University of Leicester dig at Chester House Estate
Sarah Scott, Professor of Archaeology at the University of Leicester
Sarah Scott, Professor of Archaeology at the University of Leicester
Category
🗞
NewsTranscript
00:00University of Leicester is working in partnership with the Chester House Estate, North North
00:27Hanse Council. We're running a collaborative field school, the Urchester Field School.
00:33The field school is for our students, so we have distance learning students from all across
00:37the world. We also are working with local volunteers, students from Creating Tomorrow
00:43College who are based here at the Chester House Estate, and we have lots of other visitors.
00:55It's just such an amazing site. Within the estate there's evidence for 10,000 years of
01:01human activity. There is a really well-preserved small Roman town. We're excavating in the
01:07suburbs of that town. There's the Archaeological Resource Centre on the doorstep, and it's
01:12fantastic to have the partnership with the estate. Many of the volunteers here have been
01:29working here for many years on excavations before the site even opened, so they're very,
01:35very committed and loyal to this particular site, so it's fantastic to be able to offer
01:40them opportunities to carry on working on site, but also they have a fantastic range
01:45of local knowledge and expertise that bring a huge amount to this project and partnership.
02:00We've been really excited to run a school engagement programme for the first time. We
02:05have had around 40 schools on site and almost 2,000 children. They range in age from about
02:12seven right through to 18, so all key stages, and we've been running three main activities,
02:19so in the landscape, but also giving them the opportunity to see what's happening on site,
02:23to try out some of the archaeological tools, and to talk to the archaeologists involved in the
02:28excavation. We are getting great feedback from all the school children. So many of them have
02:33said they want to be an archaeologist when they grow up. I think they're loving the hands-on
02:36aspect of this course. Not only are they getting to walk around a Roman town and explore it for
02:41themselves with compass and maps, but they're getting to talk to real archaeologists about
02:45the tools we use and how we process materials straight out of the ground. We've been handing
02:50them objects as we've been excavating them, so they've loved that hands-on quality of the programme.
02:54We're linking the activities to the curriculum, but actually it is something different. It's
03:00hands-on. Things are coming out of the ground as they're walking past. They're able to talk to
03:04people who are really, really passionate about history, archaeology, heritage that's on their
03:08doorstep, and that's really fantastic, and the children really respond to that.
03:12One of our students last week, a distance learning student from the University of
03:25Leicester, it was his first ever excavation, and he found not only one but five complete pots,
03:30with a whole range of other fragments of pottery, animal bone, and coins, all from the same feature.
03:36The reaction on site was incredible for these finds. It's so rare to find complete pots like
03:46this on site. They must have been deliberately placed for whatever reason. Most archaeologists
03:51rarely find one complete pot in their lifetime, let alone this many. It's a really special find,
03:56and the student who found them must be over the moon.
03:58I've always wanted to do this. We wanted to do this for more than 30 years.
04:19It's something that I've always seen, and when I retired, you start to think,
04:25well I've got days now, I can come and do different things that I can try.
04:29I've always been in the outdoors, and where I used to live on a farm, they found like an Iron Age
04:38roundhouse, so that was really exciting, and that was my first sort of taste of it alongside Time Team.
04:45I've made my first ever find today. It's a late Roman pot, possibly Mortarium,
04:513rd century AD, about this big, and to me it's worth its weight in gold. But it was great,
04:56the feeling of finding that was worth the 30-year wait to be able to do this. We feel that we've
05:02actually done something worthwhile, achieved something, part of a group that knows what
05:07doing and supports us and guides us.
05:09This is absolutely fantastic, because you've got so many different layers of ages and eras,
05:19and what they're finding, like the five pots and that huge hole down there, is really unique,
05:25and the cemetery over there with all the bodies, it's quite creepy, but also exciting. And the
05:32little baby body, which was completely unexpected since last year, that's been discovered,
05:38and it's just like all these little things, each year it's just an exciting opportunity,
05:44and I'm so glad that they let me do it.
05:46It's just nice to find different stuff, I mean I found an old cow bone in there,
05:54and there's a bit of Roman pot, so it's not jewels, but I enjoy doing it,
05:59you never know what you're going to find.
06:02I'm thinking that nobody's seen that thing for thousands of years,
06:07and it's just, it's someone else's rubbish, but it's treasure to me, so why not come and have a go.