Summer is just around the corner and for us FSJ volunteers, Josephine Czichon and Justus Kühn, the last and at the same time hottest phase of our one-year voluntary social year at the NIhK begins. As a volunteer in excavation technology, this means one field assignment after the next: we take part in excavations, help with drilling and carry out geomagnetic prospecting. In addition, over the past year we have in addition to numerous other activities, done some work with the QGIS program, which is very important in archaeology, including rectifying excavation photos and creating find maps.

In the restoration workshop, finds were primarily processed, which means that we first documented, exposed and preserved them. In addition, we were able to get a taste of other research areas at the NIhK, such as botany. For example, we investigated pollen collected from soil samples and were able to understand what the landscape must have looked like a few hundred years ago.

The FSJ helped us to make a decision for the future. The FSJ in the restoration workshop was ideally suited as a preparatory internship for subsequent studies in restoration. But also in the field of excavation technology, one has gained countless great experiences and learned a lot. The year is not yet over, so there surely will be new challenges to be mastered!