It is eleven years since the North West Archaeological Research Framework was published (see http://www.liverpoolmuseums.org.uk/mol/archaeology/arf/). Since then a large number of projects have taken place across the region from developer-funded work to HLF and volunteer research, whilst the period 2006 to 2017 has seen a huge amount of archaeological and built environment publications. This…
This August sees the first of a series of community digs as part of the Saltscape project. Saltscape is a three year HLF funded partnership project, coordinated and managed by Groundwork, designed to help protect, enhance, restore and celebrate the unique salt landscape of the Weaver Valley in mid-Cheshire. The project area stretches from the…
This year’s Association for Industrial Archaeology annual conference was held at Brighton, on the University of Sussex campus. The theme of our regular research seminar was the challenges facing the future of industrial heritage and archaeology, inspired by the 2015 European Year of Industrial Heritage. In the first of two blogs I look at the morning session…
This month (the week beginning the 13 April) Dig Greater Manchester returned to Radcliffe Tower in Bury for the first of our flagship community digs this year. This is the fourth season of excavations on this late medieval and post-medieval manorial site since 2012, and each time the archaeology story has become more complex. Our…
2014 saw the completion of the excavation evaluation stage of Dig Greater Manchester and the end of Year Three of the project. The last three of our eleven exploratory digs took us to Tameside, Blackburn and Trafford where we investigated the Victoria villa residences of the region’s new manufacturing elite as a contrast to the…
Dr Sharon Coen, Senior Lecturer in Psychology, University of Salford, has been working on a project with the Centre for Applied Archaeology to explore the impact of community archaeology on its participants. The project, ‘I Dig therefore I am: place, identity and participation in community-based archaeology projects’ aimed to explore the role played by participating…
Week two of our community excavation, digging the WW1 training trenches under Watson Road Park, Blackpool, produced some exciting, but also difficult archaeology. After day two the weather was hot and humid. This meant that the archaeology was hard to see as the sun bleached the trenches and the sections. The team ended up praying…
As part of Blackpool Council’s wider commemoration of the centenary of World War One it has brought together a number of partners to create a community archaeology project to uncover sections of the buried training trenches under Watson Road Park, dug in 1915 and 1916. These were used for just eight months by the army.…
CBA North West’s spring conference earlier this May took a look at the archaeology of war in the region from the 18th to the 20th century: hence the title ‘turrets to trenches’. The talks ranged from the archaeology of the first Falklands War in 1770-1, and its regional connections (Rob Philpott); digging up Hulme Barracks…
Next month (March 2014) Dig Greater Manchester starts its third year with a two week excavation in Cheetham Park, Stalybridge. For me this is a welcome return to a landscape I know well courtesy of the Tameside Archaeological Survey. One of the features of archaeology is that sometimes projects run for several years, a pleasant…
archaeologytea 