including myself was set up to tackle the project and we will be meeting regularly to decide on what form the new site will take.

Week Nine, 28th Oct - 1st Nov 2013

This week 20 or so students from HSFC came to Headland over a two day period to take part in a series of finds and environmental processing workshops. The sessions seemed to be a success, made more so by the presence of Viviana Culshaw who is the CAB CABP holder at Clwyd-Powys Archaeological Trust and who came along to help out on the first day.

You can find Viviana's blog at http://viviculshaw.wordpress.com/

It is particularly apparent that in this type of work it is important to cooperate with peers who offer vital input into projects from a range of different experiences to your own. I am very grateful to Viviana for this as she offered to lead the finds washing and labeling activities. She also had the time to explain to the students about on site conservation from her past experiences of working on community projects. This was an important lesson for the students.

I myself ran the environmental processing which included wet sieving and retent sorting (retent being one of the byproducts of wet sieving; the flot is organic material which floats and retent is what is left that sinks). 

MOLA can offer some very useful guidelines for this (@ http://www.museumoflondonarchaeology.org.uk/).

Showing the HSFC students around the office and archive. 

Retent sorting, finds washing and finds marking with students from HSFC

HSFC students wet sieving environmental samples with a flotation tank.

I learnt much during the week about managing volunteers and organizing activities to run smoothly. It was useful to have an input from Viviana and I adapted the sessions on the second day to accommodate the fact she was not here to help. Being flexible is certainly an important consideration since not everything will go exactly to plan. The ability to adapt to a given situation is something I will keep in mind for future projects.

An entirely new experience for me was the health and safety considerations and risk assessment necessary for such activities to take place. I actually really enjoyed getting to grips with this and it got me to think about the tasks in a different way. This is certainly a useful skill to posses and it is important to be able to communicate the risk assessment to the students prior to the activities.

The students got a really good idea of the types of tasks used to process an archaeological site after the excavation. I hope that with the regular Wednesday sessions they will soon be confident enough to carry out the work independently and help produce an archive for deposition. These sessions will also be important for those wanting to take archaeology further either as a career or as a volunteer and can be used on projects in the future.