On 9th June 2016 CAER Heritage Project lead artist Paul Evans and film maker Jon Harrison led the first of two Model Village creative workshops at The Glamorgan Archives with students from Michaelston Community School. This was the first stage in the creation of The Model Village film for the Connected Communities Utopia Festival at Somerset House

Featuring as part of a intensive, full day of activities within the archives entitled Past Detectives, the Model Village workshop was also designed to draw connections between research into Welsh Garden Villages with Cardiff University researcher Dr Stephanie Ward and the CAER Heritage Project Dusty Forge WW1 project with Dan Jewson.

After a brief collaborative drawing exercise the young people developed their own individual cartoon characters – inhabitants for the Ely Garden Village – and worked on scripts for their characters. These characters were then scanned into iPads and imported into a user-friendly app that allowed them to create short animation sequences. Photographs from the Ely estate were used as backgrounds or scenery for these sequences.

The young people then carefully rehearsed their scripts and recorded their films/animation sequences, making the characters move in rhythm with their words.

Selected animation sequences from this workshop will be featured in The Model Village film, along with an interview with Dr Stephanie Ward made at the Glamorgan Archive, and film sequences from the Ely estate made by local film maker Viv Thomas and Jon Harrison.

You can check out the finished film HERE.

 

Caer Heritage Project artist Paul Evans has been busy recently, completing work on our Romanobritish table tennis tables or ‘Ping Pong Portals to the Past’.

Paul used a carefully chosen selection from dozens of designs created during three days of intensive artistic workshops with students from Woodlands and Glyn Derw High Schools – see the following links for further details of these lively creative sessions:

Session I

Session II

Session III

Using these designs Paul has created 16 hand cut stencils that were used to transfer the designs onto two table tennis tables, one to be permanently sited at Michaelstone Community School, the other at Woodlands High School.

 

 

The third and final Romanobritish workshop, which took place at Glyn Derw High School in late October 2015, was all about focussing on the output of the Romanobritish project – a design for our ‘Ping Pong Portal to the Past’.

We began the day with the enjoyable but challenging task of creating a cartoon ‘Romans v Ancient Britons’ table tennis match. Romanobritish lead artist Paul Evans handed out an example of what such a match might look like, but our young people had no problems creating their own, individual, unique interpretations of this scene.

Question is who would win? Answers on a postcard to CAER Heritage Project please!

Next we turned our attention to developing a series of Romanobritish symbols or motifs for our table tennis design, using a collection of images of beautiful Romanobritish brooches as inspiration …

Finally, we collected all of the ideas, drawings and motifs developed over the three days of workshops and transferred the best of these onto A0 sheets of paper laid out to scale with table tennis markings.

All of these will now feed into the final designs to be developed by lead artist Paul Evans over the next month. These will then be transferred onto the outdoor table tennis tables sat Woodlands High School and Michaelston Community College sometime during the first few weeks of 2016.

 

 

 

 

Day two of the RomanoBritish project was once again packed full of creativity.

After a review of last week’s activities we warmed up with a customised version of the surrealist parlour game Exquisite Corpse. Although this has a rather alarming title, it’s actually a very simple, fun and creative drawing game involving paper folds.

After the first stage, during which we created some spectacular mixed-up monsters, we applied the same format to the Romans and the Brits.

The next activity took us outdoors and onto Trelai Park where the Ely Roman Villa is buried*. Measuring out a 30m line – where 1mm represented a year, 1m a thousand years – the young people were each allocated a millennium, made a sign for this year on paper, and then physically spaced themselves along it to scale. This really made us think about the huge distance that we need to go back into deep time to encounter the very earliest cave art that we explored in RomanBritish Session I .

Once we had established our timeline we located the millennia to which our examples of ancient art belonged, drew them onto luggage labels and tied them in place.

Returning indoors we then looked further into the culture of ancient Rome.

The Romans have developed something of a reputation amongst historians for ‘colourful graffiti’ so we decided to turn this idea its head and create some colourful, contemporary, ‘graffiti style’ versions of Latin phrases. These were created collectively, each of the young people designing their own Roman graffiti letter which were then compiled into classical sayings.

We then explored the mosaics that were used by the Romans to decorate various surfaces.

 

*Roman Villa site: In 1894 a first century Roman villa was discovered on Ely Racecourse and excavations were carried out in 1922. The site of the villa is still visible as an unmown area in the middle of Trelai Park, although the excavations have been covered over. The site is a scheduled ancient monument.

 

Romanobritish is a new project that is being run in partnership between Woodlands School, Glyn Derw High School, Caer Heritage Project lead artist Paul Evans and Dr David Wyatt from Caer Heritage Project. The aim of the Romanobritish is to co-produce designs for playing surfaces of two table tennis tables that will be permanently sited within Woodlands and Michaelston Community Schools.

These ‘playable artworks’ will act as ‘ping-pong portals to the past’ with eye-catching designs based on artistic motifs from the Romanobritish cultural period that began after the Roman conquest around AD43. The first session, however, focussed on art that preceded this time and amounted to a whistle-stop tour of artistic prehistory.

The Romanobritish project will feature a number of collaborative artworks during the course of the project and our first piece was based on the theme of very ancient hand stencils which feature in the most ancient cave paintings, dating back some 40,000 years. These hand stencils were originally created using blown paint but we decided to use felt tip pens to trace our hands. Everyone in the class room – teachers, class room assistants and young people each traced their own hand onto the paper and decorated in with patterns based on the very earliest rock art and spiral motifs that appeared in the Neolithic.

We then looked at Palaeolithic representations of animals and considered the conditions under which they were made – in the dark, deep in the ground, from memory. We each drew an animal from memory using charcoal – a material that would have been quite familiar to our ancient ancestors – again creating a group artwork, representing our collective identity.

The final creative task for a very busy morning was to make an individual artwork in homage to the Bronze Age . After looking at images of golden masks, we made a simple, mask-like form in plasticine. We then used another soft, shiny metal – aluminium foil – to mould around this.

Dr Dave Wyatt then made a short presentation on Caerau hill fort and its place in Romanobritish culture to the group which prompted lots of lively discussion.

The session was finished off with the young people being offered the chance to handle some recent finds from the dig – some of which had been buried out of sight for over 2,000 years.

We are grateful to the staff and pupils of Woodlands School and Glyn Derw High School for making this a very special day.

 

 

 

A blog by Exploring the Past student and volunteer Midnight

On Monday 6^th July I returned to the archaeological dig at Caerau Hillfort for the third year in a row. Together with my trusty support worker, and with trowel in hand, I was rearing to go.

Unlike previous years where the weather has been baking hot and extremely bright, the Monday was grey, overcast and we even had a few showers. However, this helped keep the dust from the digging to a minimum.

As there was insufficient space for me to layout for digging in Trench 3, I was assigned to sieving. I was using a large rectangular sieve set in a tripod structure to go through the buckets of soil from Trench 3 to start with. I didn’t find anything, unfortunately, but others have found pottery shards and the like in Trench 3 over the last 2 weeks.

After the break I was assigned to Trench 5a and with my lovely assistant Ellen (I do hope I’ve spelt that right), we used a similar large sieve to go through the soil coming from Trench 5a. Whilst Ellen found numerous bits of pottery and even a small fragment of bone, I only found a thick pottery sherd. Dating of these sherds is hesitant at present and we await the arrival of a pottery expert to assist with this.

Despite the showers and slightly lower temperature, today was productive and insightful, and I eagerly awaited tomorrow’s adventure!

Tuesday 7^th was a wet world! As the wind guested and clouds moved across the sky, one minute sunny, the next gray; I sat under a small gazebo and washed finds from Trench 3. To wash finds you need a tray with the finds in, a tray with some newspaper laid down, a bowl of clean water and a toothbrush. Gently brushing the find with a damp toothbrush, the soil and debris on the find is removed to reveal what lies beneath. Warning, never dip the find in the water!

I worked mainly on different types of pottery and some bone fragments. The pottery was interesting and I mainly cleaned three types; thin, black ware; medium dark brown ware and thick coarse ware. We await a pottery specialist to accurately date there fragments but as they were found in a Roman age midden it’s fair to say they may be Roman in age. Some of these fragments had slightly visible patterns and faint ridges or lines as well as edges.

Cleaning finds is as important to an archaeological dig as the digging itself. Without careful logging, cleaning and preservation of the finds we would have little idea about the use and relative age of the site. It’s also exciting to hold something in your hand that may have last been held 100’s of years ago and wonder if it was a precious, cared for possession or if it was a ubiquitous transportation vessel and given as little thought then as the thought we give the bottles we drink out of today.

Wednesday was all about ‘square 33 and the hidden treasure’! Despite the rain and the gooey chocolate cake like mud, I was laid out in trench three, digging a Roman midden! We used a slightly different technique to dig here, excavating the midden in squares so that all finds could be recorded accurately.

I was allocated square 33 which was 50×50 cm and asked to dig down 10 cm’s; sieving as I went. At first the going was tough and the site seemed barren. However, I did find (after a couple of hours of digging) a small fragment of white bone, possibly animal; and a little while later a large fragment of Oxford pottery.

Digging is obviously the most important part and main focus of an archaeological dig. It’s important to be careful while digging not to accidentally destroy finds with over enthusiastic use of the trowel. It’s important to note this as one digs down through time.

While I didn’t finish my square in the time allocated, overall today was a productive and exciting day.

Midnight

Here’s your chance to flex your archaeological muscles! Take a look at the amazing results from the latest geophysical survey inside and around the Caerau Ringwork by the CAER team and local volunteers and let us know what you think you can see.

How to Enter? It’s easy!

Take a good look at the two images below – these are the results of the latest geophysical results around Caerau Ringwork. Geophysics helps us ‘see’ under the ground surface without having to dig – see here for an explanation of how geophysics works and how to interpret the results.

 

 

 

Study the results from both images very closely to see if you can spot any buildings or other potentially important archaeological features in them. THEN you need to:

EITHER

Write a short paragraph (maximum 500 words) that tells us what you think you can see

OR

Create an image that tells us what you think you can see

OR YOU CAN DO BOTH!

There are two age group categories for this competition.

Ages 8-18

Ages 18 and above

Please can you indicate your age clearly on your entry.

The entrant with the most convincing looking interpretation of the geophys results will win their choice of one of the following great prizes:

For age category 8-18: AN AMAZON KINDLE WORTH £59.00

For age category 18+

YOU CAN CHOOSE BETWEEN EITHER

• A free personal flint-knapping workshop with a master flint-knapper for you and a friend in which you will learn how to make a flint tools using the same techniques our Stone Age ancestors at Caerau would have been familiar with.

OR

• A free amazing weekend archaeology course ‘Shrines Stars and Sacrifice‘ taught by the brilliant Dani Hoffman and exploring the techniques that archaeologists use to understand rituals at prehistoric sites like Caerau.

 

PLEASE send your interpretations of the results to Caer@Cardiff.ac.uk OR you can drop them into Dave Horton at the Dusty Forge in person (please ensure they are clearly marked with a name, age and contact email or phone number) by 5pm Friday 8th May.

The winner will be decided by the CAER team and will be judged on both archaeological skill and imagination. All decisions are final.

Have you ever thought about building a house…not just any house…but an Iron Age roundhouse!? The thought never came to my mind, until I saw a poster next to Dr Olly Davis’s office at the University. St Fagans National History Museum needed the assistance of CAER Heritage Project volunteers to help out and test our knowledge, endurance in a bad weather, and our physical fitness in a bit of experimental archaeology.

Olly would drive us out to St Fagans every week. The first time we were walking up the little muddy path towards the roundhouse building site, we weren’t sure what to expect. Needless to say, this was something completely new to all of us. But when we reached the end of the path and there was a small opening with two massive roundhouses staring down at us, we just stopped in awe.

If you’ve ever been to St. Fagans, you will know that amazing historic buildings from around Wales have been quite literally taken apart and re-erected, piece-by-piece, at the Museum.

However, the building of Iron Age roundhouses is quite different. These buildings were originally constructed more than 2,000 years ago out of timber and clay, material that has long since decomposed. The roundhouses at St Fagans then are reconstructions, but they are based on excavated archaeological evidence from Bryn Eryr in Anglesey. However, only the ground-plans of the houses at Bryn Eryr survived so this project was all about thinking about how our Iron Age ancestors might have built their homes.

We were to help out with the thatching of the houses. The thatching team at the Museum was led by John Letts, a palaeo-botanist and historic thatch specialist. He gave us a quick introduction and unravelled the story of the construction so far, and told us a little a bit about thatching.

There is no evidence in the archaeological record of what the roofs looked like, or what the techniques of thatching were in the Iron Age. We learned that the weathering coats and thatching techniques were based on surviving medieval roofs from England and Ireland, and the materials were selected from the array of seeds found in the archaeological record. We tried out several thatching techniques to see which worked best…after all, this is the whole point of experimental archaeology!

Before we were allowed to work on the roof we had to complete a working at height training session. But once we were let loose, it turns out students of archaeology are born thatchers (backup plan!!).

If you ever visit St Fagans Museum, this is a house to see and if it’s cold and rainy, gather around the hearth and for a few minutes travel back to the Iron Age, and perhaps try some of John’s Iron Age beer while you’re there.

Vesna Podrzaj

For more information about the Bryn Eryr project click here

Tread softly, don’t forget, we do this for you.

Love,

Your Ancestors

On Wednesday 3rd December Paul Evans and Jeff Trask created this unusual encounter for the NCCPE Engage Conference in Bristol. Dressed as characters from the past and from the future (Jeff wore a medieval costume, the identity of the future postman remains something of a mystery), our time-travelling postmen invited conference delegates to write postcards either from the past to the present or from the present to the future*. Around forty highly original, imaginative (and some very moving) postcards were written, and the quality of the handwriting was judged as exemplary by our postman.

Please see below for a few examples, chosen more or less at random from our postbags.

 

Hello Humans!

Be excellent to each other – and don’t eat the red Smarties!

To the future!

Learn from the past & our mistakes. Be open and emotional, responsive & communicative. When aliens come, be their friends!

I hope everything is good for you & that we didn’t mess it up too much.

Charlotte X

We used to enjoy watching people kick balls into nets …

a team called Arsenal were the best at this.

It is OK to be radical

We’ve trodden too heavily on the earth, and forgotten to live in more equitable ways.

We’ve much to learn from the past in terms of the danger of walking heavily and the benefits of walking lightly.

We’ve one earth – engage with it wisely.

The university no longer exists – it becomes public.

Don’t trust the English!

When they come to visit your country to ‘help you out’ they actually plan to stay for 800 years and make you eat potatoes!!!

Dear the Future,

Sorry for breaking the environment and the healthcare system!

Hope you’re all OK!

P.S. Here’s a drawing of a tree in case you don’t know what one looks like X

To whom it may concern,

Let it be noted that you have not been forgotten and we are still learning from the relics you left behind and these experiences bring new engagements and relationships for the future!

Reality TV is a bad idea – don’t do it!

Don’t repeat the same mistakes generations before you have made.

*Even allowing for seasonal disruptions in the temporal continuum, we are confident that all of these postcards will have reached their destination in time for Christmas.