Monday 4 June:

In the morning Community & Education Manager Sam gave me a tour around the building and showed me each of the individual departments, I found this useful as it gave me an insight into the different areas in Wessex Archaeology and what they roughly did.

The first area I went to was the Finds department with Amy, here she showed me how she sorts through all of the different kinds of pottery that she receives. After she talked me through what she does and how she organises it, she let me have a go at sorting and trying to piece some Roman pottery together, which I thought was really interesting.

In the afternoon I went to the Graphics Team in the drawing office, where Nancy taught me how to draw some Roman pottery pieces. I found this particularly fascinating as it was something that I had never done or experienced before.

 

Tuesday 5 June:

In the morning I went to the Environmental Archaeology Wet Area, where I learnt how they washed the soil off of some samples from Old Sarum using a special kind of sieve and then kept the remains (like snail shells and seeds) to use to investigate into what that environment was like from that specific time period.

Then in the afternoon I went to the Finds Team and they showed me how they washed animal bones and pottery, I really liked this as it was very ‘hands on’ (which is what I prefer to do).

 

Wednesday 6 June:

This morning I spend some time taking photographs to create a 3D picture in the Geomatics department. This process is called photogrammetry, we went outside and took lots of photos of the outside building all from different angles, then uploaded this to the computer, which processed it into a 3D picture. Then I got to look at how GPS is used to survey a site.

In the afternoon I went back to the Finds Team, and this time I was showed how they label pieces of bone and pottery. They do this by using nibs and Indian ink (which is permanent so won’t rub-off). It took a few practices first as you have to put the relevant information in very small writing.

 

Thursday 7 June:

Today I did a few things, for an hour in the morning I went to the Geophysics department and I got given a talk all about geophysics and what they do.

After that I went to see Principal Osteoarchaeologist Jackie and she gave me a fascinating and insightful talk on the human skeletons they have, and talked me through the process of finding and recovering the bones, all the way to them looking into what time period it’s from.

During the afternoon I spent some time in the Archive department. Learning how they sort each of the projects and finds and store them. I really enjoyed this as I think it’s important to understand about how each process during the archiving works (and I also just find it satisfying to organise things).  Moira showed me how they have to re-organise and scan files, then I got the opportunity to scan and sort a file too.

 

Friday 8 June:

This morning I went to the Marine Archaeology department, where I was shown all of the storage they had in unit 2. I also got the opportunity to write a page for their magazine, I enjoyed this as I am interested in archaeology and writing and so it combined the two.

Then during the afternoon, I looked through the microscope at flots in the environmental department, I found it particularly interesting seeing how different each sample was, and the variety of types of seeds and snail shells you can find.

By Rachel Curtis