Since Monday was a holiday, I came back to work on Tuesday. In the morning I helped Lizzie out planning for a schools mapping workshop next Monday with 300 children that I am meant to be helping to run! Slightly daunting but sure it will go great. In the afternoon I went to Hackney Museum and catalogued all the finds used in the ‘Digging Hackney’ Workshop where children learn about archaeology. As part of our plans to change this workshop we thought it would be a good idea to know what artefacts we actually have at the moment and whether we need any different types. To do this I gave each bone, tile or piece of pottery a number and a description, attempted to date them (not the bones…) and photographed and labelled them. The dating was tricky to say the least, despite having been an archaeologist for 3 years in London and with the help of two books I still struggled to sort some Medieval and Roman pottery from one another!
Today I inputted all this information into a spreadsheet and linked this to the photos. Whilst somewhat monotonous, this will really help us change the workshop into a more Hackney focussed activity hopefully that might look at several different aspects of past lives and local places.
Also today I have been trying to wrack my brains what might be good as a key introductory object for when we take the workshop out to schools rather than in the museum. At the moment the workshop focuses around the idea of age and how archaeologists can tell things about the past as fantastically evidenced by the Springfield Park log boat in a glass case in the museum which is great because people can stand and look down on it or sit on the glass above it to see how many people it could hold etc. Obviously to go out to schools we need something equally as impressive and evocative but somewhat smaller and less fragile! Ideas are welcome! The search continues…
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