The Durotriges Big Dig 2012 (Archaeology field school) (Short Course)

Course content

Work on site will take place daily between 9am - 5pm, six days each week (excludes Saturday).

We would recommend that you attend for a minimum of two weeks to expect to undertake some or all of the following activities:

• Site preparation, top-soil sampling, and trench excavation
• Stratigraphic excavation of deposits and features
• Context and feature recording (including written and photographic descriptions)
• Sampling for environmental materials and specimens for scientific testing
• Illustration: production of measured plans and sections
• Sieving and sorting of soil samples to extract environmental materials and artefacts
• Finds processing: cleaning, marking, logging, documenting and packaging different materials
• Topographic survey for the collection and mapping of spatial data (Total Station; GPS etc.)
• Geophysical survey for detecting and mapping below-ground features (resistivity and magnetometry)

What our 2011 volunteers found of most benefit ...

• "Personally I believe every aspect of my experience was beneficial to me despite the fact that I am not going into archaeology. Learning the history was the most interesting to me and therefore the find's hut was my favourite place on the dig"

• "Professionally the relationship between the Romans and others in the empire will be of great benefit to me and the skills I learned while digging will help me in future digs in other areas invaded by the Romans"

• "All of it. Honestly. Personally the experience of digging with such nice people was a great pleasure and constantly interesting. Professionally, the Geophys., the Environmental and the Finds experiences will be extremely useful on my CV. The history of the site was also personally interesting as it covers a period of history that I rarely focus on at my current stage of study, especially as it was unfolding under my trowel"

• "The opportunity to try out different types of archaeological data collection and recording including planning, filling in context sheets, geophysics, finds processing, and environmental sampling were of most use to me"

• "I enjoyed the physical excavation and learning about the various methods and techniques used for this. The discovery of human remains was of particular interest and most beneficial to myself"