Week Seven, 14th - 18th Oct 2013

This week I supervised a work experience student called Danniel who came to us from St. Mary’s R.C. High School in Hereford. She has a passion for archaeology and wanted to learn more before deciding what to do in her higher education.

On Monday Danielle did some wet sieving with Annie Partridge who is now one of the supervisors at Headland after completing her CBA placement earlier in the year. We then all did some finds and environmental processing together throughout the afternoon.

Tuesday and Wednesday saw Danielle and I processed one of the Roman cremations from the Alcester site. This was a thoroughly enjoyable exercise for both of us and was a rare opportunity for Danielle to do something special with her work experience. It is amazing just how much you can learn about an individual from even the tiniest fragments of bone. Jason Murphy is a site supervisor and osteologist with headland and he showed us both how compressions on a vertebra visible even after cremation suggested an adult that had lived a hard life of manual labor. Could this be one of the soldiers from the fort? We will never know for sure but it was certainly an intriguing possibility, and one I think Danielle really enjoyed thinking about. Moreover, the discovery of a fingerprint on the cremation vessel, probably from the last person to hold it before it was fired, was an exciting personal touch bringing us tantalizingly close to this Roman individual.

The above photographs are taken at different stages of the excavation of the Roman cremation. Note how the larger fragments of bone are at the bottom of the vessel which makes the last stages much more tricky.

 Danielle excavating the Roman cremation

Danielle and I washing and sorting the bone from the other content of the vessel.

 After wet sieving the contents of the vessel we had to carefully and painstakingly separate the tiniest fragments of bone from the retent.

Some useful links regarding the treatment of human remains:

http://www.bajr.org/Documents/HumanRemainsGuide.pdf

http://www.babao.org.uk/HumanremainsFINAL.pdf

Also look for MOLAS guidelines.

On Thursday I took Danielle with me to Alcester Heritage Centre in the morning where I had arranged to meet Laurence Thatcher who has been instrumental in building local volunteer support to work on the Alcester site. He and some 60 volunteers had been washing and marking the finds over the past few months and I wanted to meet him to find out a bit more about the Heritage Centre, the volunteers and the community that is so active in preserving their town’s heritage. Since Danielle had been working on the cremation and environmental samples this week I thought it was a good opportunity for them all to meet, and for her to get an impression of the kinds of work involved in community archaeology.

The Heritage Centre at Alcester is a fantastic facility and we had a good talk about its past work and future direction. Laurence was keen to talk to Danielle about her interest in archaeology since the centre was hoping to develop its teenage demographic. We passed some ideas between us to this end and hopefully something may come out of it in the near future.

For information on the Alcester Heritage Centre go to http://www.alcester.co.uk/page.aspx?id=188