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We take making clothes back to basics!

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Jack cards the wool for Esther to spin it At Colchester's Young Archaeologists' club March meeting we looked at the fibres and fleeces which  even Stone Age communities used to clothe themselves. Archaeologists have discovered woven cloth which dates from the Stone Age. These were made from the fibres found between the bark and wood of trees. Other raw materials available to our ancestors is wild cotton, flax for linen, nettle fibre and the favourite for the British Isles, fleeces from sheep  were spun and woven into cloth.      Thanks to a generous donation of fleeces, wool combs and spindles a team of Jack, who combed the raw wool and Esther, who became a dab hand at spinning it, didn't have enough time to weave the impressive amount of  thread they produced between them.     Others learned they could produce clothes by knitting or crocheting the finished thread or produce a trim or tie with a lucet.      We tried weaving techniques and styles on cardboard looms.     Ther

We look back in time with flints and fossils

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 Colchester Young Archaeologists' Club looked back in time today. We  explored the ancient art of flint napping  techniques. It was done safely with soap and wooden knives. We were recommended to use wooden knives on the imperial leather brand of soap. It has the right sort of consistency to be worked like flint on flint. As the young people napped the 'flints' the fragrance of the soap filled the room. When they drew flints,  the standard of drawing was exceptional. Some young people were fascinated with our collection of fossils and puzzled through the fossil dating quiz, working out which species were likely to be tens and hundreds of million years old. We had some new members join us and they were introduced to the ever-popular game of Aquila.

Druid game strategy replicated in castle

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 It's now four years since the Covid pandemic hit the world and even today, Colchester Young Archaeologists' Club received an apology from a member suffering from the most recent variant. That was no deterrent to the rest of us. In Colchester Castle Museum is an exact replica of a druid's grave excavated in 1996 by Colchester Archaeological Trust. Colchester YACs eagerly identified the medical instruments, the forceps, the tweezers, the razor and scalpel. We had brought one of our sets of the game Aquila, which was devised by Alex Jones, who based it on the one excavated in the druid's grave in 1996. A YAC familiar with Aquila carefully replicated the strategy of the game interred, on our board with our counters.    We also explored the vaults supporting the podium of the Temple of Claudius and found out how they came to be hidden and obscured by the Norman castle for centuries until 1919, when archaeologist Mortimer Wheeler identified them. Wheeler compared them to the

Local Archaeology, a prize quiz and Aquila rounded up our year

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  Colchester Young Archaeologists' Club met at Roman Circus House for our last meeting of 2023. We discussed the visible local archaeology, particularly the Roman-origin wall.  As one YA remarked a lot of Colchester's wall can be found near car parks. As the large map showing Colchester's walls (just seen on to left of the picture above) is orientated differently from the venue, like a mirror image, we noted there were car parks by both of the longest visible stretches of the walls to the east and the west of the city centre. After we had explored the Roman town on the map, we studied the model in the Roman Circus Centre, where the young people were able to identify the main features of the Roman city with buttons and lights.There were two prize winners for our challenging quiz, one of whom shared her prize. We rounded off our morning with treats from the Roman Circus cafe. Alex, who worked out a strategy game called Aquila from a Colchester Archaeological Trust 1996 excava

YAC create obelisks and play Aquila

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 Colchester young archaeologists' club members met up out of the cold and the rain in their 'home' at Roman Circus House. They used their imagination to colour and decorate obelisks with YAC in hieroglyphs and glued them together. They made small mosaic coasters.    They also played Aquila, sets of which the inventor of the game has donated to the club. Read on for the story of Aquila.   About twenty seven years ago, well before all our present club members were born, the archaeologists from Colchester Archaeological Trust, who are now based at Roman Circus House, excavated the grave of a Romano/British doctor or druid in Stanway, near Colchester. The excavation was reconstructed, exactly as found, and is on display in Colchester Castle. Among the artefacts carefully placed in the burial were forceps, tweezers, a woven cloth and pots, including an infusion (tea?) pot for brewing up remedies. It was a momentous excavation which indicated the degree of sophistication British

YAC learn on-site techniques

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Colchester Young Archaeologists' Club brought their trowels and kneelers to a site near Colchester to learn practical archaeology techniques on the Roman site. Twenty young people, their parents and five YAC volunteers, learned about the site from two archaeologists from Colchester Archaeological Group, the location of the finds date it to the late Roman period.     With so many eager excavators, it was not long before Roman brick, pot and roof tile fragments were unearthed. The spoil was sieved to ensure nothing was missed. The find trays were numbered to identify the location. There was just time to wash all the finds, before the session finished.    It is nearly four years since the Covid pandemic hit the world. Even this week Colchester YAC received apologies from members who were unable to attend today's meeting because they had Covid. One parent was telling us that he had caught Covid in the early stages of the pandemic, in 2020, when it was most virulent and it took him

YAC explore archaeological techniques in Fordham

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 The Chairman of Colchester Archaeological Group explained to Colchester Young Archaeologists' Club how to recognise sites of previous human activity and occupation from aerial and satellite images. He said that Fordham, near Colchester had been on the edge of the reach of the last ice age. The young people were able to answer all his questions, before they split into groups to do find washing and identification, reconstructing broken pots, dating fossils. Each of them tried metal detecting techniques, all of them discovering metal objects, except one who found a worked piece of flint, which looked as if it had been used as some sort of tool. There were also worked flints among the find the young people sorted and washed.