Saddleworth Archaeological Trust

THE FRIENDS of SADDLEWORTH ARCHAEOLOGICAL TRUST

Newsletter

No 1

Winter 2006

Retrospect, 2006

In the four years that the ‘Friends’ have been in existence, the past year will probably prove to be the most successful to-date. Seven evening lectures were held during the year, starting with the Annual General Meeting in January and finishing with David Chadderton’s ‘The Prehistory of Saddleworth’ in December. During the year we changed our meeting room to Greenfield Conservative Club, where we have a comfortable room and have been made to feel very welcome by the Officials of the Club. Attendance at meetings has been satisfactory, but we would welcome more members to support our speakers who sometimes travel some distance to be with us.
Membership has increased during the year and now stands at 70, although we shall lose one or two next year because of members leaving the district. We need to increase membership, so please try to recruit friends who may be interested in supporting archaeology in Saddleworth.
During the year we had two special lectures and a one-day school, all were well supported.
The first of the special annual lectures was given in March, the ‘John Buckley Lecture’. John was a member of the Trust and the event is held in his memory. This was the first of these occasions and was given by Dr Mike Nevell who is the Director of the Field Archaeology Unit at Manchester University. The title of the lecture was ‘Aspects of Industrial Archaeology’. A fitting subject, John had a lifelong interest in this field of archaeology and it will be the topic of future lectures in this series.

The second of the special lectures was the ‘Stonehouse Lecture’. This was the fifth year of the lectures and an audience of approx. 70 people were kept enthralled by Professor Rosalie David (see photo) of Manchester University who gave an illustrated talk entitled ‘Ancient Egyptian Mummies; a resource for studying disease and lifestyle’.