Wessex Archaeology’s Community and Education experts were excited to make a return to in-person events with our attendance at Education Business Partnership South’s (EBP) Primary STEM event on 9th March. This event was a fantastic opportunity to connect Wessex Archaeology’s business with schools as part of EBP’s legacy of high-quality programmes.
Beth Harrison, Community Engagement Coordinator, ready to greet children at the EBP Primary STEM event
Designed to enable forward-thinking businesses like Wessex Archaeology to demonstrate their expertise to young people, the Primary STEM fair shows children the opportunities they can access within archaeology and how their STEM skills will be needed in the next generation of archaeological specialists. Wessex Archaeology is proud to be part of such a proactive initiative which is contributing to social mobility and challenging stereotypes around archaeology.
For this specialised STEM event, we were thrilled to get a positive reaction to our ‘Osteoarchaeology – people in the past’ activity. This Osteoarchaeology themed activity covers how we excavate human skeletons and how they’re recorded. It enables children to explore what a person’s skeleton can tell us about their lives, even if they’re thousands of years old. We use a replica skeleton and task the children with putting the bones in the correct order to learn how they all connect.
Isobel Curwen, Heritage Consultant, reveals just how meaningful the interaction was to some of our young visitors –
“The Primary STEM Fair was such a fun event, and it was great to be able to engage with children face to face as opposed to being through a screen! My favourite part of the event was when a child said to me –
“I thought this was going to be really boring but now I think archaeology is awesome!”
That pretty much sums it up and made my day!”
