Category: News (Page 2 of 5)

In August the Kingsbury Time Travellers invited us to attend a day of archaeological workshops at Kingsbury Episcopi Church.  They had organised a lot of activities for the MAYANS to try, including Anglo Saxon calligraphy with authentic quills and ink; using a dino-lite microscope to examine archaeological artefacts and work out what they were and what they were made of; plus drawing an accurate and to scale floor plan of the church.  Our members were divided into three groups and each group was given the chance to try out all the different activities.

We were also visited by the local bell ringers who gave us a wonderful guided tour up the church tower and into the bell chamber. The MAYANS were able to try their hand at bell ringing which was a fantastic opportunity!  We were then allowed up onto the top of the tower where the views were spectacular.

A big thank you to Adrian and Helen and all the other volunteers who gave up their rime to organise and run such a varied and inspiration range of activities for us.

Our archaeology weekend continued on Sunday 2^nd June with a visit to the Quantock Hills to take part in an excavation near Cothelstone.  The dig was being run by the Quantock Hills Landscape Partnership (QHLP) and Dig Ventures who were investigating some features which had shown up as crop marks on aerial photographs and geophysical surveying.

There were two sessions during the day so some MAYANS attended in the morning and the others in the afternoon.  The QHLP had very kindly organised a minibus to take us to and from the site.

We were met by Anna and Ben from Dig Ventures who gave us a tour around the site and showed us some of the artefacts they had found.  We were then given the opportunity to do some digging of our own in two trenches which had been located over two of the geophysical survey anomalies.  The archaeologists were not sure what these features were so it was our job to help them find out!

Unfortunately, apart from some charcoal we didn’t uncover very much but this is quite often the case with prehistoric sites and the team from Dig Ventures said we had done really well.

It is always great to get the chance to take part in an actual excavation so a big thank you to Dig Venture and the QHLP for giving us this opportunity.

The first weekend in June was a busy weekend for MAYA.  On the Saturday we visited Muchelney Abbey and on the Sunday we were invited to take part in Dig Venture’s excavation at Cothelstone on the Quantock Hills.

The weekend started with our visit to Muchelney Abbey.  We had been invited there by Stephen Honey who is the curator of the site.  Stephen took us on a guided walk around the abbey, starting with the ruins of the original Saxon church, then through the Norman period and all the developments over history including the dissolution of the monasteries.  The ruins were quite extensive and it was fascinating to look round them on such a lovely sunny day.

After a break we then looked at the building where the monks’ toilets were which was a source of great amusement!  We finished off by looking around the inside of the existing building and all the changes it has gone through over time, including some of the archaeological artefacts which have been discovered.

A big thank you from MAYA to Stephen for arranging such an enjoyable and interesting visit.

The topic for our May session was industrial archaeology with a trip out to Westonzoyland Pumping Station Museum on the Somerset Levels.

We started out with a talk by Iain Miles, Honorary President and Archivist of the Westonzoyland Engine Trust about the history of manging flooding on the Somerset Levels from Roman times to the present day.

After this we were taken on a guided tour by Jason Keswick, the manager of the museum.  We started out by looking at the huge original Easton Amos Land Drainage Machine and Jason explained to us how it had been used to drain flood water from the Levels into the River Parrett.  After a short break we then looked around the rest of the museum at all the different types of engines and pumps which had been rescued and restored by the museum.

We finished the day with a ride on the Westonzoyland Light Railway which was great fun!

A big thank you to Jason and Iain and the staff and volunteers at the museum for such a great day out.

In April we returned to the Museum of Somerset in Taunton for a session all about Castles.  The session was very kindly run for us by MAYA volunteer Chris Webster.  Chris started out with a presentation about castles and what their main function was and how it wasn’t always about defence.  After this our members got to draw or build a models of their own castles.

After a short break, Chris took us on a walk around the outside of Taunton Castle, pointing out some of the features which the MAYANS may not have considered in their designs.  We then went back indoors to finish our drawings and models, thinking about the extra features Chris had shown us.  Our members got really creative and it was really great to see so many different and unusual designs.

A big thank you to Chris for running this fun and interesting session for us!

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.