Henbury School Mock Excavation

HENBURY SCHOOL, BRISTOL

Continued...

Though the idea of supervising and directing a class of school children, especially when sand was involved, was daunting at first, Peter eased me into the job by supervising the first session. By way of an introduction, we began with a question and answer session to engage the children's attention. I found the feedback from these sessions quite intriguing- most of the children didn't know what archaeologists studied or when the Romans were around (most guessed at 200 yrs!), not to mention the Iron Age, and very few were aware of the excavations carried out under their school. The groups were divided into three - one to dig, the second to record what was being dug and the third to wash what had been dug up.

Apart from the odd sand castle and complaint about soggy gloves, the digging part of the mock excavation was unanimously the activity of choice by all the groups. As with most full time archaeologists, the expectation of discovery really captivated the school children, even in some pretty wet weather. We asked the groups to place their finds in trays and allocate a 'context' number to them just as an archaeologist would.

While some children were digging, another group were using specially produced sheets to record the features that were being dug. They had to use tape measures to work out the dimensions of the pits or ditches, in some cases they even had a go at planning some of these onto grid paper to scale. The intention was that the classes would be going away and producing a creative piece of writing such as report, so we asked them to try to interpret their features with a view to the broader context. So if their pit contained animal bone or Roman building material what might that mean for the settlement? What kind of conclusions could they draw from the information available?

As my hands were tied with the two groups in the excavation area, it was left to the accompanying teacher to lead the group in the finds washing and identification. As the teachers had no prior knowledge of archaeological artefacts we supplied a very useful finds 'crib' sheet for them to run through and help the pupils identify and record what they had found. Time permitting, they also had a go at illustrating the finds they found most interesting.

Before the group left we had another question and answer session to summarise the issues that they would need for further class work, especially concerning the interpretation of the site, the archaeology of the local area and their ancestors. We asked what they thought the Romans doing there, how they lived, whether they were wealthy or poor and what was missing from the finds that we had found e.g. weapons, clothing and food?

All that was left was to bury all the finds again and cover them with sand and wait for the next group to descend upon the site the following day.

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