Yorkshire Museum, 11th April, 1:00pm, Main Gallery
Are you interested in Yorkshire’s ancient past? Do you want to get up close with some its most intriguing archaeological artefacts? Can you spare an afternoon in April to help us build a Virtual Museum? We’re looking for 10 people to learn while lending a hand!
Yorkshire’s caves are full of wonders: huge stalagmites, dark tunnels and the archaeological remains of the ancient humans and animals who sought shelter in their depths many thousands of years ago.
Victoria Cave is one of the most spectacular. Discovered in the 1800s, its Victorian excavators uncovered the bones of tropical animals such as hippo, rhino and hyena, providing evidence that these creatures thrived in the Yorkshire Dales between Ice Ages. They also found hunting implements left behind by the first humans to return to northern Britain after the last glaciers retreated, and even the remains of what archaeologists now believe could be evidence of a popular Romano-British cave cult.
Many of these artefacts are now in private collections, but we’re gathering them up into a Virtual Museum and digitising them so that everyone can see them online, whenever they like. It’s all part of our #UnderTheUplands project and you can see what we’ve done so far here.
Yorkshire’s Box of Mystery Artefacts
As well as the items in private collections, we’ve also heard that there’s another box of artefacts stored deep inside the Yorkshire Museum. The curators have kindly invited us in to open it up and add it to the #UnderTheUplands collection, and that’s exactly what you can help us do on 11th April. What’s inside the box? There’s only one way to find out!
Let’s Build a Virtual Museum
We’re looking for 10 people who can spend the afternoon helping us to create a Virtual Museum of the objects inside the Yorkshire Museum box.
We will teach you the basics of photogrammetry – a quick and easy way of using any digital camera to create fabulous 3D models for everyone in the world to see. This technique is becoming an essential piece of the modern archaeologist’s toolkit, but it also has huge potential for anyone who might come across ancient artefacts while they are out and about and share it with archaeologists. Do you like visiting or exploring caves? With these skills, you can help archaeologists by creating an accurate recording of anything you find – preserving an extremely accurate, 3D model of it for the future.
Get Involved in Cave Archaeology
This session is open to anyone who wants to get up close with some of Yorkshire’s most amazing ancient artefacts and learn the latest techniques that archaeologists are using to share their discoveries. We’re hoping that you’ll like it enough to get more involved, and help us record more of the archaeology hidden in and around Yorkshire’s caves – some of it in collections, some of it still waiting to be found…
Register Your Interest
Do you want to spend an afternoon learning hands-on about Cave Archaeology, and learning cutting-edge photography techniques? If your answer is yes, get in touch as soon as you can; we reckon places will fill up pretty quickly, and we’ll assign them on a first-come-first-serve basis. If you want to learn while lending a hand, email Nigel Steel (nige@digventures.com) as soon as you can and he will email you back to confirm your place.
