[David Griffiths:] I'm the head of a project called ArcheOx, or The Archaeology of East Oxford,
which is a four-year Heritage Lottery funded project, together with John Fell Fund,
totalling just over £500,000.
The basis of the project is that we take archeology out into the community.
We chose East Oxford because we thought it was an area of Oxford which,
not only has very interesting archaeology
-- an untapped resource in so many ways,
there are so many fascinating sights and landscapes in East Oxford,
but there's also a large proportion of Oxford's population
and I think it's an area which the University really needs to reach out to
and it's working really well.
We've got 3 extremely dedicated staff apart from myself.
They are: Jane Harrison, Olaf Bayer and Jo Robinson.
Jo is on a training bursaryship from the Council for British Archaeology.
The other two are part of our HLF funded package.
We have a website which is called www.archeox.net and
through the website and through community events, outreach, guided walks, lectures
we've been doing as much as we possibly can.
We've now got around 500 active volunteers signed up to the project
and these people are from all walks of life, all backgrounds,
just about all ethnicities and educational backgrounds you could possibly imagine.
We've been working in inner East Oxford, in Saint Clements and around Cowley Road,
but also in Rose Hill, Iffley, Blackbird Ley's, Littlemore...
All of those areas have their own distinct identity
and we've managed to bring them together.
We've got people doing things like test-pitting,
which are small 1x1metre excavations that are designed to pepper the landscape
and to provide a pattern that we can interrogate.
We do geophysics --
we've got some fancy, electronic equipment for scanning the ground
and we've got people learning how to do that and how to process the results.
So we're teaching people computer skills as well as interpretive skills in archaeology.
Perhaps our most concentrated burst of activity so far has been a 6 week excavation at Bartlemas Chapel,
which is the site of a medieval leper hospital just off Cowley Road.
We found 13 burials, and the osteologist who works on the project
has actually found evidence of leprosy amongst the human material we excavated.
We're dealing with cutting-edge archaeological science,
as well as dealing with people from the community,
because the Research Laboratory for Archaeology at Oxford University came out
and did some isotopes sampling and radiocarbon sampling,
and there's a chance we may be able to find out where some of these people grew up
-- those who were buried in Bartlemas hundreds of years ago.
That was an amazing experience
and so many people visited the site,
so many people worked on the site and received training,
that we have people who had hardly done any archaeology before but are now extremely skilled
and have a really good sense of how to approach archaeology.
Their interest has been completely consolidated.
We've been keen to reach out to school groups.
We're working with several schools across the area
to teach their students how to understand and approach archaeology,
which has been great.
Another major group that we've worked with is Restore, the mental health charity
which is based in Manzil Way, East Oxford.
That's helping people to get back into normal life who've had problems or issues with their mental health.
We've had groups who've been helping us do test-pitting,
we've worked to excavate in their allotment site at Elder Stubbs
-- we've got pottery out of there, and they've been really fascinated by that.
We've been working with Oxford Archaeology,
which is the biggest commercial firm in archaeology in the UK,
-- which, of course, is based in the city --
to do a lot of that work.
Oxford Archaeology have been extremely helpful,
it's a good link up with a major local employer
that we're very pleased to have.
Ok, we're not doing brain surgery or solving the riddles of the universe,
but I think we are doing something very important socially, academically and educationally
within the city of Oxford,
to really bring Oxford together
and to get the University out there to those parts of the city that it hasn't reached yet.