Author: Admin (Page 6 of 16)

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.

For our September session we were back in the Museum of Somerset after our visits and fieldwork over the summer.  The session was planned and run for us by Chris Webster and Chris Jessop and was all about how archaeologists record everything while they are excavating.

At the start of the session Chris W gave a short PowerPoint talk about why it was so important that archaeologists recorded everything while they are digging, including plans, photographs and context sheets.  This is because when you dig up archaeology you are in effect destroying it!

The MAYANS then split up into four groups around four specially prepared indoor test pits.  These were layers of 1m square cardboard sheets representing different contexts.  In between the sheets were artefacts for the MAYANS to find and plan using a 1m x 1m planning frame like the ones used on real excavations.  For each layer they had to fill in a context sheet describing everything they saw.

During the session the MAYANS also had chance to look at different types of surveying equipment used to record the height or “level” of their test pits.  This type of equipment had changed a lot over the decades and we were able to show them an old fashioned dumpy level and staff where everything looks upside down and back to front, right up to a modern day GPS which connects to satellites to show very precise location and height.

At the end of the session each group told everyone the story of their test pit, describing what they thought had occurred there in the past using the evidence they had found… good fun as well as being a great learning experience!  A big thank you to Chris W and Chris J for all their preparation and for running such a great session for us!

For our September session MAYA members were invited by Richard, Cheryl and Tara from Context One Heritage and Archaeology to take part in their excavations at Broomfield on the Quantock Hills.  They were trying to find out the nature and date of a large, circular ditch almost 100m across, identified on aerial photos and geophysical surveying.  This was a great opportunity for our members as we don’t often ge

t a chance to do some actual digging, especially as our August test pitting was cancelled due to bad weather.

We were given a tour of the site and then

we split up into groups to do some digging.  There were three trenches, one on the big ditch and two on other anomalies located by the geophysical survey.  The MAYANS carefully scraped back the soil looking for artefacts and any changes in the colour of the soil which could be postholes.  Those working in the big ditch were also trying to define the edges of the ditch.

This was quite near the start of the dig and no artefacts were found apart from two very tiny pieces of pottery.  The fact that there were so little finds, plus the size of the ditch suggests the circular enclosure could be Neolithic or Bronze Age.  The archaeologist who were running the dig were very impressed by how careful and dedicated the MAYANS were whilst they were working.

This was a really great day for our members and we would like to thank Richard McConnell, Cheryl Green and Tara Fairclough for giving MAYA this exciting opportunity, plus Dan Broadbent from the Quantock Hills Landscape Partnership for organising transport to enable us to get to the site.