university of leicester & the chester house estate irchester field school 2023
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
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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.