Cardboard Capes and Ghost Signs – Different Ways to be an Archaeologist

“Fingers crossed this will be the last Day of Archaeology post I write whilst a PhD student, and I am writing wondering what next”. This was the opening statement from my 2024 ‘A Day in Archaeology’ blog and it is safe to say that things haven’t exactly gone smoothly. As of the 5th July I am in an unfunded writing up year - so if all goes a little more to plan this time next year, this year will be my last year writing my PhD!

Although I don’t see any improvement in the funding or future of Welsh (or British) heritage organisations or universities, maybe this is still something that will be open to me in some limited way. Despite a challenging year for me personally there have been a lot of positives and I feel more settled and confident moving forward. Reading back through the rest of my 2024 post - writing again about a month after this year’s Bryn Celli Ddu event - I can see so much has changed. This year I was a paid member of the creative team and after an initial feeling of massive anxiety, worrying that I wasn’t up to it, the experience this year was incredible.

For the event I was just able to run with making items, this time thinking how the sun is represented in pre-Roman Wales and how this could form a basis for activities. Chatting it through with Angharad from Think Creatively led to gold lunula and sun disks and then the question of would it be possible to make a wearable version of the Mold Cape. And the answer is yes – with a lot of cardboard (thanks to a lovely lady at Smyth’s Toys), a lot of wedding cake decorations, a lot of glue, and a lot of gold spray paint!

Although it ended up a little larger than life size, it looked pretty good but my 7 year old insisted I needed to make a child sized one too. She was totally right - it was such a fun activity having the kids (and adults) playing dressing up, imagining who had worn it, what it meant, why it was buried and chatting about how it made them feel and how it affected how they moved/held themselves. The scaling down also applied to other artefacts with gold card used to create artefacts to be decorated and a child height pattern stone.

Over the last year I have been making more and more ‘things’, trying out different arts and crafts. I’m dyslexic and I think more in images than words, and I have found that I can take elements of my PhD which I am struggling to communicate in writing and turn them into pictures. This led to the creation of a grave goods banner made with scraps of fabric, beads, wool, needle felt and a throw from the Halloween sale. All items on it are from specific sites in Wales and the work ended up as a backdrop to the table for the Bryn Celli Ddu event (and a handy wind/rain break given the weather).

It is feeling like something of a come down after the event and I am trying to balance keeping going with the last push at writing the PhD, building our commercial archaeology business back up to full time for two people (we had scaled back when I had my stipend funding), managing work and kids in the summer holidays, and continuing to be creative. Today has been one of those days where things don’t entirely align but somehow also seem to work out. I worked late yesterday evening to free up this morning to take the kids to karate, worked on some new designs for turning my crafts into items to sell for Christmas (and maybe Halloween if I can make some decisions soon) in the car while they were in class, and then home to pick up on some research into some ‘ghost signs’ (old and often hidden advertising /shop signs preserved on buildings) recently uncovered on a historic building for a project we have been working on.

I visited the ghost sign site and another building we have been recording in Holyhead yesterday - being self-employed has the massive advantage of being able to chose who you work with so I got to spend the day with the wonderful Adam Stanford chatting photogrammetry and churches. I thought that going back to full time commercial archaeology would be difficult as my initial hope from the PhD was for a complete career change, but my perspective has shifted. The skills which I have gained are helping to change the direction of the commercial work – to broaden it out. The break doesn’t have to be clean to make a difference. Although I still sometimes feel like I do archaeology by numbers, with negative watching briefs and endless paperwork it feels a little lighter having outlets for creativity to break this up.

And the ghost signs yesterday – well they have got me thinking about changing fonts, changing technologies and capturing ephemeral streetscapes. I have a feeling that beyond the report there might be something a little extra coming out of this project too.