A lifelong dream fulfilled

For many years I wanted to be an archaeologist, even if I wasn't entirely sure what that meant exactly. I knew it involved digging artefacts out of the ground, finding things unseen for centuries, and touching real history. It was the tangible thing that attracted me - I would go on little expeditions in the garden to find some ... well whatever there was to find. There never was much - our block was just bush before my parents built there, so my treasures were usually pretty rocks or occasional house building rubble. The best piece was an axe head which still sits on the kitchen window sill slowly rusting away. I was jealous of the famous five - they would spend their holidays casually popping into abandoned mines and finding arrow heads by the handful. I wanted that life.

Then I discovered landscape history, what is actually been interested in all along without realising it was a thing. That axe head always made me want to know what it was doing there, how did it get there, who was chopping down wood there. The famous five and their arrows had me asking why there were so many battles fought in those places so long ago. I'd been admiring old houses as part of their village, examining the views from the tops of church towers. The finds were revealing the life of that village or moor, putting a human face on the beautiful buildings and streets.

Today I got to be a pretend archaeologist. I was given a trowel, a ground sheet, some paperwork and other bits and pieces and sent off to dig up some finds. It was for a community dig in Hoxne, Suffolk (pronounced Hoxen) that had been short of diggers so asked the landscape history team at uni. My partner in digging was one of my lecturers, and we had a great day finding all kinds of ... modern pottery. But in among the rubble (which was definitely a building/gardening discard pile from the past 50 years, with 1970s finds underneath 1770s) we found these pieces which are certified late medieval (sometime around the late 15th century I believe).

It was beautiful weather - 26 degrees, perfect skies, completely still - so just what you want for a first foray into the archaeological world.