Once again, our friends from Ingol Community and Holy Family joined us for a fun morning of archaeology. We thought about what archaeology is and how it is different from paleontology. We had a quick look at the different time periods we would be thinking about and about how archaeologists use fine details to try to find out about the  lives of people from the past.

The time periods we focussed on were: 

  • The Romans
  • The Vikings
  • The Anglo-Saxons 
  • The Aztecs
  • TheTudors

There were five teams (all named after a famous archaeological site) and they had to work their way around the samples on each table, making careful notes of what they found, including detailed drawings. Once they had completed this-and using the very handy identification guide-they had to decide what time each 'sample' came from.

And the 'samples', did I fail to mention what they were? Something that everyone leaves behind...it was historic poo!!

For those of you who are a bit squeemish, don't worry. Though the children were wearing protective gloves, the 'samples' were actually made from salt dough, mixed with gravy browning and with some exciting additions such as small bones, corn, wheat grains, melon pips, orange pips, grape seeds, apple pips and so on. There were even rice noodles in some of them, which looked very convincingly like tape worms!

Whilst this was possibly the most disgusting activity I have ever done with the children, they did have a great time and got an awful lot out of it. There were definitely some budding archaeologists there.

The children who took part were: 

  • Pool House: Emily J., Max, Evie, Finlay, Ellie-Mae, Leila, William F., Ayyun, Wojciech and Ethan.
  • Holy Family: Max, Olivia, Erin, Nathan, Stephen, Suzanna, Maria, Livia, Martha and Jack.
  • Ingol Community: Alyssia, Eliza, Rowan, David, Lexie, Talia, Preston, Aaron, Hayden and Kai.

 

Well done all of you!

 

Amazing Archaeology