My second week as field archaeologist intern at Wessex mainly involved working on three different sites in Staffordshire, Derbyshire and Sheffield. The first was an evaluation on an urban site; the second was a walkover survey on a rural site and the third was an urban education and community project that I had been looking forward to since week 1.
I’ve learnt a lot by being out on site and I’m already putting into practice what I’ve been learning in the office. Working on such different sites, with different people in different contexts, really keeps things interesting. The urban evaluation was in southern Staffordshire which gave my first taste of travelling to and working on an excavation in a beautiful historic city. The walkover survey mainly comprised a day of walking over fields in rural Derbyshire looking for potential archaeological features. The community and education project is based on the outskirts of Sheffield. Getting to travel to such varied and interesting places is one of the benefits of working in field archaeology.
In addition to the fieldwork we met with Sally from Heeley City Farm to plan the next stage of a community and excavation project, ‘Exploring Tinsley Manor’, at Tinsley Junior School. We laid out the trenches, locating them with a GPS, and de-turfed the trench locations by hand ready for the excavations. I should be working on this project for the next couple of weeks so it will be great to see our understanding of the site develop.
By Hannah Holbrook