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.