Chiltern YAC's 25th Anniversary Celebration!

We meet in Jordans near Beaconsfield, South Buckinghamshire and in March this year, we celebrated a significant milestone, our 25th Anniversary!

To make this event special, Will Attard, an archaeologist with Thames Valley Archaeological Services, came to our meeting to share his passion for the Mesolithic and his flint working expertise with us.

Will had prepared pieces of slate and flint tools for our members to create their own Mesolithic-inspired Star Carr-style pendants. Follow the link to find out more about the real pendant – http://www.starcarr.com/film.html. Everyone engraved their own designs but teamwork (and patience) was needed to be able to drill the holes using flint drills.

It is a well-known fact that archaeologists love cakes, so we also ran an archaeologically themed “Cake-off” competition which was very popular with the members. Copies of Raksha Dave’s book “Lessons from Our Ancestors” were awarded as prizes by our very impressed judge, Lucy Lawrence, Archaeology Officer for Buckinghamshire County Council. Lucy had also kindly baked and decorated a Celebration cake for our party.

After our regular meeting, we invited guests including families, former YAC Leaders and alumni, our sponsor Mark Milligan of HeritageDaily, and many representatives from local archaeological and heritage groups to join us for a party. Around 70 people enjoyed a buffet lunch whilst we watched a short review of our highlights from the past 25 years, even Neil Redfern of the CBA made a surprise video appearance to wish us a happy birthday – thank you Neil, and Jo Kirton for persuading him!

The event was a very enjoyable and successful celebration. This was our opportunity to say thank you to some of the people and organisations who have contributed to helping us develop the next generation of archaeologists and historians! Here’s looking forward to setting out on our journey for the next 25 years…