Woodland Heritage Festival - Issue 5 - AudioTrail

Welcome to the final Woodland Heritage Festival episode – this is a bit more experimental, an audiotrail around the festival. 

Background information on the J G Graves Woodland Discovery Centre is provided by volunteer Wes Hedge; there are snippets of some of the talks and activities going on around the site during the day. 

Listen out for the sounds of copper hammering, Q-pit fire management, post-medieval music, iron-blooming (mattocking clay to build the furnace), pottery decoration (surprisingly noisy!) and our PhD candidates speaking with members of the public, as well as the sounds of birds, dogs, children and other visitors during the day.

(Apologies for the spotty sound quality! I hope this gives you a feel of how busy and varied the Festival was.) 

To learn more about visiting, volunteering or training at the J G Graves Woodland Discovery Centre, visit the website: http://www.ecclesallwoodscraftcourses.co.uk/

After this we’ll be returning you to your regularly scheduling programming of the monthly Archaeology and Ale talks, recorded live upstairs at the Red Deer pub in Sheffield. 

If you’d like to know more about the Archaeology in the City Programme or the regular monthly Archaeology and Ale talks, visit our website; you can follow the link from the Archaeology Podcast Network page, or come and find us on facebook under Archaeology in the City. 

Thanks again to the Archaeology Podcast Network for having us.

Woodland Heritage Festival - Issue 1 - Human Osteology

Welcome to a special edition of the Archaeology and Ale Podcast;

For the next few podcasts we’ll be taking you through the Woodland Heritage Festival.

The Woodland Heritage Festival was a two-day free public event at the J. G. Graves Woodland Discovery Centre in Sheffield, which had talks and hands-on displays on all kinds of archaeological topics.

These topics included zooarchaeology, ceramics, experimental archaeology, digital archaeology, osteology, iron smelting, copper working, basketry and post-medieval music.

The talks aimed to explain our archaeological interests in a family-friendly and accessible way, so all of the visitors to the Woodland Heritage Festival could come away with some new information about the past and how we study it. Our youngest attendee was about 18 months old, and we had a lot of children present as it was the first week of the school holidays, so if you have any very young archaeologists in your family they might enjoy this podcast too!

This special edition introduces the topic of Human Osteology, presented by Emma Green, a PhD candidate at the University of Sheffield.

A few British television programmes were mentioned in the introduction to this talk: for our international listeners, here are some links to the official websites. “Horrible Histories”: http://www.bbc.co.uk/cbbc/shows/horrible-histories

“Time Team” (http://www.channel4.com/programmes/time-team )

“Digging for Britain” (http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b014hl0d )

Apologies for the background noise – we were recording in the function room next to the cafeteria at the J. G. Graves Woodland Discovery Centre and it was a very busy day!

Stay tuned for another special edition introducing some more activities at the Woodland Heritage Festival. Next time we’ll be presenting a talk on Digital Archaeology. If you want to find out more about the Festival or Archaeology and Ale, visit the Archaeology in the City website (). Thanks again to the Archaeology Podcast Network for having us.