Knights of the Excavation Exhibition Table, Which Happens To Be In A Cellar

Having finalised our plans for descending upon the Yorkshire Museum next Friday, we moved on to our next great adventure: designing the University of York Archaeology Department's Year-End Exhibition For First-Years Having Just Finished Their Excavation Module And Now Creating Interactive PowerPoint Slides On Their Work!

No, we didn't actually call it that. But it's a fairly good description of what's happening and what we're up to now!




K/G60, otherwise known as The King's Manor Cellars.
Photograph by us.

We divided into three teams of two each: Emma and Susan on publicity, Jenna and Olivia on design and logo, and Adam and me on technology. This meant us embarking on a dangerous mission to the dreaded K/G60 - 'The Cellars' - where we battled the monstrously slow and/or deathly unresponsive computers in a fight for PowerPoint supremacy. We lost... Actually, we discovered that eleven of the fourteen computers worked, although we will need to budget extra time to get them booted up before the exhibition. Because we need fourteen computers to display each of the seven groups' two posters/slides, we need to request three laptops to take the place of the broken computers. In addition, we will also have a central table with six laptops: two containing only the films we created in our Heritage Practice module, and four with a menu slide linking to all fourteen heritage slides. At either end of the room, we will have a SMART board (interactive large board) on which the fourteen slides will cycle. Visitors to the exhibition will be able to interact with each groups' slides on either one of the fourteen computers around the walls of the room, the four central laptops, or one of the two SMART boards. We hope this will reduce queueing time. Each station will also have headphones.

Free wine and food awaits the worthy at the exhibition
if you come. Photograph taken by Luna Dizon and accessible at:
http://www.carjet.com/blog/wiltons-music-hall-favourite-new-watering-hole

On to the more exciting part: The Bribe. Come to the exhibition and you get free wine and food! Our job is to guess how much of each we'll need. Adam took the task of seeing how many glasses of wine make up a bottle upon his "noble" (I responded, "foolish") self. I guess he'll report back with his Internet findings when we meet again. We also had to calculate how many bags of crisps to order. It was a fun game of 'Guess how many bags of individual crisps can you fit into a massive sharing-size bag?' This will also have to be tested. Adam nominated me. I nominate the Internet. Of course, not everybody likes crisps, so why not add something everyone does like: SUGAR!!! Adam suggested adding Pixie Stix, those big sticks of coloured sugar. I thought this might be a tad dangerous, so, after much debate and compromise, we decided on mini-cakes. This also means that we can buy fewer crisps. For the exhibition, anyway.

This afternoon was our Hollywood debut. After being behind the camera for so long, it was good to be the star. Simon Davis, E-Learning Advisor for the University of York, came to interview our class on our work in this module, specifically our filmmaking project. Fun!

After our fifteen minutes of fame, it was back to work. Next on our list: create a ballot for the competition between the excavation posters. Easy!

Now, as we wrap up this blog post, we have just one thing to say:

Come to 'GroundBreaking', the year-end archaeology exhibition, on 19 June at 4 PM in King's Manor, G/60! THERE WILL BE FREE FOOD AND WINE!!!

This is the image we are using on the promotional posters.
Photograph taken by Gavin Repton.