What is the most interesting thing you have found? What is the first step in excavating old bones and artefacts? Shaiah (13)

Hi Shaiah!

Two questions for the price of one!

I think the most interesting and challenging site I’ve found is an Iron Age village with huge enclosure ditches, roundhouses and a shrine with lots of lambs buried in it as well as a human baby! We had so many finds. We had boxes and boxes of pottery and animal bone and we even had a couple of gold brooches!

If I was to pick an artefact, I would have to pick a beautiful polished axe I found on a quarry down in Norfolk.

Check out the picture of it. What an amazing find! I felt so lucky to have rediscovered it.

Your second question is a proper archaeological question!

OK, so if we’ve removed all the topsoil and any other overburden from our site and we can see archaeological features perhaps with finds (pottery, bone etc) on top of the features, the first thing we would do is trowel and trowel to clean the feature so we can see exactly where it starts and finishes. We would then decide on the best way to excavate our feature. Once our plan is made, we give our feature some numbers. As I’m sure you know numbers are very important for archaeologists and we call them ‘context numbers’. So the cut of the feature gets a number (for example, 100) and the fill also gets one (e.g. 101). That way, any finds we dig up will have a context number written on the bag we put them in. This is very important because the context number tells us exactly where the finds came from the this makes it possible to tell the story of the site and how and what people were doing there.

All the best!

Phil