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A Day at Wessex Archaeology

Summarising the 29th June 2012 for the staff of Wessex Archaeology is a both a challenge and an opportunity. Spread over four regional offices in Edinburgh, Sheffield, Rochester and Salisbury everyone is busy working on a range of activities, from diving wrecks to excavation, examining finds in the lab to research. This blog aims to provide a glimpse of some of these activities.

In the field

We have a variety of staff out in the field today.

A Wessex Archaeology diver © Crown Copyright, taken by Wessex Archaeology

Our dive team are currently working for English Heritage on the Contract for Archaeological Services in Relation to the Protection of Wrecks Act 1973. Today, falls within the fieldwork season, however they are not diving due to bad weather. You Can read their own Day of Archaeology blog – A Quiet Day.

A very small Chris in the distance © Wessex Archaeology

On dry land, well almost, Chris Ellis, Senior Archaeologist, is running investigations at Steart Point. In advance of a habitat creation scheme, Team van Oord, on behalf of the Environmental Agency working in partnership with the Wildfowl & Wetlands Trust, commissioned Wessex Archaeology to undertake the mitigation work on what is, and has always been, a low-lying peninsula prone to flooding. However over the past few month’s fieldwork, including a walk over survey, geophysical survey, evaluation and excavation, our team have discovered evidence for settlement spanning several thousand years, including Iron Age, Romano-British, medieval and post-medieval occupation.

Out on site © CEMEX UK Materials

There are also various excavations going on across the country run by our different offices.

Hannah Brown sporting the latest geophysics acessories © Wessex Archaeology

Two of our terrestrial geophysics team, Ben Urmston and Hannah Brown, are also occupied out in the field undertaking a magnetometry survey. This is the kit the team use the most because it can detect a wide range of archaeological features.

In Scotland

OCHMAPP © Wessex Archaeology

On Friday the Outer Hebrides Coastal Communities Marine Archaeology Project (OHCCMAP) team from Wessex Archaeology (Coastal & Marine) and the Royal Commission on the Ancient and Historical Monuments of Scotland (RCAHMS) were in a very remote area of South Uist in the Outer Hebrides, accessed only by boat. The team have been studying previously unrecorded buildings and archaeological features, some of which are now underwater. Based upon reports from local people and communities the team have been mixing diving with landscape surveying and geoarchaeology to examine the development of these remote coastal landscapes during prehistory and in recent centuries. This year’s results are already looking very interesting.

In the Sheffield Office

18th century system for the water features at Barnham Park © Wessex Archaeology

In our Sheffield offices the team are finalising the report for fieldwork undertaking at the Grade 1 listed Barham Park, Wetherby, West Yorkshire. The excavations explored early 18th century water features that no longer exist in the contemporary gardens.

In the Salisbury Office

Walking through the various labs and offices in the Salisbury offices, we collected a few photographs of people.

Pulling together a site story © Wessex Archaeology

In the Project Officer’s room, things are quiet as nearly everyone is out in the field. However, Sue Clelland, Senior Archaeologist, is working is on all the paper records from a large scale evaluation and excavation project. The written, photographic. drawing, environmental and site survey all need to be cross referenced. With this task now completed, Sue is trying to make sense of it all, grouping records together to develop a site story. On the computer, you can see the information for a late Roman building.

Overlaying historical maps © Wessex Archaeology

Chloe Hunnisett, Heritage Consultant, is back in the office after a trip to a site, walk over survey and visit to the local archives. It is now time to start on the desk based assessment for this site. Here, we can see uploaded digitised copies of historic maps overlaid onto the GIS over the HER data for local monuments. Chloe will now start her assessment of how the landscape has changed over time and what archaeology could exist in the area.

Enhancing records © Wessex Archaeology

Sophie Thorogood, Marine Archaeologist, is busy working on the final report for the South East Rapid Coastal Zone Assessment. This is an English Heritage project, which aims to enhance the archaeological records of the National Monuments Record, local Historic Environment Records and Sites and Monuments Records, and to serve as a basis for improved management of the coastal historic environment.

Marine Geophysics

The marine geophysics team are busy interpreting sidescan data from the field. Sidescan is a type of geophysical survey that measures the intensity of soundwaves reflected off the seafloor. These experts can assess if the sidescan shows natural or man-made features. If man-made they could indicate the location of a wreck. Their work is very technical and complicated – illustrated by the complex combination of computer screens required.

How many computer screens does one person need? Four, apparently © Wessex Archaeology

Louise Tizzard, one of our Geologists, is looking at the geology of the seabed to understand submerged prehistoric landscapes in marine dredging zones. In particular looking at License Area 240, where in the past there has been a major discovery of Palaeolithic handaxes.

In the lab

In the lab you can find all our post-excavation specialists.

Examining cremated remains © Wessex Archaeology

Dr Jackie Mckinley, is our human remains expert. Today she is examining a cremation burial. Here, she is detailing all the identifying fragments of bone that can help her conclude about age, sex and other important information. For example, examining the cremation burial by spits can highlight how the skeleton was placed into the burial vessel.

Back from the field and cleaning finds © Wessex Archaeology

Tom, currently back from the field, is washing finds from an excavation.

Post excavation finds sorting © Wessex Archaeology

While Ellie Brooks is looking through these washed finds, sorting, counting and weighing them by type and content bag, then preparing to box them up.

Chris in the environmental lab © Wessex Archaeology

Delicate work © Wessex Archaeology

In the environmental lab, Chris Stevens and Nikki Mulhall are delicately picking out charred plant remains from residue of processed soil samples. These remains will be analysed, the plants identified and then cross-referenced with information about the features on site where they were excavated to see what conclusions may be drawn. For example, what were the people from the site eating?

Geomatics

Volunteers learning and using a Total Station on previous Churches Conservation Trust project © Wessex Archaeology

Geomatics is the discipline of gathering, processing, and delivering spatially referenced information and is vital to modern archaeological practice. Our Geomatics team, led by Paul Cripps, are mainly in the office but today Paul is organising a fieldwork event for the Churches Conservation Trust as part of the Festival of British Archaeology. You can find out more on Paul’s own blog – A Day of Archaeological Geomatics

The Graphics Office

The Graphics Team are a fundamental part of the company, we rely on these talented people for a range of activities, from typesetting and providing figures for reports to artefact and reconstruction illustration to creating exhibitions and posters.

Here you can see Kitty drawing a Palaeolithic handaxe found in a marine aggregate dredging area.

Getting out and about

Wessex Archaeology is a charitable trust with an educational remit to promote archaeology. As a result, we have dedicated staff for working with the public, who unsurprisingly decided to provide their own material for Day of Archaeology.

Sarah Phillips, Senior Learning and Access Officer had the least exciting day. This is sadly the price of heading up the team but her blog – The Glamour of Outreach – illustrates that it is not all fun and games, admin exists in outreach too.

CBA Comunity Archaeology trainne Angus, our experimental archaeologist © Angus Forshaw

Having said that our CBA funded Community Archaeology Trainee Placement, Angus Forshaw had a great day on site working on Barrow Clump as part of Operation Nightingale . You can find out more about the site and project on his blog – A Day with Operation Nightingale

Laura interviewing Alex, a Rifleman for Project Florence podcast © Wessex Archaeology

While Laura Joyner, the Project Florence Officer was also out at Barrow Clump working with young film volunteers and filmmakers from Salisbury Arts centre on a documentary. You can read about her day on the Project Florence’s Day of Archaeology blog – Lights, Camera, Action.

The End of the Tour

So that is a brief tour of Wessex Archaeology and you have only seen a fraction of what is going on here today. Before I finish this blog, I have to mention the people not shown here at all, our board of trustees, the directors, project managers, our amazing finance team and admin staff that keep the company running so that we can do all these activities.

This is just one day at Wessex Archaeology, the next might be completely different, and you never know what you will discover.

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Historic Building Recording with Aerial-Cam in Gloucester Cathedral

By Aerial-Cam on July 2, 2012 in Commercial Archaeology, Day of Archaeology, DayOfArch2012, Digital Archaeology, Historical Archaeology, Illustration, Medieval, Periods, Survey

We’ve been using a specially adapted tri-frame mast system to get the camera into position at various heights inside the Lady Chapel (1470). We are working with the Downland Partnership, who needed a full photographic record of the masonry and window structure for the production of accurate drawings via photogrammetry and laser scanning.

Lady Chapel, Gloucester Cathedral images from Mast-Cam.

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A Day in Monrepos

By Monrepos - Archaeological Research Centre and Museum for Human Behavioural Evolution on July 2, 2012 in Day of Archaeology, DayOfArch2012, Illustration, Prehistory

My name is Sonja Grimm and I’m an Archaeologist in MONREPOS Archaeological Research Centre and Museum for Human Behavioural Evolution (Neuwied, Germany).

This was my Day of Archaeology 2012:

It’s graphs day today! Helped out a Dutch colleague with a map of the
distribution of the Havelte Group (a northern European facies in the
Weichselian Lateglacial) and made some graphs for the material chapter of
my dissertation. Maybe, I’ll start my first trials with QuantumGIS with
some maps later today.

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A Day at the Shopping Mall CSI lab (Conservation Science Investigations)

By Dana Goodburn-Brown on June 30, 2012 in Community Archaeology, Conservation, DayOfArch2012, Illustration

A bit of an introduction and general update:

I am the conservation manager at “Anglo-Saxon CSI:Sittingbourne” [www.anglosaxoncsi.wordpress.com / facebook / @CSIsitt], we reported from the lab last year and are very pleased to be taking part in Day of Archaeology again…

Our project has had some periods of closure due to lack of funding over the past year, and we are in the midst of a fundraising campaign at the moment and seeking out new ways to fund conservation of the 2nd half of the Meads cemetery; as well as expand and take forward the CSI shopping mall lab concept. We are open 10-4 Tuesdays, Thursdays and Fridays at the moment, and possibly might add Saturdays for July and August. Although we had to stop conservation work for a large part of last year, work on recording the large bead assembly, and reviewing the results of the conservation work took place, and the Assessment Report for Meads II is with the Canterbury Archaeological Trust editors and hopefully out soon. I shall be away for most of the next 2 months (family illness and then conserving on site for Rutgers University Dig in the Upper Sabina Tiberia Valley, Italy). So today we started to confirm plans to ‘down scalpels’ and carry out a further review of the conservation work and invite volunteers and visitors to attempt reconstructions of our grave groups while I am away. We also need to compile a list of research questions we may have about materials we might want to investigate further, with the portable Hitachi Scanning Electron Microscope (SEM) that is coming to the lab soon – thanks to a generous scientific equipment grant that has recently been awarded to Oxford University (RLAHA) for the CSI project and general conservation use, by the Clothworkers’ Foundation.

Our partners, Sittingbourne Heritage Museum have counted well over 18,000 visitors to date; and last summer’s count of conservation volunteer hours topped 5,000 !!

The morning’s activities:

Heritage Studies MA student Vicky Price interviewing artist Rob Bloomfield about his work with CSI.

Volunteer Vicky Price (Heritage Studies [contemporary practice] Kingston University, MA student] and I discussed her work on shield studs from grave 111, and her main task for the day – her desire to interview me and our resident artist, Rob Bloomfield for our views on the relationship between art & science in our work, and processes of how we are working with the CSI project, for her dissertation (working title: “Narrative, craft and the investigative conservator”)

Vicky’s interview with Rob then turned into a larger discussion about authenticity vs. creativity in his drawings and also his observations that the work of the investigative conservator is a bit like that of a sculptor, but at opposite ends of the spectrum… and he came up with the term “intricate deconstruction”. It is great to have such a wide mix of people involved with this conservation project… and really great to have Rob’s fabulous range of illustrations – today he was sketching ideas for a poster to advertise summer workshops and this also resulted in a possible new T-shirt design, an Anglo-Saxon Warrior (We have an unusually high proportion of warrior graves at our site)… unfortunately, the sword ended up looking more Roman than Anglo-Saxon, so this is not the final copy – it is an interesting and sometimes tricky collaboration… Rob is an unemployed artist, and this is his first experience working with a professional archaeological project.

Rob’s sketches for designing a poster advertising summer workshops “Hands on the Past”

Rob’s Anglo-Saxon Warrior drawing (although sword and scabbard should be longer)

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Historical Archaeology & Visual Art

By Philadelphia Archaeological Forum on June 30, 2012 in DayOfArch2012, Digital Archaeology, Historical Archaeology, Illustration

I am an historical archaeologist who teaches at Cheyney University and at West Chester University, two campuses of the Pennsylvania State System of Higher Education that are located in the suburbs of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania USA. I am not teaching during the summer term which gives me time to pursue my research which involves studying the public’s engagement with the archaeological resources in Independence National Historical Park (a U.S. National Park Service property commemorating the birthplace of American democracy). Today, June 27^th, has been a ‘catch-up’ day for me where I had time to move ahead on several items on my ‘wanting to do’ list. First, I wrote to the editor of the “Images of the Past” column of the Society for Historical Archaeology Newsletter (Benjamin Pykles) proposing a write-up about Jackson Ward ‘Smokey’ Moore, Jr. Moore, a retired archaeologist and a Native American Chippewa, excavated in Philadelphia in the 1960’s at the site of Benjamin Franklin’s mansion.

Jackson Ward 'Smokey' Moore restoring a historic dish

Jackson Ward ‘Smokey’ Moore, Jr. in a National Park Service Public Affairs Photo, circa 1960. (Independence National Historical Park Archives).

My offer to undertake this write-up required researching the Newsletter’s back issues to determine the type of information expected for the column and I spent an hour doing this prior to contacting Pykles to make sure I had the kind of information wanted. I then turned to some on-going background research I’ve been doing for a possible book project that the art photographer John Edward Dowell Jr. and I have talked about doing. This would be a book designed for the general reader which would feature photographs John took during the excavation of the President’s House archaeological site in Independence Park. These photographs document the archaeological excavation and its findings about slavery and freedom at the birth of the American nation and, in doing so, they help create African American history. They are also art pieces made by a Black artist. Beyond documenting new American history evidence and documenting new African American history evidence, his photographs are art pieces (re’ artifacts) of black visual art. Today I spent time researching and considering how these images therefore fit into the history of Black visual art. After reading a significant portion of N.I. Painter’s Creating Black Americans I realized that Dowell’s President’s House archaeological site photographs not only help make Black history more visible but also help make black art history more “visible” and that this is something we would likely want our manuscript to address given that the history of black visual art, like African American history, has been ignored, overlooked, and excluded in the canon.

View of the President's House by J. E. Dowell

ne of artist John E. Dowell’s photographs of the President’s House Site in Independence Park (right center, above the blue tarp-covered, back dirt pile). Dowell takes large format images (2 x 5 – 4 x 20 feet) which are then digitally scanned to produce highly detailed, deeply contextualized, images. His photographic style is known to convey life in the urban metropolis and he uses both unique perspective and lighting — namely pictures shot from high-rise vantage points that are taken at sun-up and sun-down.

Later on in the day I began typing up the meeting notes taken during the last monthly meeting of the Philadelphia Archaeological Forum (PAF). I am Secretary of that non-profit advocacy group and I post the meeting minutes on the PAF listserv. However, I am coordinating a local version of the Day of Archaeology for the PAF and I switched to work on this task. I am coordinating Philadelphia area Day of Archaeology contributions from local area archaeologists as well as members of the public during the period June 25^th-June 28^th. I will use these contributions to develop a new page of content for the PAF webpages at www.phillyarchaeology.orgthat will help demonstrate and explain what people in our area do with archaeology both at work and at play. I will also be forwarding the contributions to the coordinator of the international Day of Archaeology blogging project.