Lectures and workshops of a very special kind kept us busy in the last days: AcrossBorders participates in the current programme of the Vienna School Board (Stadtschulrat Wien) entitled “Junior Science Club”, aiming to communicate scientific research to school kids! Summarizing our project, key working steps, methods and general aspects of archaeology in an understandable and appealing way was quite challenging – but also very instructive and enjoyable!

Today, we had the great pleasure to welcome a class of students in our office rooms and to provide them with some ideas what is behind archaeological research. A full programme was carried out, focusing on documentation work during archaeological excavations and its main principles.

Illustrating the importance of accurate labelling of finds during excavation.

Sherds, scarabs and shabtis were to discover in our “trench”!

Four working stations were open to the participants after a short general introduction: 1) A sand box where hidden finds had to be traced, exposed and labelled; 2) another sand box holding a small “foundation deposit” which had to be photographed; 3) a modified fish tank illustrating main principles of stratigraphy and 4) a poster summarizing the most important working steps of archaeologists from the excavation until publication and museum/archive.

We really enjoyed this morning session and hope that our young visitors did so as well! With two more Junior Science Club workshops coming up in June (on ceramics and hieroglyphs), we will be able to profit again from further encounters with pupils!

I am especially grateful to Jördis, Elke and Daniela for all of their efforts and enthusiasm – and to Johanna Novak (Stadtschulrat Wien) for joining us and for taking nice souvenir pictures!