With museums closed and digs postponed, DigNation Festival is bringing some of the best archaeologists and their discoveries straight into your living room

Running from 13-14 June on digventures.com, virtual festival-goers will get to hear from dozens of archaeologists whose work out in the field or in the lab has been interrupted by COVID-19, but still have exciting new discoveries that they want to share.

Highlights include talks from archaeologists working in Jordan, Ethiopia, Mexico, Italy, Slovenia, Canada, Croatia, India, and even under the sea in the murky depths of the Solent.

The festival is being organised by Lisa Westcott Wilkins, co-founder of DigVentures, a UK-based team of archaeologists who run crowdfunded research excavations that anyone can take part in or watch online.

The idea for the festival struck Westcott Wilkins as she watched waves of fieldwork projects being postponed, including some of her own.

“We started hearing from archaeologists all over the world whose fieldwork was on hold and with so many museums beings closed, we realised that we could do something really positive by bringing all these amazing archaeologists together to share their stories with people at home” said Westcott Wilkins.

“You don’t usually get to hear about discoveries direct from the people who make them, but at DigNation Festival you’ll get to hear about everything from rock art, ancient DNA, and Neolithic passage graves, to discoveries being made by LIDAR – all from the archaeologists themselves” she said.

The festival is free to attend, and events can also be re-watched after the weekend – you can register at https://digventures.com/projects/dignation

Notes to Editors:

• DigVentures has been running crowdfunded and crowdsourced archaeological digs since 2012. Registered with the Chartered Institute for Archaeologists, the team has unearthed and Anglo-Saxon burial ground on Lindisfarne, an Iron Age hillfort in Gloucestershire, a medieval castle in Yorkshire, and more – all with help from people around the world.
• DigNation Festival was first launched by DigVentures and Sir Tony Robinson in 2018, to celebrate the legacy of Mick Aston – the lead archaeologist on Time Team who did so much to bring archaeology into the living rooms of millions of people on Sunday evenings. This year, DigVentures is making the festival a free, online event featuring archaeologists around the world.