Birmingham Archaeology

In February 2005 we visited Birmingham Archaeology based at the University of Birmingham to learn about the work that they do.

We started the day with a visit to some excavations that are currently underway on the site of Metchley Roman Fort. The site of the Roman Fort is partly within the grounds of Birmingham University and partly a nearby hospital. The fort covers a large area and was occupied for about 150 years from around AD48. The new excavations are being carried out prior to some of the hostpital's land being redeveloped.

This area is thought to have been used as barracks and workshops. We learned about how archaeologists carefully clean a site by hand to reveal the underlying archaeology.

The orange colouration of the soil in the image of the left indicates that an oven was located here.

Following our tour of the excavation we returned to the offices of Birmingham Archaeology where we visited their stores of excavated soil and of their archaeological records.

We were then each given a bag of finds excavated from a site near Coventry and shown how to carefully wash the finds with a toothbrush and water. We each had 2 trays, one for the dirty finds and the other for the cleaned finds. We put our finds bags which were labelled with the location and context of the finds underneath the clean tray to make sure that the cleaned finds were returned to the correct bag.

Our washing revealed lots of animal and bird bones, some 14th century high status green pottery, roof tiles of about the same age and some metal objects including a possible mediaeval coin.

We had a wonderful time and are very grateful to Kirsty and her colleagues from Birmingham Archaeology for spending the morning with us and showing us their work.

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