DIG, York: The Yorkshire attraction where visitors can be archaeologists for a day and explore human history over 2,000 years

Visitors get the opportunity to dig in reconstructed excavation sites based on genuine excavations carried out by York Archaeology over the years.

There are four pits used to dig out artefacts and each one represents a different period in history: Roman, Viking, Medieval and Victorian.

Head of interpretation and learning at DIG, Chris Tuckley, from Sheffield, has been working at the attraction since 2004 and has seen a significant change.

“It starts with a presentation of both real and replica artefacts based on items that have been found in York over the years,” he said.

“Visitors get a chance to look at these things in close quarters; some of them they can touch.

“After you’ve had the presentation, you are issued with a trowel and there are four pits to explore and these are the ones that are based on genuine excavations.

“We are approaching 2,000 years of history discovered in this sequence of pits. In the company of your guide, you get to rotate between these pits and dig through.

“It’s very exciting because you don’t know what you’re going to find; there are all sorts of artefacts within the pits.”

Around 45,000 people visit DIG every year and many are adults interested in archaeology as well as children.

“York has got a very rich and varied history in that period so it always looks different,” Dr Tuckley said.

“Sometimes visitors imagine they might be digging up dinosaur bones but this is archaeology so it focusses on human history.

“The majority of our visits at the moment are school groups and the majority of the remainder are families but we do offer tours for grown-ups as well on our DIG Deeper tours.

“They are consistently popular, so I think grown-ups enjoy doing the digging as well as watching the presentations.”

The experience for children is a chance to step out of the every day as they know it, Dr Tuckley, 46, said.

“I think that’s really important to take a different view on what the every day means for us but also what the every day meant for ordinary people like us at other times. That’s very eye-opening for young people,” he said.

“It’s something you don’t necessarily get through history books and some of the other histories that maybe young people are exposed to where it’s dates, kings and queens, important people and battles.

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“This approach to history reminds us that history is made in the home, in the back garden, in ordinary places, it’s not just about important men marching up and down, it’s about all of us and what we do every day. I think archaeology is very important for that.

“A lot of the histories are and have been considered unimportant but of course they’re not, they just haven’t been written down or recorded and archaeology is one way of getting at those.

“Somewhere like DIG is a very valuable tool for getting people to think differently about our shared past and to see it as something that everybody participates in and that belongs to all of us.”

When discussing the differences in the way people lived thousands of years ago compared to now, Dr Tuckley said that the pace of life has been one of the biggest changes.

“I can think of differences within my own lifetime,” he said.

“If you think about the pace of life nowadays, I grew up in the 80s and 90s, I think the pace of life is so different now than it was even then.

“I bet if you went back in time the pace of working life in particular would seem so much more steady.

“I think people took time in what they were doing; what you find in looking at some of the archaeology in York is craftsmanship for instance.

“Men, women and no doubt children as well were working, doing practical jobs that may seem unsophisticated to us today because we’re used to so many machines doing our work.

“But it must have involved a lot of hard work and a lot of application over long periods of time to make and create and achieve whatever it was that they were working on.”

The introduction of the internet has changed the way in the heritage sector work now, Dr Tuckley said.

“Online there is so much misinformation and disinformation around history, often that’s a recurring theme,” he said.

“History is used often dishonestly by various bad actors to push certain agendas or certain narratives that aren’t correct or accurate.

“We’re in a position within the heritage industry of finding ourselves sometimes having to compete with those narratives and sometimes defend ourselves against them because there can be a certain amount of hostility that can be whipped up against heritage organisations in this day and age. Fortunately it hasn’t impacted us very much.”

The economy has presented challenges within the industry.

“In the heritage attractions business you do see numbers going up and down over the years and that is often a response to the wider economic climate,” Dr Tuckley said.

“Pretty much everybody within the heritage and hospitality sectors were reflecting on this last year, which was considered to be a great year.

“These are challenging times for visitor attractions in general but we look forward hopefully to the future and we have a lot of interesting plans in mind that we are hoping to carry through in the near future.”