WORK EXPERIENCE

“I came for work experience with Colchester Archaeological Trust because I’m really interested in archaeology – It’s what I want to do at University. I’ve gotten such a rich experience out of the week (and two extra days!) I’ve been able to spend here.

Over the week I’ve been excavating a bronze age cremation pot, in 5cm sections (spits), and separating and labelling what I have found. This has been mostly bone, which we weren’t sure what it was at first, but after taking all of the bone fragments out of it, we think it’s likely that it is an adult human. As well as having something so important inside, we also found fragments of a different pot to the outer pot, which we think might have been an inner pot – atypical for the bronze age. All of this has been very exciting, and I’ve been so lucky to be able to have enough time to finish all of my excavation and get onto washing the pot, even if so much of it is in fragments from being 3,000 years old.

Washing the pot fragments is revealing a black to red gradient on the outside, with small finger indentations and tiny holes around the rim for decoration. I think it’s incredible how impressive the craft work is, as this pot was made before pottery wheels, and when the clay had to contain ground shell and quartz inclusions to keep it strong. Clearly a lot of care was taken in this cremation.

On Wednesday, I visited the site that the pots had come from, there were a lot of trenches and you could see the change in soil colour where features were present. Digitally I could also see the map of where it was likely that there would be more, as well as glacial and post-glacial anomalies, caused during the last ice age 10 – 20,000 years ago.

All of this confirmed to me my passion for archaeology. I’ve been so lucky to have had such an amazing work experience opportunity and I’m very sure that this is something I would like to continue doing. I think I want to continue volunteering when I have some more time“

Written by work experience student Levi.