Communicating the Excavation Experience: Production of a Training Film and Handbook

Description

Round 6 Teaching Development grant

The Roman villa of Yarford, near Taunton, has proved a perfect subject for a training excavation (over 120 undergraduate and postgraduate students learnt to excavate at the site).

The Roman site is comprised in its northern end of upstanding walls (up to 1m in height in some places), mosaics and well-stratified occupation and destruction deposits, all overlying the Iron Age enclosure ditch. The southern part of the villa had been impacted by ploughing and consists of a series of cut Roman features (e.g. the villa's bathhouse), several courtyard surfaces and the Iron Age ditch and gate house. Recording techniques used were a modified version of those employed by the Museum of London Archaeology Service, while - uniquely for the excavation of a Roman villa - the vast majority of artefacts were individually located in relation to their spatial distribution, and separately processed after being removed from the site.

As a result of an internal grant (£5000) the 2004 excavations were filmed by students from the University of Winchester, Screen Production course under professional direction. There are over 200 hours of resulting footage comprising interviews with staff, students and visitors; teaching being carried out; work on the site (including excavation, recording, survey, finds and environmental studies). The filming was planned in order to produce footage suitable for a number of different purposes (e.g. training, promotion, documentary etc). This project will produce an hour long training resource together with an accompanying handbook. At present there are no training films devoted to the process of excavation (as opposed to survey, health and safety etc.).

By production of such a film it is intended that:

i. Students in university archaeology departments are better prepared  for fieldwork before they take part.
ii. Archaeology staff can use the film as a benchmark against which to measure student performance when assessing fieldwork.
iii. Students taking A levels in archaeology can be better informed about the nature of archaeological fieldwork and the generation of archaeological data.

The report and abstract of this project, as well as any teaching resources, will be made available through the Subject Centre website. A copy of the DVD will be sent to all UK archaeology departments, and a copy will be supplied to Research in Archaeological Education and The Archaeologist for review.

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