Meet Cecilia Brine, the 16-year-old California student who joined: The wider industry impact

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Working alongside professional archaeologists and a small international team of fellow students, the 16-year-old helped bring to light human burials, Roman coins, the remains of old taverns and what may be the city’s oldest known building. The organisation runs a separate high school excavation at the Medieval Castle of Zorita, roughly 60 miles from Madrid, giving students the chance to explore a markedly different period of history within the same country. For most teenagers, summer means lazing by the pool or catching up with friends. For Cecilia Brine, a student at Santa Monica High School, it meant something rather more extraordinary: four weeks on her hands and knees at the ancient Roman city of Pollentia, unearthing artefacts that had lain buried on the Spanish island of Mallorca for close to two thousand years. Organised through ArchaeoSpain, the field school is one of only a handful in the world designed specifically for high school students, blending hands-on excavation with lessons in Spanish history and culture. It was, by all accounts, an education far removed from anything a classroom could offer. Beyond the discovery, the Pollentia field school gave Cecilia and her fellow students a genuine grounding in archaeological technique. Participants were taught proper excavation and surveying methods, as well as how to treat and catalogue the artefacts they found, skills that form the backbone of professional fieldwork. Cecilia’s experience at Pollentia is just one thread in a broader pattern of work carried out by ArchaeoSpain across the region.