What is the most delicate object you have ever found, and where and when did you find it? Bethany and Lauren

Hi Bethany and Lauren! I found a Bronze Age burial urn on a site in York about 10 years ago. This was so fragile we couldn’t just dig all the soil away and pick it up. I worked with another archaeologist who works as a conservation archaeologist looking after really fragile artefacts. We had to ‘block-lift’ it. This meant leaving a block of earth around the body of the pot and digging down all around it so we could then wrap the whole thing in plaster of Paris. This is same idea as putting a cast on a broken arm or leg; it held the pot together and protected it from being bumped or crushed. Once it was wrapped we pushed a thin metal sheet under it and lifted the whole block together. The conservation archaeologist then x-rayed it to have a look inside, before carefully unwrapping it and excavating it slowly in the laboratory, collecting the tiny pieces of cremated (burnt) human bone inside it.