Colchester Young Archaeologists’ Club meeting in January ’16

On Saturday (16th January), the Colchester Young Archaeologists’ Club (YAC) held their first meeting of 2016 here at the Roman circus centre.

Colchester YAC organiser Barbara Butler writes: ‘… Eleven YAC members braved the cold weather on Saturday morning to renew their membership for 2016 and to celebrate the award of £1,800 from Essex County Council for the archaeological fun day which the YAC members are organising at the Roman circus centre. This will be on the 16th July, at the beginning of the Festival of Archaeology. We will start planning the activities for the fun day at our meeting in February and the members will design their own posters to publicise it. At this meeting, the members also decorated their own YAC name badges.

We enjoyed some warm-up games, although we were grateful to find that the central heating in the Roman circus centre was switched on! We then played a ‘true or false’ game where the players stood in the middle of the room with cards marked with the numbers of 28 questions. If they thought that a question was true then they went to one end of the room to have their card marked by the leader there and, if they thought it was false, then they went to the leader at the other end. One of the ‘true or false’ questions caused a lot of confusion – this was whether Trust director Philip once excavated a tobacco-pipe lost 45 years earlier by archaeologist Sir Mortimer Wheeler at the Balkerne Gate in Colchester… Niles won the game by getting 24 of the questions correct: his prize was a copy of the new guide to Colchester Castle Museum. Impressively, there were other scores of 22 and 19 and Kyle, who thought he was getting the questions all wrong, scored a very respectable 14.

We then moved upstairs to the Trust’s main office to make pictures for our time-line. This proved so popular that we began to run over time. We have now added the 20th century to the time-line, since our members have so much interest in its history and archaeology. The 20th-century part of the time-line is dominated by symbols of WW1 and WW2, although Concorde, fashions and space rockets are there, too …
(PS  Apologies for the Mortimer Wheeler story, but it occurred to me when I was reading his book Still digging, which a friend gave me for Christmas and in which he says that he learned to talk with a pipe in his mouth from his father and that he had been excavating in poor light under the Hole in the Wall pub. at the Balkerne Gate) …’.
[Note: Philip says that he really did find Mortimer Wheeler’s pipe in an archaeological trench at the Balkerne Gate in the 1970s.]

The images show the YAC members’ group ‘thumbs-up’ for the award from Essex County Council, in the ‘chariot room’ at the Roman circus centre, and then working on the 20th-century part of the time-line, with a close-up of the artwork. (In the ‘thumbs-up’ image, it even looks as though the charioteer silhouette is raising his whip in support.)

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If you are aged under 17 and interested in joining the Young Archaeologists’ Club in Colchester, then please contact Barbara Butler on 07808 968766 or at barbara[at]peterbutlerdesign.co.uk or Barbara Butler, Colchester YAC Branch, c/o the Colchester Archaeological Trust, Roman Circus House, Roman Circus Walk, Colchester, Essex CO2 7GZ.

The National Young Archaeologists’ Club web-site is at www.yac-uk.org/ .

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