Niles is a Young Producer with the Shout Out Loud project, English Heritage’s flagship youth engagement project.

For the 2023 Festival of Archaeology, the Young Archaeologists’ Club (YAC) teamed up with Shout Out Loud to create a bumper resource pack of activities based on the Festival’s theme of archaeology and creativity.

The resource pack was created by young people, for young people, ensuring the activities are youth-proofed.

Niles tells us a little about the activity she created for the resource pack.

Biography and Activity Idea

My name is Niles Schilder, I have always been very interested in history from a very young age, I am a Young Producer with the English Heritage Shout Out Loud program which is intended to help bring heritage to a younger and more diverse audience. I have also been a member of the Colchester branch of the Young Archaeologist Club since 2011 and have been a helper since 2018. Since 2021 I have been a Military History student at the University of Kent in Canterbury. 

Since starting at the University of Kent I have discovered a passion for early medieval history and hope to move on to do a masters in Medieval and Early Modern Studies. I find this time in history absolutely fascinating and have noticed a lot of misconceptions people have concerning this era, this stretch from the levels of education at the time all the way down to simple things like their appearance and clothing. One of the biggest misconceptions is about what sort of helmets the Vikings wore, as many people believe that they wore very destructive horned helmets when there is in fact no evidence for this. Hopefully this design for a more historically accurate do-it-yourself Viking helmet will allow people to have fun while being able to better visualise what life looked like for the Vikings.