Lancashire and Cumbria

… get 1000 finds for Lancashire and Cumbria on the database this year? I shouldn’t be writing the blog, but I do it anyway to just rest my brain a little bit.

There is a rally coming up on the 15th/16th Dec in Cumbria and I am worried about that – will write about it after it happened to keep you in the loop.

In the meantime I have been databasing like mad. I have managed 950 or so finds this year which seems ludicrous compared to counties like Suffolk or Norfolk, but I only had one volunteer doing some databasing for me in summer and at any other time it was just me… and I am still jetsetting around Lancashire Primary Schools and preparing sessions in the meantime. I got contacted by yet another school – this time a school near Blackpool – who want me to teach 30 Year 6 kids archaeology, between 1 and 1 1/2 hours in January. There will be a write-up, watch this space!

And I got another bag of potsherds in from a field walking trip in Carlisle… and no time to record the finds this year! Well, they will have to go on the pile for 2008… oh, my!

And now…. back to the database!

Before I forget – last week I went back to the lovely children (Year 5) of Carleton St Hilda’s Primary School in Poulton-le-Fylde, Lancashire, near Blackpool. This was my second visit as I didn’t get everything done when I went there back in October! The first time I had brought in my time line, finds and some work sheets which they children seem to enjoy… and remember, as I was to find out last week! The children still knew what archaeology is and that finds, especially pottery and flints, need to be handled with uttermost care and always over a table, close to the floor or held with two hands. They also remembered that you have to wash your hands after handling finds – surely that shows how much they enjoyed the session? While we just went through the time line quickly the first time, we did it with a bit more depth this time: every child was a allowed to pick an artefact and they learned that usually, artefacts are made from metal, glass, pottery, stone, bone or possibly plastic (the more modern ones!). We didn’t have any wooden or leather artefacts because wood and leather ‘rots’ in the ground, as they children knew. They looked at Stone Age chert debitage, a Bronze Age axehead, Roman coins, brooches and pottery, Medieval pottery and floor tiles, horse harness pendants, a coin and Victorian and Modern toys, a tooth brush, gun flints and a thimble – I hope that they learned that today we use stuff made from many more different materials than we did in the Bronze and Iron Age!!

I’d also brought sheets of a Roman tombstone activity which is not strictly speaking a ‘Portable Antiquity’, but one of the most important archaeological discoveries from Lancashire in the past 50 or 60 years. I thought that the kids would enjoy looking at the gruesome scene on the tombstone (a Roman rider who just beheaded a barbarian, still holding his head in his right hand!), colouring it in and talking about it and why it’s so important for the county. They all loved this activity as well as the ‘Design your own tombstone’ one, which does not mean THEIR tombstone, but another one for the Roman soldier!

This school, too, asked me to come back in January to do an archaeology session with their Year 1, 3 and 4. Hurray!!!