Today’s image is of our preparations for the Bones and Burials activity for Archaeology for You which will be taking place tomorrow! Last week we showed you the skeleton arriving, today we show you it being fixed in place to be used to teach people how to excavate a skeleton.
Coil, build, smooth, decorate; the four stages of building a coil pot, inspired by prehistoric pottery excavated locally. This is one of the activities you can take part in at Archaeology for You in the Inspired by the Past area on Saturday.
Only three days left to go until Archaeology for You on Saturday the 12th July at the Powell-Cotton Museum. One of our activities on Saturday will be ‘Give it a Swirl’ where you can find out how archaeologists find out about evidence for ancient environments and diets from soil samples taken at dig sites.
Today’s picture is of some charred grain, seeds, charcoal and tiny shells that were found in a soil sample taken from a Medieval ditch near Manston.
The process we use to retrieve this evidence is called flotation. This is where soil samples are swirled in water in a tank over a fine mesh. The light artefacts such as charred seeds and grain, charcoal and small bones float to the top and are retrieved for identification by pouring the water off through a fine seive. Heavy artefacts such as the odd stone, piece of pot or larger bone sink and are retained by the fine mesh and the soil particles sink right to the bottom of the tank.
We will be using a simplified version of this process on Saturday using buckets and plenty of water, so come along, get your hands dirty and Give it a Swirl!
Animal bones are one of the most common finds in archaeological excavations, often forming large elements of the assemblage of finds.
Man has brought many animals into the routine of life, to use for food and to provide muscle power and as a source of other useful raw materials and resources. Many animals share the human world as companions, being fed and given a space to live because of some return they give for their keep. Some animals live as parasites, living off waste or on the by products of agriculture and industry. All can be represented in the collections of animals bone collected from archaeological sites. The size of each bone reflects the range of animals that share our world, from rodents and amphibians to cattle and in the earliest of sites some of the largest animals that have lived, like hippos and mammoths.
Understanding the patterns of distribution and the species that are represented are part of the process of reconstructing both the environment of the past and the patterns of consumption and exploitation of animals by humans. Part of the process of archaeological investigation is the identification the species of bones and bone fragments, quantifying the range of species represented and comparing them with the use of animals in cultures from the historic past and present. The evidence of the animal bones allows us to piece together the relationships between animals and humans, when we have no other written evidence to reconstruct them with.
Today’s image is of the Pottery Dating game, a simple introduction to understanding how ceramics are used in archaeological investigation to generate knowledge about people and culture in the past. The pottery dating game is one of the activities we have developed to help people understand the basics of archaeological investigation and analysis, which you can try out at our Archaeology for You event.
Developing the ability to make ceramics was one of the most significant inventions of prehistoric people. Everyday pottery vessels, familiar in form and uses to our own, link us in a long chain to first Neolithic potters, with almost every step of the journey marked with innovations in form, fabric and technological advances and retreats.
Studying ceramics in the archaeological record can grow to a full time occupation, with a whole body of subtle detail that a ceramic specialist needs to become familiar with. The scope of interest in ceramic material ranges from the variety of vessels and fabrics present in the archaeological record, to observing how modern potters manipulate clay and construct objects from it. Piecing together the sequence of the potters craft involves tracing cultural cross references, short lived fads and long lived styles that defy the creative urges of the moment in favour of utility, familiarity and tradition.
From the earliest days of archaeological research there has been a recognition that an archaeologist should be familiar with the range of ceramics that are common in their area of research, in the period they study and the geographical regions they focus on. Indexing and sequencing the ceramic types associated with a field of study is a basic building block in establishing regional time lines and tracing common ways of life.
To become familiar with the methods used to analyse ceramics, there’s no substitute for hands on experience. But, as in many unfamiliar activities. people are not confident of their own abilities and are nervous about making mistakes. The pottery dating game is a confidence building exercise which shows that we all have the skills of reasoning and observation that form the foundation of the systems used to analyse and classify ceramics.
The dating game box contains a set of sherds of pottery ranging in date from the early prehistoric to the modern era, all with distinctive characteristics. We invite you, without any previous experience of archaeological pottery, to place the sherds in the order from earliest to latest according to your own ideas and experience. Before we compare the sequence you decide on with the order and dating given by an expert in archaeological ceramics, we ask you to explain the observations and decisions you made in ordering the sherds.
How close do you think you might get to the actual sequence on the first go? How do your observations fit with those of experienced ceramic archaeologists? Perhaps you know more about the technology and craft of the past than you think you do…
Our image today is of a worked flint flake, with its modern equivalent a utility knife.
Over spans of thousands of years, human history is mainly reconstructed from the discovery of similar flint tools, or the other variations on the scale and sophistication of objects that represent the flint-workers art.
Each of these tools represents intentional alteration and manipulation of the properties of flint, or other stones available in other parts of the world, to create cutting edges in the material that can be utilised for many purposes. Archaeologists have generated models of both the creative skills that went into each tool and the functions and social circumstances they were used in, individually or as part of a tool kit that can be recognised and classified in the archaeological record.
To a great extent prehistoric humans are known only by recognising the dexterity and technological repertoire of their tools, through analysing or recreating the actions that went into creating each one. Cultural and social organisation in these periods is projected from the way that tools are grouped into sets and distributed over space and time.
Each flint, like the one in the image, preserves the action of a single unknown maker at a single point in time. The study of these actions, and the products of each of the makers, collectively preserves an echo of the whole way of life of an ancient society.
You might think that this pair of Grade II Iisted brick and flint cottages with their Flemish style gables are tucked away in the Kent countryside. These lovely buildings are in fact hidden away behind the shops of Queen Street in Ramsgate. Accessed through a narrow passage called Queens Court they are a hidden gem of the townscape and a window through which we can see something of 17th century Ramsgate.
We’ve just taken delivery of our second teaching skeleton at Virtual Museum, in time to create a new archaeological activity for Archaeology for You on the 12th of July.
Although we already have one excellent disarticulated skeleton for osteological instruction in our Bones and Burials activity, we’ve now got one to practise digging and planning with.
Excavating and recording human burials is one of the most complicated and painstaking tasks archaeologists undertake in the field and we would like to explain how it is done.
So our new teaching skeleton will be pressed into service as the example for excavation, while our other skeleton will let us explain which bone is connected to which.
Come and give it a go at Archaeology for You.
Is this Thanet’s earliest art?
Following on from yesterdays image, today’s VM_365 picture is of some fragments of painted plaster found at the Abbey Farm Roman Villa at Minster in Thanet.
We have over 7,500 pieces of painted wall and ceiling plaster from the site ranging in size from a few centimetres to roughly the size of an A4 page.
As the technique used here was fresco, where the paint was applied directly to fresh plaster, we know that the artist who painted these designs must have been on the Isle of Thanet carrying out the work. This makes them one of the earliest artists in the area.
Visit the Virtual Museum to see some of the other pieces of plaster from the site.
The image for our VM_365 project today is of a fragment of Roman Mosaic with part of a guilloche pattern that was found in the excavation of a Roman Villa at Minster in Thanet.
One of the most impressive Roman buildings to have been discovered on the Isle of Thanet to date and almost certainly on of the most important places in the area in the Roman period.
Several of these small fragments of Mosaic from the excavation are in storage, but there were no floors of any size surviving in the excavated remains of the villa. The pieces we have survived because they had been broken up and had fallen into a deep chamber within the northern apse of the building.
It is useful to try to reconstruct the shape and size of the Villa building with its main range, wings and detached bath house building, which was served by its own piped water supply.
With only the ground plan visible from the robbed remains of walls it is difficult to know exactly what the structure of the building was like, but with the few mosaic fragments we have, we can at least assume that like other buildings of the period it had several of these grand decorative surfaces. The full history of the building and the details of exactly who may have lived in and around it will probably remain unknown.