This year's Day in Archaeology has fallen during the last week of our Museum of Liverpool community excavation. As curator of Regional and Community Archaeology at the Museum of Liverpool I am leading a community dig at Piermater's Green, Royal Albert Dock, Liverpool. We are investigating the site of two houses which were built for the dock master's and their families by the Mersey Docks and Harbour Board in 1852. These houses were destroyed during the Liverpool Blitz of the Second World War when over 70,000 people lost their homes in Merseyside. We are digging the site with the help of local residents, forensic anthropology students from Liverpool John Moores University and members of the public who signed up to volunteer.
The day started with loading up our wheelbarrows in our finds room which is happily a couple of minutes walk away from the site. It was a very windy morning on the Liverpool Waterfront and the archaeology team formed a back up plan of finds washing and sorting in case it became too windy to dig. At 10am our volunteers arrived and got to work exposing more of the wall between the yard and the kitchen area of house number 8 in Trench I and uncovering more of the porch of house number 7 in Trench II.
Just after 10am Neil Redfern arrived as part of his #Walking AndTalkingYourWay tour of the North and it was great to be able to share our community archaeology project with him and introduce him to our community archaeology Kickstart trainees, dig volunteers and one of our YAC members as well as a look at our finds! After Neil headed off I did a bit of mattocking in the west end of Trench I where we are hoping to locate one of the walls of number 8 and chatted to members of the public. So far we have engaged with over 3,000 members of the public at our finds table which is fantastic! It is great to be digging in such a visible way, to be able to show people the finds as they come out of the trenches and to hear their memories of the houses too.
After lunch the team from #SwabAndSend came down to the dig for a second day of swabbing the site. Swab and Send is a Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine project to locate bacteria which isn't resistant to antibiotics which can then be used to help develop future antibiotics. I love that archaeology can help discover the next antibiotics! As well as swabbing our coal chute and various parts of the site, I brought them into the finds room to swab our unwashed finds.
At 3pm it was time for our volunteers to head home which gives us time to sanitise the equipment before finishing up for the day. As it has been so sunny throughout the project I decided to take lots of site photos before the rain descends tomorrow as there was a nice bit of cloud cover. Tomorrow is our last day with volunteers on site, so perhaps we will find the elusive west wall of number 8 with moments to spare!
Contact details
Vanessa Oakden
Museum of Liverpool