It
has been almost a month since my last post…I have been so busy that I’ve not
managed to blog about it!!
After
being introduced to everyone in the office on the first day, I had a meeting
with Phil (Project Manager of Adopt-a-Monument) and Cara (Adopt-a-Monument
Officer). I was given a briefing on everything their team were doing and what
they were planning to do in the next year. I was given much reading material so
that I could get myself up to speed with projects/activities I will be involved
with! I also went to RCAHMS with Cara for a meeting about Scotland’s Community
Heritage Conference, which will be taking place this coming weekend in
Perthshire. So straight away I was networking and have spent a day in the
RCAHMS offices helping Kevin put the delegate packs together for the conference…I
am learning there is a lot that goes on behind the scenes of archaeology and
conferences such as these!!
I
have been helping Cara with a community group from Dundee called Dighty Connect. The idea behind their group
is to work with communities along the Dighty Burn and encouraging them to take
part in envioronmental and cultural projects. Anne who leads this group
contacted Cara as they wanted help with learning how to record archaeological
features. We went to Dundee one day to walk along the Burn and spot such
features but what we weren’t expecting was a group of school children to be
accompanying us! This turned out to be a fantastic introduction to those
children as their teachers asked us to go back to their school later in October
to hold a session with them. I have to say that I have enjoyed all of my time
in this first month but that has been my favourite day so far. We took a couple
of our artefact investigation kits so the children could handle the objects,
they were extrmely engaged and even brought in objects that were special to
them or best described them…we saw many console controllers which was pretty
good! The session got them thinking about objects in terms of material culture
and what objects say about people in the archaeological record, we also had
them looking at aerial photographs and they also got to read maps. All in all
we had their attention for just short of 3 hours which in my eyes is something
of an achievement when I think about when I was in secondary school!
In
terms of the future project I have been working on proposals, permissions,
setting up meetings with various groups in different areas of Scotland. I will
go into more details when I get the go ahead from Phil, it’s all under wraps at
the moment but it is something that hasn’t really been done in archaeology
before. I am really looking forward to seeing this in action but for now I must
carry on with the paperwork…who knew there was so much behind every
archaeological project, I’m learning everyday!!
