Great experience

I had a great time at Blackfriary, and the only criticisms I have are organisational ones that I think come from the fact they hadn't dealt with such a large group of students on site before.

The accommodation was much better than anything I expected, in luxurious self-contained housing next to the golf course with access to hotel facilities including a pool and sauna. The food was usual group catering, over boiled meat and veg. There is a large supermarket about 30min walk away, and a gas station 10min away.

The supervisors were on the whole wonderful, relaxed and helpful. My fellow students were some of the best people I've ever met and made the experience all the better. Beware that close quarters over long weeks of hard work will cause friction - but there was always an opportunity to get privacy and decompress.

I loved the time on site as it was some of the first real field experience I had, and it was a relaxed and supportive environment to learn in. The excursions off site tied in well to what we learnt, and offered a real sense of context.

I do wish that the emphasis on human burials in the description of the program had been fulfilled. They rotated us around the site in week-long chunks. It was luck as to who got assigned a burial when the rotation came, and if you got one you had a full week on it. If there was no burial available you missed out. I wasn't lucky. I was upset about that, as working on human remains in situ was the reason I chose the program.

I think this was the result of the big group I was in, but they could have rotated people through burials in 3 or 4 day chunks to give more people an opportunity to work on the thing that had attracted most of us to the program.

Overall, this is a wonderful, comfortable introduction to field archaeology in a country with a rich history - both in terms of human occupation and in archaeology. The supervisors are experienced and helpful, and the experience well worth it.