Placement Opportunity with the CBA: Macey

Here at the Council for British Archaeology, we really enjoy supporting placement students to gain experience working in archaeology and heritage organisations. We have a long-standing collaboration with the University of York's Archaeology Department to support their annual cohort of Cultural Heritage Management MA students. Macey tells us about her recent placement with our team.

Despite being an archaeology novice I have had a fantastic two weeks on placement with the Youth Engagement team at the Council for British Archaeology.

I am currently completing my Masters in Cultural Heritage Management at the University of York and have chosen to do this placement as part of my course. It has worked really well alongside some of the modules I have taken. For example, I was able to apply what I had learnt in the Heritage Education module.

Learning about YAC and all of the amazing opportunities it offers budding archaeologists has been great and has given me some wonderful experiences that I can take forward into my career post-masters.

Over the two weeks of my placement I was able to spend a number of days in the office meeting the team and learning more about the different departments and how the Council for British Archaeology works internally.

Early in the placement I was invited to a training session on the importance of youth engagement within heritage, and it was a great opportunity to think about the wider issues of participation and engagement.

For my placement I worked with the YAC handling collection to put together a handling box with accompanying activities to send out to YAC branches that don’t currently have access to artefacts to work with. I looked through the collection and pulled together different artefacts that could work well together and ultimately decided on a handling box which focussed on archaeological skills using medieval pottery. In order to provide instructions for activities I was able to complete some of the activities myself including pot and tile making. It was really useful to do the activity myself as it meant that I could include handy tips in the instructions. Not only was it useful, but it was very fun.

My time spent with Jo and Rachel at the CBA has been invaluable and I’m so grateful for the opportunity.

Macey's resources will be made available during this year's Festival of Archaeology, which explores the theme of creativity in archaeology.