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During archaeological excavations (or even walking around footpaths between fields) around Worcester, it is not uncommon to find bits of clay pipes.  Used by men and women while working the pipe stems often broke as they were held in the owner’s teeth and while they were readily available from shops they were also sold in...

During an archaeological excavation near Worcester city, the team found a lot of evidence of expected urban activity, but two styles of pottery stuck out as particularly striking sitting in the rubble layer above the remains of an older building. Found above a layer of building demolition material dating from the 1700, one was a...

A lump of rusty old iron – nothing to write home about, or is it? Unlike copper and bronze, iron quickly rusts and easily distorts beyond recognition. With the recent discovery of Iron Age ironwork at a site south of Worcester, we thought it was time to explore the tricky topic of identifying iron artefacts....

Our Find of the Month is a Roman pot with a chequered past, discovered at Ruardean Hill in the Forest of Dean during a recent Foresters’ Forest community excavation. We were investigating a rectangular earthwork which had been identified using LiDAR. It’s one of 1700 potential archaeological sites being investigated over the 5 year course...

We went looking for a Roman Road and all we found were buttons! In a scruffy corner of an old sports field in Perry Barr, RPS Group asked us to dig some trenches to look for remains of a Roman Road which once passed beneath the proposed location of a new school. There was little...

It's International Lefthanders Day. Roughly 10% of the world's population are left-hand dominant. But for how long has this been the case? There's plenty of evidence in the archaeological record to suggest that handedness runs deep in our evolutionary history.

  Over 3000 years ago, fingertips were pressed into the damp clay of a large pot, creating a patterned band and dimpling the top. Once dry, it was fired and used before being broken – several large fragments were put into an isolated pit on the gravel ridge east of the River Severn. Prehistoric pots,...

  It’s fairly common to find animal bones on archaeological sites. Most often there’s a range of different bones from an assortment of animals, left over from cooking or butchery. So when the finds trays start filling up with just one or two different bones, it’s a cue that something particular was going on. This...

  Archaeologists don’t metal detect, do they? Walk over a ploughed field and you’re bound to see bits of pot and metal sticking out the ground. Artefacts are easily disturbed and moved over time from their original location into the topsoil – metal detecting is an easy way to check for interesting finds missed in...

  Keep your eyes open! You don’t need to be an archaeologist to discover fascinating finds. This month’s star artefact was found by a volunteer on our community excavation in the Forest of Dean. During October, we ran a dig at Ruardean Castle – a nationally important and protected monument – as part of the...