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A selection of pictures from our recent trip to the Blake Museum & Bridgwater Dock.

For our February session we were visited by Laura Burnett from the Southwest Heritage Trust.  Laura is a finds expert who specialises in coins and in this session we were looking at the ways coins can help archaeologists.  After an introductory talk by Laura, we split up into three groups and took it in turns carrying out three different activities.

One activity was to design our own coins.  Laura provided photos of coins to give our MAYANS inspiration, e.g. Roman coins, trade tokens and coins of historical British monarchs.  We talked about who or what we would put on our coins and what message that would represent.

The second activity was about different ways of imprinting the designs onto coins by hammering and screw press.  We hand hammered a coin die into playdough disks and then compared this methods to using a screw press to imprint designs into chocolate coins.  Great fun!

For the third activity we talked about what archaeologists can learn by studying coins, e.g. dating a site, trading, status and coin hoards.

This was a really interesting and fun session!  A big thank you to Laura for running it for us.

We thought we’d start 2024 with something really different!  In several of our 2023 sessions we looked at the different ways archaeologists record what they find.  In a fitting start to the New Year we looked at the new ways we can use technology to digitally record and spread the news of the latest archaeological discoveries as they happen!

MAYA volunteer Caroline Pathy-Barker led the session where she showed us how to make an Archaeological Blog!  We started out by thinking about the sorts of questions we might need to include, and then split up into groups to carry out mini-interviews with other members.  We then uploaded them to a special app where we can edit them and include music.  Eventually we hope we can continue to make blogs of future sessions, especially when we’re out and about, and upload them to our MAYA website!

This was an exciting session as it also including a visit by Rebecca Jacobs from YAC HQ who is doing an Impact Study on how our members feel about being part of a YAC club.  Only seven clubs have been chosen throughout the country to take part and MAYA is one of them!  Rebecca brought along activity sheets for our members to fill in and talked to them about what they enjoyed about being a members and the sort of things they would like to do in future sessions.  We got some really good feedback from our members which was fantastic!

A big thank you to Caroline for running such an interesting session and to Rebecca for coming to visit us.  We look forward to hearing from her again when she has finished the study.

We thought we’d start the build up to Christmas this year with a session about the Mid-Winter Solstice and its important to Prehistoric people.  We began with a PowerPoint presentation about the different types of prehistoric monuments throughout the British Isles that are aligned with the Mid-Winter sunset, such as Stonehenge, Newgrange and Maeshowe.

We then made Mid-Winter sunset LED tea light decoration, with the sun setting behind our very own designed stone circles!  We cut silhouettes of the stones out of black card and stuck them around foam discs.  We put red translucent paper behind the stones and then an LED tea light in the centre.  They looked fantastic and really great for Christmas decorations!

We then had our Christmas party with loads of food, crackers and pass the parcel and a lucky dip.

It has been really great year and we have a lot of activities planned for 2024, including visits to Muchekney Abbey and Avebury.  A huge thank you to everyone who has supported us over the past year and helped to make MAYA such a success!

Following on from our excavation of a possible henge site on the Quantock Hills in September, we decided to hold an entire session dedicated to prehistoric henges.  We started out with a PowerPoint presentation about different types of henges, talking about how some contained stone circles like Stonehenge but others did not.  Some but not all were aligned to the mid-Winter sunset.  A few had had later structures built inside them like the famous village at Avebury.

We looked into how henges were discovered and recorded by the early Antiquarians and how they were recorded today in earthwork surveys.  We then looked at how and why they were built by Neolithic people.  Afterwards we had a quiz where we had to identify photos of lots of different henges from a brief description.

After a quick break, Sean Kosikowsky the Museum Manager came in to talk to us about Neolithic axes which dated from the time when henges were being built.  Sean brought a collection of various types of prehistoric axes with him for us to look at and handle which was great!

We finished the session by drawing designs for our own henge monuments, thinking about things like whether it contained standing stones, how it was aligned, what was in the centre and what activities might have taken place there.

This was a fun and interesting session and really brought to life the site where we had been excavating a couple of months before.