Issue 86

January/February 2006

Contents

news

Flight of the eagles

Unearthing the ancestral rabbit

Counting the treasure

Tools for learning

Round and about in historic Leominster

In Brief

features

700,000 years old found in Suffolk
Full report from the scientists who found the first Northern Europeans.

Easter Island statues explained
Brett Shepardson takes issue with stories of doom - thanks to Edwardian women.

50 years on
Celebrating industrial archaeology, but what is it? Michael Nevell knows.

Evacuees Christmas and other war art
Soldiers who draw: English Heritage report on a new study of old graffiti.

on the web

Recommended websites

letters

Views and responses

CBA News

Headlines from the CBA office.

ISSN 1357-4442

Editor Mike Pitts

Issue 86 January/February 2006

on the web

Archaeology for online kids

Caroline Wickham-Jones finds things to do on dark winter evenings and wet weekends.

Children are avid internet users. A good place to start is the Young Archaeologists Club (www.britarch.ac.uk/yac), which has information about joining the club but (for now) little online activity. Abetter guide for younger virtual archaeologists is Dig (www.digonsite.com). Although this partners a physical magazine (ordered online: foreign subscription is not cheap), there is plenty to do including quizzes, articles, fun and links.

Archaeological institutions like English Heritage (www.englishheritage.org.uk), the National Trust (www.nationaltrust.org.uk) and the National Trust for Scotland (www.nts.org.uk) all have kids' pages, though none is obvious. They hide under "learning" – surely an adult view of "fun"? Children have to be guided to the pages, though it would be nice to feel that the adventurous might get sucked in accidentally. Historic Scotland (www.historic-scotland.gov.uk) and CADW (www.cadw.wales.gov.uk) have no obvious children's content at all.

Kids' web pages are based on a site or institution; or elsewhere, usually in education or the media, making use of archaeology. Site-centred information is plentiful from the very sophisticated (www.smm.org/catal) to simpler (www.ferribyboats.co.uk/young/index.html). Most provide information on archaeology and the period/s in question, games and links; some accept questions. Popular topics like Egypt are well catered for. Ancient Egypt Web Quest (www.iwebquest.com/egypt/ancientegypt.htm) has not been updated since 2002 but offers good interactive questing; the British Museum's Ancient Egypt (www.ancientegypt.co.uk), though hidden, offers other activities.

Museum websites for kids, where they exist, are well resourced, eg Birmingham Museums' web adventure (www.schoolsliaison.org.uk/kids - excellent games), or the Museum of London (www.museumoflondon.org.uk/molsite/learning/who_are_you/kids/kids.html). Again, however, children's pages are rarely obvious on a home page, and lie hidden through formal learning or education portals.

Outside Britain, Lascaux's website (www.culture.gouv.fr/culture/arcnat/lascaux/en), while not designed specifically for kids, has an appealing inventive homepage, and an imaginative site. Lascaux plays with light; Te Papa Tongarewa in Wellington, New Zealand plays with sound with a suitably noisy kids site (www.tepapa.govt.nz/TePapa/English/Kids).

Curriculum makers are reluctant to make use of archaeology, but not education websites. Gridclub is well used in our house (www.gridclub.com), a Channel 4-associated site that offers a bloodthirsty games suite for the primary school child (subscription needed but provided by many schools), one set at Skara Brae (albeit with anachronistic bunnies). Likewise, the bbc (www.bbc.co.uk/schools) offers enough archaeology and history for various age groups, and with varying levels of animation, to while away a rainy afternoon. Budding, or aged, archaeologists might like to try out the excavation game devised by Julian Richards (www.bbc.co.uk/history/games/ancestors), a lot less stressful than real life.

Nonetheless, few websites provide dedicated information for children. We are missing the boat.

Finally, remember the virtual alternatives. Many computer games use archaeology for settings and adventures: Rome Total War, Imperial Glory or Alexander provide detailed knowledge of the past. Like it or not, games for many provide their only contact with archaeology.

Sites to send the kids to

• The Romans in Sussex - www.romansinsussex.co.uk
  • Congratulations to the Sussex Archaeological Society on this dedicated educational website with enough variety for all
• Mysteries of Catalhuyuk - www.smm.org/catal
  • Excellent site using humour to draw you in. Good graphics and a variety of activities from games to information as well as personal blogs
• Kids Dig Reed - www.kidsdigreed.com
  • A noisier website with positively irritating humour, but attractive games and information
• Am Baile - www.ambaile.org.uk/en/funandgames.jsp
  • A broad view of archaeology includes culture, and this provides culture
• Ancient theme - www.ancient-theme.com
  • For the child in us all. No updates since 2002 but inspiration for kids and those who have not yet liquidised their childhood assets on eBay. Wonderful models – Petra sets a challenge to all BA readers. No Stonehenge yet!

Walk to work learning about old Dorset

Tom Goskar and Catherine McHarg have entered the exciting world of Web 2.0.

Key features of "Web 2.0", a phrase reflecting fundamental changes in the web, are interactivity and the reuse of website content: people want to add, comment or write their own opinions.

At the heart of this are "blogs", websites onto which the authors ("bloggers") regularly publish articles or "posts". Most blogs allow readers to comment or question.

Blogs will often have RSS links (standing for "really simple syndication"), which download the latest posts onto your computer like email. You can "subscribe" (blogs are free) to Wessex Archaeology's news blog with RSS (news.wessexarch.co.uk). We also use RSS to "pull" archaeology headlines from a number of sources, so we can display the latest archaeological news across the world.

In September we set up our first events blog (events.wessexarch.co.uk) to cover special events or projects. For the two weeks of our annual practical archaeology course we published a daily diary, updated live from the excavation using a laptop.

The archaeologists running the course needed to plan ahead for the day's entry. Access to mains electric was a bonus as laptop batteries can be limited, although blogging is possible without. A digital camera was essential. This meant extra thought as to what might make a good picture or best illustrate the points to be made. Images were downloaded and edited on-site and uploaded to the blog with the accompanying text by mobile phone. Depending on content roughly 45 minutes to an hour a day was needed to keep the blog up-to-date.

At the end of the two weeks we recorded a "podcast", a pre-recorded radio show linked from a blog post, containing interviews with trainers, visiting specialists and course participants. Podcasts are usually available as MP3 audio files, so you can listen to them with devices such as your computer, MP3 player (not just iPods!) or a newer mobile phone. You can subscribe for free using software such as Apple's iTunes. You copy and paste the RSS link from the blog into iTunes, and it will check the blog regularly for podcasts, automatically downloading a new episode. Broadband is definitely recommended for this.

Downloaded podcasts can be listened to anywhere. You could walk to work hearing Martin Green explain the archaeology of Cranborne Chase in Dorset, or experimental archaeologist Jake Keen talk about prehistoric iron smelting, with bellows pumping in the background. Hundreds have tuned in to these Archaeocasts, as we have named them, and over 4,000 people visited the blog during the excavation. We plan to launch further Archaeocasts to unveil the mysteries behind the processing of finds, environmental archaeology, and of course, archaeology and computers. And there will be more from our excavations and dive sites.

Wessex Archaeology has set up a "watch list" with the word "archaeology" on a free account with Technorati. We are alerted via RSS whenever anyone, on any blog, anywhere in the world, publishes a post containing, or "tagged" with, that word. We have come across some fantastic websites that we would never have known about without these technologies.

Feel free to visit our blogs, subscribe using RSS, comment on our stories, and if you know how, use our headlines on your own website or blog. We are developing these technologies and there is much to learn, but they offer immense potential for new and larger audiences to learn about the importance and excitement of archaeology. The internet has created a global audience thirsty for information about life in the past. Be part of the changing web!

RSS readers to run on your computer: www.ranchero.com (Mac), www.newsgator.com (PC), www.getfirefox.com (Mac/PC/Linux). Blog search engines: www.technorati.com, blogsearch.google.com. Podcast directories: www.apple.com/itunes (PC/Mac free download), podcasts.yahoo.com. Tom Goskar is archaeological multimedia developer and Catherine McHarg is education officer at Wessex Archaeology.

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