The working life of Museum of London

Cooking Pots, Bones, Milk (Street) & Eggs?

A culinary delight of ingredients provided the setting for week 7’s recipe of fun.

On the general finds side of the project, two sites were improved this week; Monday & Friday’s teams ploughed on through the material from St John Cass School, (CASS72), admiring the numerous amounts of pottery and steadily reducing the number of boxes these pots are stored in, by effective repacking and ordering. Wednesday’s groups tackled animal bone from the Triangle site (TR74), the final type of material they’ll be getting their hands on as next week it’s over to the Museum of London for them as they start to put together the photos they’ve been taking throughout to produce their video diaries.

Over with Registered finds, we started a new site, Milk Street (MLk76) which produced our first object of the week – a saxon bone comb which used to be on display in the old medieval gallery. A few bits of leather remaining from last week was also completed and Friday’s team completed all the glass, wood and started a box of pigment samples which produced our second object of the week – an oyster shell paint palette.

This week’s workshop was something quite different to the usual ones as we welcomed archaeological conservator, Luisa Duarte to LAARC to guide us through “Eggscavation”. Quite possibly my favourite workshop so far, Eggscavation, is all about how conservators lift delicate artefacts on site and a great practical way of learning the techniques behind it.

On entering our common room, volunteers were confronted with a seed tray full of compost, with an egg buried in the centre. Not knowing whether the egg was whole, hard boiled or indeed covering something else, the task was to careful lift the object, before carefully excavating it further.

Wrapping the visible shell with wet tissue first, then ten created a barrier to surround the egg, using laminated card. Once fenced in, volunteers mixed some plaster of paris and poured this into the fenced off space, covering the tissued egg.

Whilst waiting for the plaster to set, Luisa showed us some brilliant pieces of leather and wood and explained the process of freeze drying in relation to these organic finds.

Then it was back to the egg, the next stage being to put a fish slice beneath the barrier of card and flipping the whole thing over, plaster side down. Finally, with a small stick and brushes, they removed the remaining soil, until the egg and the contents inside were exposed.

I’m pleased to report that not one egg cracked!

To view more photos from the week, visit our Flickr site by clicking here: Flickr

To find out more about the excavations we’re currently working on or any other associated information click on the highlighted links in the text.

Pots, Plaster &  Tip Top Textiles

For today’s blog, I’m going to get straight to the highlight of the week – our fantastic workshops on archaeological textiles. Curator of Fashion & Decorative Arts, Hilary Davidson headed over to lead the session which separated itself into three parts; medieval textiles found along the river sites, Tudor items found back in the days of the Guildhall Museum & burial garments found during the Spitalfields excavations at Christchurch (CAS84).

I think it fair to say that we were blown away by some of the material that survived in our collections, from decorated silks to knitted wool, from burial bonnets to Tudor socks. And even a medieval hair extension and Tudor codpiece popped up during the talk.

During the sessions, we tried to link things together by checking and auditing the leather & textile fragments from 1983-1986’s excavations. A couple of volunteers got to pack some textiles – one of the trickiest packing techniques there is – whilst others got to add sketches of the textiles to the reverse of the finds cards. Although the majority of objects were no way near as good a condition as those in the workshop, there were still some pretty amazing bits that’s we came across, like the 19th century decorative boot from Mansion House, (SON85), the shoe heel from Carter Lane, (CAT86) and the piece of rope from the former city of London Boy’s School (BOY86)

When not working on organic material it was on to our next big site in the general finds, Sir John Cass school, (CASS72). Monday’s team almost completed the animal bone with Friday’s team rounding it off before moving on to the pottery assemblages. already, several boxes are being saved by this basic repacking of artifacts and the accessibility has improved beyond a doubt.

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Wednesday’s groups tackled building material from the Triangle of Billingsgate Buildings site (TR74), completing it all in the morning, leaving only roman wall plaster for the young archaeologist team to complete. Both groups ended their session by visiting the ceramic & glass store to take photos to supplement their project and view some of the best wall plaster ever excavated.

As a bonus this week, we had the second set of students from the Burgess Park Training Excavation join us. After a thorough tour of all archaeological aspects of the building, they joint in with the VIP project by working on more general pottery from the Triangle (TR74) and Registered Finds from the Modern Foreshore site (MFS76)

For more photos visit our Flickr site by clicking here: FLICKR

And to find out more about any of the excavations we’ve worked on this week click on the highlighted sitecode in the text above.

Half way through – New sites galore!

Fresh from our break last week, where volunteers got a chance to dig at our Burgess Park community project, it was back to the archive for more packing and auditing.

Monday’s team started with some roman coins from the 1976 London Dock’s (LD76) site completing the lot. These coins went from being loose in plastic bags to nicely protected in small coin boxes. In the afternoon, they moved over to General finds and completed the pottery from the large St. Thomas Street site (1STS74), moving on the building material.

Friday’s group were back to registered finds in the morning and were on fire! They got through over 60 boxes completing 7  brand new sites; St Swithin’s Lane (SL75) St Magnus, New Fresh Wharf (SM75), Westminster Abbey (WAM75), 175 Borough High Street (175BHS76), Christ Church Greyfriars (CHR76), Fenchurch Street (FSE76) & London Docks (LD76) getting through ceramic, bone, stone, wood and glass artefacts. In the afternoon they moved on to completing all the big heavy boxes of building material from St Thomas Street (1STS74).

Wednesday’s groups started work on general finds for the first time, tackling boxes of pottery from the Triangle of Billingsgate Buildings (TR74) before recording their experience with photographs. Their session ended with a visit to our ceramic and glass store to compare their sherds with the complete vessels within the museum’s collections.

Our YAC group spent their time solely in the ceramic & glass store, looking at complete examples first, then moving on to complete all three boxes of pottery from the 1974 excavation at Union Street (8US74). By being in a room full of these complete goodies we were able to once again match our sherds to complete examples, but, as all of these pots had been published, we also matched the sherds to the illustrations in the publication.

The workshop this week was focused on pottery, in particular, tin glazed earthenwares. We were fortunate to have our Head of Department (who started off his Museum of London career as a pottery specialist) lead this session.

An additional bonus this week was the visit from the team of trainee archaeologists currently working on the Burgess Park Training Excavation in Southwark. The group visited the archive on Thursday and as well as looking around our stores, visited Museum of London Archaeology’s finds processing areas and offices. They finished by spending some time in the ceramic and glass store, where they became VIP volunteers for 30mins, packing some more finds from the pottery archive of The Triangle site (TR74)

For more photos visit our flick site by clicking here: FLICKR

And you can follow links for more info about any of the sites we’re working on, or any other information, by clicking on the highlighted sitecodes in the text.

Eyes & Keys

Week 4 of LAARC’s volunteer project saw us play around with the teams a little as we split them into two for the first time. One half worked with Glynn on pottery from St. Thomas Street (1STS74), whilst the others worked with Adam on metal objects from the General Post Office site, (GPO75), swapping around in the afternoon, so everyone got a turn with both.

The two sites generated loads of material when archaeologists dug them back in the 70’s and we’ve already worked our way through over 200 boxes. The end is in site though as all the GPO75 metal was finished by the teams this week, leaving only the general glass finds for Saturday’s volunteers. We even managed to work through the metal from a few more sites on Friday; St Magnus (SM75), Artillery Lane (ART76),  175 Borough High Street (175BHS76), London Docks (LD76) & Christchurch, Greyfriars, (CHR76). Only a few more boxes of pottery before building material will be the next hurdle for the 1STS74 site before we can tick that off our list.

However, the good news is the finds are still coming with some fine reconstructed pots, stoneware and sweet little  highgate ware pottery being packed this week. The metal finds were more of a grind, but every now and then, amongst the many rusty bits of iron and fragmentary copper, a truely awesome artefact would crop up. Coffin plates from Greyfriars were superb (one had the possibly masonic emblem of the eye over the pyramid – see above &  top picture above for close up) and we also seemed to get a fair amount of Roman keys.  The two highlights this week are a roman copper hanging lamp and a fancy roman finger ring key.

Both Monday’s and Friday’s sessions ended with a workshop on Medieval Religion led by Curator Emiratus, John Clark, who retired from his post of senior curator of medieval collections last summer.

With no Wednesday sessions this week, it was a chance for Adam & Glynn to catch up on some reboxing as Tuesday and Thursday saw them down on site at the Burgess Park Public Archaeology Excavation. And next week, that’s where the volunteers will be too. To find out more click here: big dig

Don’t forget, to see more pictures from the project, you can always check out our flickr site by clicking here: flickr

LAARC of Leather

For the third week of our project we turned our heads towards our leather collections and started our third target – making space in the leather store. Each afternoon volunteers got to handle and audit shoes, scabbards and the like after a morning working with pottery.

Monday’s team found themselves slightly down in numbers this week, but even so managed to complete a significant amount of pottery from the St Thomas St. site (1STS74). They continued where Saturday’s volunteers left off and got to look at some brilliant complete and reconstructed roman vessels.

In the afternoon, they moved from Glynn’s General Finds Project, to Adam’s Registered Finds strand and started by completing the coins from the General Post Office site (GPO75) left over from last week. Once complete, it was time to tackle some leather and the first site worked on was the rather nice material from Billingsgate (BWB83). Finds included many examples of shoes but it was a decorated scabbard (see above photo) that stood out as one of our objects of the week.

Wednesday’s group from Capital Arts continued with leather moving on to another large assemblage from the former City of London Boy’s School, Tudor St. (BOY86). Again, some remarkable shoes and scabbards turned up, however an unidentified decorated piece of leather really caught our attention. What it originally was is still unclear. Click on the photo for a closer look and feel free to leave your opinion as a comment.

The Young Archaeologists joined us on Wednesday afternoon to complete the leather from the same site (BOY86) and they too saw shoes, straps, scabbards and even a glove. Included amongst these was a medieval shoe that had all the pieces needed for it to be reconstructed. With this in mind, the YACs had a go at making their own replica medieval boot out of felt.

Both groups continued to record their session with video and photos provided by our colleagues in e-learning.

Friday’s team, like Monday’s, started with General Finds and the pottery from St. Thomas St (1STS74). Only a third of the pottery boxes left now until the site is done. They too worked on leather in the afternoon, completing two sites; Dowgate Hill House (DGH86) & Sun Wharf, (SUN86) both on Upper Thames Street

To start each day, Glynn showed the teams some of the records archive for the St Thomas St. site, putting things into context. To finish, and quite conveniently in line with the material they’d been working on, the days were completed by a leather finds workshop run by Museum of London curator Jackie Keily.

The project is moving along nicely. To view more pictures, visit our Flickr site, by clicking on any photo or the word Flickr. Roll on week 4

Romans & the Registered Finds

As we rolled into week 2, the volunteers started work on the registered finds side of the project.

The first site worked on has been the General Post Office excavations on Newgate Street, 1975 (GPO75). Monday’s team of 10 knuckled down straight away and audited over 1000 objects, including all the ceramic and all the stone artefacts and then making good headway with the glass artefacts. An amazing assortment of accessioned objects appeared as volunteers checked the packing and updated the location of these beauties. One of the star objects was a complete bellamine jar, but there was an abundance of samian maker’s stamps, mortarium maker’s stamps, Roman tiles with animal paw prints on, examples of Roman graffiti and Roman lamps also within the ceramic boxes. An amazing coin mould cropped up in the stone boxes along with plenty of sharpening hones, architectural mouldings and a few huge quernstone fragments too. Finally the glass boxes provided plenty of treats with moulding bowl and handle fragments and one particularly nice glass with an air twisted stem.

Friday’s folk continued with the boxes of glass and gave us our second object of the week – an amazingly reconstructed roman bottle. They were also treated to an array of spectacular finds including moulded bowls, painted window glass, complete bottles and a spectacular deep blue roman vessel depicting a chariot scene.  By the end of the morning session we’d almost completed all the non metallic boxes of registered finds from this large site. This was followed in the afternoon by work on the coins and copper artefacts. Over 40 boxes of finds were audited - a phenomenal amount of material for one week – an excellent start to the project.

On both days, we made a brief visit to our ceramic & glass store to see some complete examples to compliment our audited sherds; Monday’s team looked at the roman ceramics whilst Friday’s took a look at some of the glass. Both groups ended their days with a talk and handling  session on Roman household objects led by the Museum of London’s curator of Roman collections, Jenny Hall.  Jenny kindly showed us loads of goodies from various archive sites; keys, cauldrons, knives, spoons, door hinges, handles and an awesome fragment of weaved basket which has incredibly survived almost 2 millennia.

Wednesday’s groups also worked with material from the General Post Office excavations (GPO75), with coins being the first port of call. Both our group from Capital Arts and our team of Young Archaeologists learnt the technique to pack a coin properly into small plastic “crystal” boxes. Having completed 10 coins each, each volunteer then had the opportunity to record their work via photos and video. Some excellent close up shots of coins were taken and the younger volunteers began some entertaining news-report like pieces.

All in all, an excellent week of work. Next week – leather!

For more photos from the project visit our Flickr site by clicking on any photo or the word, Flickr and to find out more about select pieces of this blog, click on any word highlighted in red above.

LAARC VIP. Back In Business.

This week, we at the Museum’s Archaeological Archive welcomed our new sets of volunteers who will be joining us over the next 3 months to help improve the storage & accessibility of our collections.

And we kicked things off last weekend with our Saturday volunteer working through the registered bone artefacts from the awesome General Post Office site from 1975 (GPO75). As registered finds are objects that have some kind of individual value to them, it was likely that some beauties would crop up and we weren’t let down. Amid the boxes were knife handles, brushes, spoons, pins, needles and even a needle case. Only one volunteer could make this first session on Saturday but he single handedly audited all 165 bone artefacts, getting VIP6 off to a great start.

On Monday & Friday we inducted our new teams – our biggest yet! For this sixth Volunteer Inclusion Project, both days will have 10 volunteers join us from many different backgrounds, with many different experiences and skills to share.

All the new volunteers started with General Finds, in particular, animal bone from St Thomas St. (1STS74). As general finds are objects usually looked at as assemblages, we found ourselves confronted with large boxes chockablock full of thin disintegrating bags of bone. Impossible to find the contexts you’re looking for without tipping out everything, our volunteers were soon transforming this bad example of packaging into a neat, orderly, much more efficiently packed and most importantly, a now easily accessible system. Over the two days, all the animal bone from the site was completed! An excellent start.

Our Wednesdays are slightly different for VIP6. In the mornings we host a team of volunteers from the charity “Capital Arts”. Last week the team visited the archive for the first time and this week, they got stuck into working on some registered finds – ceramics from the General Post Office site (GPO75). Their sessions are split into two as, having audited boxes for the first half, they then set about recording their work using photos and video. In later weeks, they will visit the E-Learning Studio at the Museum of London and working with the E-Learning Officers, use their images to create films documenting their experience.

The same will be done by a second Wednesday group – the Young Archaeologists – who came for their intro tour this week. Once we told them what to expect over the next few months, they were given cameras to snap aspects of the archive. Their session ended with us putting together these pics to create a quick little film, in a example of what they’ll be doing in future weeks.

Our workshop topic this week was Prehistoric Flints and an excellent talk and handling session was given by Museum of London curator, Jon Cotton. Thanks Jon!

And finally each week we’ll be choosing two objects that stand out among the others. This week’s artefacts are an amazing 18th century tin glazed wall tile and a fragment of human skull with a possible sword wound. Click on the objects for a larger image.

And that’s that for week 1. Next week, the teams move on to Registered Finds.

Check out more photos by visiting our Flickr site.

Hello again!

It’s been a month since we finished our fifth Volunteer Inclusion Project (VIP5) and since then we’ve been busy preparing for our next one. Ladies & Gents, VIP6 is here!

Not ones to remain content with what we’ve achieved so far, we’ve stepped it up a gear and changed things a little from previous set ups. This time round, there will be a mighty force of 20 volunteers, with 10 forming Monday’s team and the other half, Friday’s.

On top of this, we welcome 2 additional groups of volunteers on Wednesday’s, who’ll be documenting their experience using photos and video. In the mornings we’ll be joined by volunteers from “Capital A” and the afternoon session will see members from the Central London YAC in the LAARC.

And finally we welcome back VIP5’s Saturday volunteers, who are the first to pick up where we left off by volunteering today!

Work wise, it’s more of the same. Glynn continues to manage the General Finds project, improving the storage and accessibility of objects looked at as an assemblage. Meanwhile, Adam will continue with improving the Registered Finds, auditing these objects with an individual value. From the looks of things we’re going to be in for a treat as the first site Glynn and his team will be tackling is the St Thomas Street archive, (1STS74), with numerous pieces of pottery to work through. And the first site the volunteers will be getting their hands on with Adam is the mammoth archive of the General Post Office, Newgate Street (GPO75).

To keep up to date with how we’re getting on, be sure to revisit these pages as we’ll be blogging each week with news, photos and our progress.

Whilst Londoners go to the polls today, we at the Museum’s Archaeological Archive have had our own voting competition over the last fortnight.

16 objects rediscovered during the 5th LAARC Volunteer Inclusion Project were narrowed down to 4 during the first rounds of voting and we can now reveal he winner is…

The Pilgrim Badge!

This badge was rediscovered by volunteer Magdalena, when going through metals from the Chaucer House (CH75) archive. A rare copper alloy badge (most are lead based), the saint depicted is likely to be St Edmund, seen in the middle, tied against a tree, whilst either side a posed archer shoots arrows at him.

And that really is it for LAARC VIP5. It’s been a fantastic project, with some fantastic teams and as a final thank you we held a little party yesterday, which was a grand event where each daily team finally got to meet other daily teams.

We’ll be back soon as VIP6 will be coming at ya at the start of June. Toodle-Pip

All good things must come to end

The final week of the current Volunteer Inclusion Project reaches us and what an excellent project it has been. The set up for week 10 was a couple of hours of finds work  in the morning and a couple of hours of finds fun at the museum in the afternoon.

Monday and Tuesday’s volunteers had the pleasure of working with Glynn for the final time and completed another site, Northumberland Wharf (NW74), which we didn’t think we would get done during this project, so big thumbs up for that.

Wednesday and Thursday’s volunteers finished things off with Adam, completing all the general leather finds from Swan Lane (SWA81) and a couple of really small sites in their entirety; St Paul’s Cathedral Choir School (SPS74) and 64 Southwark Street (64SS74). Gold stars all round.

And so it was to the Museum of London itself for special behind the scenes visits to the museum’s library, archaeological conservation labs and a guided tour around the recently opened War, Plague & Fire gallery.

Museum Librarian Sally, very kindly showed us around the library and its archive as well as picking out some fine special boxes within its shelves.

Conservators Jill, Rose and Luisa showed us around their labs and included some amazing examples of freeze dried wood preservation and a reconstructed glass bowl.

Finally, curators Meriel & Jackie, highlighted the brilliant objects and themes of the museum’s 16th & 17th Century gallery.

And there we have it. Altogether, over all three strands of this project (general, registered, leather/textiles finds) we’ve worked on 68 excavation archives, which is just superb. A huge thanks needs to go to all our VIP5 volunteers, who have formed some excellent teams over the past 10 weeks. Special thanks should go to volunteers Magdelena and especially Wayne, who have provided this site with many excellent photographs.

Watch this space for news about our final two LAARC Volunteer Inclusion Projects (VIP6 (June-Aug) & VIP7 (Oct-Dec)), which we want to be even bigger and better than anything we’ve done before. In the meantime, don’t forget to have your say on which has been the best object from this current project. There’s still time to vote: Object of VIP

See you in June…