A GROUP of archaeologists will be digging deep this weekend but not for historical artifacts.

Worcester Sorcerers are a seven-a-side football team set up by current and former workers at the Worcestershire Archive and Archaeology Service, which is based in The Hive.

The team was set up in 2016 and has been training at Perdiswell Leisure Centre for the past several years.

James Spry, a former field archaeologist for the service, explained how the team began: “We started just to kick a ball around at the Leisure Centre.”

In 2018, the team joined a five-a-side league on Brickfields Road, while also playing a few friendly matches against fellow archaeology team, Oxford Bierbarians.

After a few years off, the team restarted six months ago and will make their debut appearance at the Winckelmann Cup on Saturday, June 22. The Cup is a tournament was set up for teams associated with either commercial archaeology companies or university departments from twelve countries across Europe.

This year’s tournament will be hosted by the Bierbarians at Oxford RFC, with the Sorcerer’s facing teams from Frankfurt, Kiel and Leipzig in Germany, and Namur in Belgium in their group.

The tournament is named after 18th century archaeologist Johan Joachim Winckelmann, and can trace its roots back to the 1980s. 1991 saw the tournament expand to include teams from Germany, Austria and Switzerland. The tournament has since been held in Germany, Switzerland, Czechia, Poland, France and Belgium. 2024 will be the first held in the UK.