IoA Placement at ASE 2021-22: Welcome Sakshi and Victoria!
26 November 2021
This academic year we’ve got TWO placement students joining us from the UCL Institute of Archaeology. They've been with us for a few months now, so let’s get to know them a little better, interview style!
Our new BA Archaeology with Placement Year students from the Institute of Archaeology are now well settled into their time with us at Archaeology South-East. Sakshi Surana and Victoria Igary will spend the next year working alongside our archaeologists in the field and in post-excavation, getting valuable experience in all aspects of commercial archaeology.
So, let’s meet them both!
What archaeological experience do you have?
Sakshi: Hello! I have quite limited archaeological experience prior to my placement and a lot of this is due to Covid impacting the fieldwork opportunities during my first and second year at university. Luckily though, I was able to do two digs this summer: the first one being Downley, our field training course, and the second one was at Poulton (near Chester) which was an Iron Age/ Roman site. They were both research digs and provided me with a basic introduction into the world of fieldwork. Other than this, I have some volunteering experience at the Courtauld, involving some archiving, and labelling and sorting work.
Sakshi preparing plaster of Paris to impregnate bandages used to reinforce the soil around a fragile object in order to block lift it
Victoria: I have been volunteering with UCL Culture for the past year and a bit, and have been captivated by the collection of the Grant Museum of Zoology and Petrie Museum of Egyptian Archaeology. I have thoroughly enjoyed learning about all the organisation and preparation that goes into the daily runnings of museums, as well as engaging with public. While I continue to volunteer over the summer, ASE arranged for me to carry out 3 weeks of work with them, allowing me to experience all aspects of commercial archaeology, from fieldwork to conversation.
Do you have a favourite period/ artefact type/ archaeological specialism?
Sakshi: As of now, the archaeological specialism I lean towards is probably zooarchaeology and I’m dying to learn more about human remains as well.
Victoria: I very much love working with artefacts made of organic material (wood, bone, leather, etc.), as it is such a treat when these fragile items survive in the archaeological record. That being said, I wouldn’t say no to handling metal objects or some nice Roman Samian pottery!
Victoria in her fieldwork get up
What are you looking forward to about your placement?
Sakshi: I’m honestly looking forward to being able to try different areas of archaeology within a commercial unit. This lets me try fieldwork, post-excavation work and even allows me to work with different specialists, which I genuinely think is a wonderful opportunity. Plus, I really look forward to not writing a hundred essays this year (!).
Victoria: While fieldwork is exhilarating I am interested in discovering the process of post-excavation. Having done some work in digitising paperwork for academic digs, it would be great to see what happens in commercial archaeology.
What do you hope to get out of your placement?
Sakshi: I hope I get a holistic experience and thus a better understanding of commercial archaeology and its opportunities. Moreover, I’m hoping for experience to help my career after university, whether it’s related to archaeology or not. I’m also hoping that this year provides me with some more clarity on where I want to take my career, especially within archaeology and its specialisms.
Victoria: Hopefully, given that this placement will give as an insight to all aspects of archaeology, this year will help me find where I want to focus within archaeology, as there are so many areas that I am interested in. Getting some clarity would be rather helpful, and it will be great to get lots of fieldwork experience before I even graduate!
What skills or fresh perspectives do you bring to the team at ASE?
Sakshi: I’m a keen reader (I read absolutely anything and everything!) and I really do love learning, so I definitely bring my enthusiasm and attention to ASE. To be honest, I do believe that I bring in some fresh perspectives from not only being a young student, but also as someone who was born and brought up in a country quite different to the UK in all aspects. Most of these would be non-archaeological but a lot of them would tie into sociocultural and political areas which somewhat do affect archaeology and how one views it.
Victoria: COVID-19 has caused most of my undergraduate degree to be online, it has given me the chance to update my technical computer skills, as well as allowing more time for my hobbies (clay modelling, baking and PC gaming) to flourish. Hopefully when the world returns to some normalcy, I can take the skills I’ve cultivated and use it in this new placement job, and take part in the legendary charity bake sales put on at ASE offices pre-Covid!
We’ll be hearing more from both Sakshi and Victoria as the year progresses, checking in with what they’ve been up to and what they’ve been learning. So look out for more blog posts in the future!
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