Our 'Ask An Archaeologist' day was a global phenomenon all over twitter, that we are still recovering from! This was a very unusual day that didn’t follow the usual approach to planning and creating the Council for British Archaeology’s social media. But was a constant flurry of retweeting and analysing the day's questions.
It went above and beyond our expectations from the previous year with all archaeologists across the world banding together to answer any budding questions. This evolved into not just our #askanarchaeologist but also a Spanish equivalent and even discussions in Arabic and Chinese.
The day was strangely exhausting, it took three of us to repost and manage the content for the ask an archaeologist twitter account, our own twitter account and sharing the questions. The exhausting part of the wealth of questions you were all asking! Every few minutes we would have over 20 new posts to share. A few times we had to be careful not to retweet our colleague's posts and shout across the office at your questions and laugh about the joke's posted in the discussions.
But our efforts where not in vain as we trended on twitter ( briefly) and given we are a heritage organisation its thrilling to have grabbed the publics attention. We have tracked the #askanarchaeologist discussions and are proud to report we had over 5.8 million discussions and threads! That's astounding, even when I signed off at 4 pm GMT in the UK I was overjoyed to see that the discussion continued for well over 24 hours, with Australia and America taking over for us for the discussions to continue.
We had some insightful questions about storage, challenges in archaeology, our best finds and the controversial ‘what counts as archaeology’. All of these were brilliant examples of real issues within the archaeology field. One popular question was about getting into archaeology and seeing so many people want to go on a dig or help out museum collections was heartwarming.
The discussion about archaeocake and snacks for the field was a serious discussion in the office with all of us having different reasons for our favourite biscuit or cake and why we would choose them. We even joined the discussion with our photos for our prefered snack of doughnuts.
Indiana Jones appeared several times with hilarious answers and serious discussions about his lack of a trowl and no context sheets!
Fellow archaeologists loved discussions about creating unusual games in the field to help ‘pass the time’ as digging a context often involved moving more soil than finds.
It was an overwhelming day but we had over 12 countries participate over 3 continents! Thanks to everyone who took part in the discussions, whether your thought of the questions or answered them. I am being honest when I say I had to go home and have a snooze.
