Our November MAYA session was held in the School Room in Castle House at the Museum of Somerset and was about archaeological finds.\u00a0 Coincidentally, our very first MAYA session was also held in the School Room and was also about finds, and one of our experts this November was Laura Burnett who also attended our very first session!<\/p>\n
For our November session we had four different activity areas, all to do with the processing, identification and recording of archaeological finds.\u00a0 After an introductory talk by Laura about the Portable Antiquities Scheme and finds recording, we split up into four groups and took it in turns taking part in the various activities.<\/p>\n
We had a finds washing station where the MAYANS washed finds from our test pitting day at Longaller Mill in September.\u00a0 We had a display of Roman pottery and flints where MAYANS could use lenses and typology drawings to try and identify the different artefacts.\u00a0 We also had a display of historically accurate replicas of Viking armour, weapons and other artefacts which the MAYANS could handle and try on.\u00a0 Finally we had asked the MAYANS to bring along any artefacts they had collected for Laura to identify and this proved to be extremely popular!<\/p>\n
After a break we rounded up the session by filling in finds recording forms supplied by Laura.\u00a0 The MAYANS could either record the artefacts they had brought along or pick one of the items on display to record.\u00a0 A huge thank you to Laura for stepping in at short notice to help us out and also to Nessie for bringing along his amazing collection of Viking artefacts!<\/p>\n\n\t\t