Hats Off to the Past. Coats off to the Future. 2019: A Year in Review

And just like that, another year is over. This year’s been a big one for us. We’ve excavated some large sites, found some cool artefacts, and on top of all that we moved offices. This fortnight on the blog we’re looking back on the year that was 2019. The blog will be back at the start of February next year. Until then, Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year to everyone.

Probably the biggest thing to happen for us as a company in 2019 was moving offices. If we flash back to the start of the year, the photo on the left shows the lab in our old office and the photo on the right is the lab in our new office. The question, “when are we moving?” was asked at least daily for the first few months of the year.

It took a bit longer than we thought but come May we finally made the big move. Here’s some photos showing the office just before we moved, versus how it is today. There’s still some more shelving and minor bits and pieces to go, but it’s great to have 80% of our artefacts now stored on shelves and a purpose-built artefact washing area.

One of the best things about our new office is that it’s big enough for us to hold exhibitions in. For Heritage Festival this year we held an open office night complete with talks about being an archaeologist and displays on some of our best sites (top photos). 2019 was a busy year for us in terms of public events. We gave talks at the Teece Museum and to the Workers Education Association, along with being part of Pecha Kucha Night for Archaeology Week (pictured bottom left). We’ve also been lucky enough to work with the Ng King family and their restoration works at the Ng King Brothers Chinese Market Garden Settlement (shoes from the settlement pictured bottom right).

The other perk of the new office is that it’s big enough for office badminton.

It wasn’t all badminton and moving. We did also do some archaeology! The best feature of 2019 by far would be this one. What you’re looking at here is an old creek bed or gully that was infilled during the 19th century, had 20th century features cutting into 19th century features, and a 21st century trench dug through the middle. The complexity of the feature made it both challenging and rewarding to record and interpret.

A few of the many, many features we excavated this year. See Hamish’s blog from a few months back for even more!

Of course, with features comes artefacts. We already did a wee summary of some of our best finds this year, and have also shared cool artefacts throughout the year. Whilst we love finding pretty things (we’re a bit like magpies), we also like thinking about what the social context the artefact existed in was (something we did in a more abstract way with our Life Before Plastic blog series).

And with archaeology, comes animals. For an office of cat lovers, I’m disappointed that nobody shared their site cat photos with me. Looks like birds and dogs won our hearts this year (#moaforbirdoftheyear2020).

And with archaeology at the Underground Overground office comes Malaise. A few of our funnier moments caught on camera.

That’s all for now folks. Merry Christmas!