The working life of Museum of London

The 21st October 2009 was an auspicious day in the life of Bill White, Senior Curator of Human Osteology as it heralded his retirement from the Centre of Human Bioarchaeology, Museum of London.

After starting his career as a Chemist Bill was then drawn to the fascinating world of skeletons and after adding osteological qualifications to his chemistry bow he started work as a freelance osteoarchaeologist. In this capacity in 1988 he analysed the skeletal material from medieval St Nicholas Shambles that subsequently led to the first of many publications. Not having looked back since he went on to work for Museum of London Specialist Services (MoLSS), Museum of London Archaeological Services (MoLAS) and with the establishment of the Centre for Human Bioarchaeology (CHB) through Wellcome funding in 2003 became the inaugural Curator of Human Osteology.

As senior curator at the inception of the Centre and over the last six years Bill has overseen many developments in the Centre, including the recording of the c.5,000 individuals of archived skeletal material onto the Oracle electronic database, Wellcome Osteological Research Database (WORD), the creation of the CHB website with downloadable data, frequent and varied out reach events and providing access and advice on the skeletal material for numerous researchers from all over the world.

It has been a great pleasure and fun to work with Bill over the last six years and he will be greatly missed in the Centre but fortunately for us he is keen to return and will do so in December under a new guise as an Emeritus Curator.

We would all like to wish him well and much happiness in his retirement.

Jelena Bekvalac
Curator of Human Osteology
Department of Archaeological Collections and Archive

 In this guest post, Tony Grey, Finds Specialist at MoLAS, explains where he goes on his holidays.  He presents surprising parallels between the medieval sugar installation and ancient city at Zoara, southern Jordan, and London.

Starting in 2006 and continuing this year I have been lucky enough to spend leave time working on an archaeological project in Jordan. I would recommend this way of spending some leave time to anyone from MoLAS.

The project is based at two discrete sites near the village of Safi in southern Jordan near the southern end of the Dead Sea. The project was inspired by and jointly run by Dr K. D. Politis (Dino) head of the Hellenic Society for Near Eastern Research. The first excavation season took place in 2002 run by Dino and Glasgow University. Subsequent seasons have run from 2006-8 with the excavations carried out by Adelaide University.

The Tawahin es-Sukhar site is that of a medieval sugar mill while around 500 metres distant is the site of the ancient and medieval city of Zoara which is shown on the early Byzantine mosaic Madaba map. My job was to identify and record the post-Bronze Age pottery from both sites.

The sugar installation was in use from roughly the 12th/13th century to the 15th century. Sugar cane was widely grown in the Jordan Valley and Levant coast in this period. Water from the hills above the Valley was led by channel to a drop where it turned mill wheels that crushed the cane. The cane was then boiled in iron vats and the juice poured into pottery moulds and jars. An upper sugar cone jar sat in a lower molasses collecting jar. The refined fraction was cooled and solidified in the upper jar which then had to be broken to remove the sugar loaf. The heavy molasses fraction passed to the lower collecting jar. Hence the site has huge mounds of broken sugar pots. Several other similar sites are known in the Levant.

This refining technology was used in the same way for several centuries. By the 16th century Cyprus was a major producer for the European market. By the 18th century the centre of gravity of production was located in the Caribbean. Sugar was refined using raw sugar from the Caribbean in 18th century York and Southampton. It was also refined in London at several sites such as Bishopsgate Goods Yard (BGX05) where the sugar cone pots are much slimmer and narrower than the pots used in the medieval Levant and at Limehouse (Jarret 2005).

I attempted to form a sugar pot typology based on published parallels. It appears that the industry may have begun at this site by the time the Crusaders arrived on the scene for a short duration in the 12th century. Certainly the sugar pots along with other pottery were manufactured at the site as evidenced by wasters.

In all the excavation seasons separate digs explored parts of the ancient and medieval city. Nabataean architectural stone and small sherds of pottery date to around the 2nd century BC. Roman, Early Byzantine and medieval (Islamic) periods follow with a mosaic floor dating possibly to the 7th or 8th century AD uncovered this year. Huge quantities of pottery awaited me. Some had been packed wet and had to be laid out to dry. Beautiful sherds of high status early glazed wares may have been imports from the Iraq region as well as being locally made. Moulded cream ware jugs of the Abassid period jostled with pieces of cooking pot, jars and basins. The material included a few sherds of Early Byzantine orange burnished dishes and bowls classified as Late Roman Fine Ware by John Hayes (1972). Later glazed wares were common along with a few pieces that may belong to the Crusader 12th century. The pottery indicates a termination of occupation at the site by the 15th century in the Mamluk period. This later period was characterised by glazed fritwares imported from Syria, handmade painted coarsewares and by the pottery of the sugar production industry.

Petrological analysis and glaze analysis have been carried out on material from the first excavation season at Glasgow University and we await publication of the results.

This has been a wonderful opportunity to handle a wealth of ceramic material from this interesting and beautiful part of the world and I hope that I will be able to return to complete the job as much pottery still remains to be recorded in the dig house where a day’s work is concluded with a refreshing glass of arak and ice watching the sun go down over the Jordan Valley.

This week,  Clare Wood, Archivist for the Sainsbury Archive, introduces a new website that brings the Sainsbury Archive to life and asks you  to add your memories of working and shopping at Sainsbury’s:

Alongside my regular duties looking after the Sainsbury Archive, over the past year I’ve been busy creating ‘Story of a Supermarket’, a new website for the collection, which is now live within the Museum in Docklands website.

The Sainsbury Archive at the Museum in Docklands is a unique collection of photographs, documents and objects which tells the story of Sainsbury’s from its foundation in 1869 to the present day.  It’s a fascinating and varied collection, including everything from old packaging and recipes to Victorian tiles and staff uniforms.

This new website replaces the Sainsbury’s Virtual Museum educational site which was launched ten years ago. This popular site, which enabled schools to explore the archive via a virtual museum building, needed significant updating. We therefore decided to create a new site using the Museum of London’s content management system and page templates, retaining popular elements of the Virtual Museum, but also adding extra information and images from the archive to help answer some of the 400+ enquiries received each year.

We started work on the project last July, consulting with local primary school teachers, retired Sainsbury’s staff and people who had contacted the archive with an enquiry over the last couple of years. The results were sometimes surprising, but gave us a clear picture of what people liked and didn’t like about the old site, and the kinds of information they were looking for.

We frequently receive enquiries about aspects of social history such as food and nutrition during wartime and the employment of women.  We therefore decided to create pages for a range of popular topics, arranged under the themes of ‘People’, ‘Places’ ‘Products’ and ‘Progress’.  Researching and writing this content proved time-consuming, and we have tried to find the right level of detail, so that the information is useful, but not overwhelming…

To add a personal touch to the official records in the archive, there is also a contributory area for visitors to add their memories of working and shopping at Sainsbury’s. All stories submitted will be added to the collection and highlights will be published on the website.

For schools at Key Stage 2, our Learning consultant trawled the archive to produce six curriculum-linked units exploring the history of food, shops and shopping. Linked to these are classroom activities, interactive quizzes, a timeline, and a scrapbook of images to download.

For informal family learning, as well as the quizzes and scrapbook, we have recycled popular features and activities from the Virtual Museum, including old-fashioned packaging to colour and make, the chance to ‘Explore a Store’ from 1909 and ‘Harry’s story’, a day in the life of a  Sainsbury’s delivery boy in 1912.

The project has grown quite a bit since its inception and the resulting website is a large and detailed resource. The collection is highly visual, so I’m particularly pleased that the new site features around 300 images. ‘Story of a supermarket’ has actually been live since May 2008, but following testing and approval by external stakeholders, we have now begun to tell people it’s there!

We’re also planning to showcase the site at ‘The way we shopped’, a day of free talks, film screenings and activities inspired by the Sainsbury Archive, which is being held at the Museum in Docklands on Saturday 4th October.
‘Story of a Supermarket’ is located within the Museum in Docklands website under ‘Collections Online’ and can also be found at: www.museumindocklands.org.uk/sainsburyarchive

Dave Sankey, Senior Archaeologist for the Museum of London Archaeology Service, writes:

“If you wander around St Paul’s Cathedral, you’ll see some curious modern pavements in the South Churchyard, opened this summer. The area has been landscaped following small “evaluation” trenches excavated by Robin Wroe-Brown and his team and a watching brief on the initial landscaping excavations by David Sankey and Aleks Cetera, with expert input by the then diocesan archaeological advisor John Schofield.

The “new” pavement is a modern representation of the remains of the medieval church and illustrates the square cloister surrounding the octagonal chapter house.  [Image from the Telegraph article, St Paul's Cathedral opens new South Churchyard]

The new design is a simplified version of the original. For instance, the original pavement of the chapterhouse (a building attached to a cathedral, church, or monastery and used as a meeting place for the religious fraternity) had different-sized panels near the door on the west side and equal -sized panels in the east (see photo below).  These floor panels are equal-sized throughout the new version.

The medieval internal pier-bases and ribs (below) were far more intricately carved.    However, the use of Purbeck stone for paving and the ribs and yellow limestone for the walls does accurately represent the original materials.  It would be wrong to quibble about detail when what has been achieved is a worthy attempt to evoke the medieval cathedral that lies below.  After all, to accurately represent the originals would require a tall structure that would obscure the view of Wrens cathedral, and a user-friendly picnic or meeting area with modern wheelchair access to the cathedral.

Rather, I’d encourage anyone to mentally wander around the space and imagine the tall chapterhouse with it’s imposing buttresses dividing large stained-glass windows, surrounded by the square 2-storey cloister with open tracery on the ground floor, overlooking the minuscule lawns. And the hunched figures of medieval clerics, plotting or worrying about relations with the king or the Pope in Rome, or the rival Pope in Avignon. Even if you can’t visit it, you might get the picture.”

This video explains more about the old St Paul’s Cathedral.

Did you know that road traffic accidents in London kill less than 1 person each day, while smoking cigarettes kills 1 Londoner every hour? Or that cigarette butts account for 40% of the litter on London’s streets? Despite these bleak statistics 2 million Londoners regularly light up to enjoy a cigarette.

One year on from the smoking ban, The Big Smoke looks at the history of smoking in London and life in the capital since the ban.

Curator Meriel Jeater says, ‘London has been a centre of the tobacco trade and consumption for 400 years and this topical display will look at how attitudes to smoking have altered over this time. The recent ban on smoking in public places is causing widespread changes and this display will showcase Londoners’ opinions on the ban and how it is affecting their city.

For some people the new legislation is the final prompt they needed to quit smoking. For others it is ruining their businesses. We want to know what Londoners think.’

You can visit ‘The Big Smoke’ at the Museum of London until 21 September 2008.  Entry is free.

Find out more at The Big Smoke article in our newsroom.

Was it a bird? Was it a plane? Well no… it was an oversized plywood sofa with a print design by Eley Kishimoto. Hmmm, didn’t really see that one coming. But never mind, the big pink couch landed in front of the Museum of London last week as part of the London Festival of Architecture. No one’s seen it diving through a revolving door as yet, but it must have some kind of superpower as it arrived simultaneously outside Museum in Docklands, along with several other venues across town.

After a little head-scratching, visitors have been making themselves comfortable, acting out Big Brother confessions, reaching for the invisible remote control, and generally turning themselves domestically inside out. And whilst lesser locations are content to let their new furnishings be, plans are afoot to get out some of the gorgeous Kishimoto goodies from the Museum’s costume store. Could be a ridiculously chic tea party in the offing…

The Museum is all over the London Festival of Architecture this year. There are huge brightly coloured toilet roll sculptures at various places around the city. The makers are calling them pods, but we know better. Anyway, beside the showcasing of nearby architectural projects, they feature glorious panels outlining the quirkier histories of well known sites, courtesy of you-know-who. Duelling knights, medieval hoodies, Roman bikinis, bone skates and buried cheese are amongst the delights awaiting passers by.

Oh, and there’s a traditional street market festival in Cheapside on 19th July where Museum of London archaeologists are stepping back in time and showing what treasures the City has been offering up through recent excavations. It’s more of the LFA’s doing, and bartering and groat-spending possibilities should be rife.

Do you have photos of these sofas about town? Let us know with a comment on our Flickr photos.

Jelena Bekvalac, Research Osteologist at the Museum of London, writes:

“The forthcoming Skeletons exhibition to be held at Wellcome from July to September will be the culmination of many months of planning and collaboration between the Centre for Human Bioarchaeology at the Museum of London and the Wellcome Collection. The premise of the exhibition is to give an insight as to what is buried beneath the streets of London and what valuable information can be learnt from analysing the skeletal remains of past inhabitants of London.

London has throughout its long history been developed and rebuilt causing destruction and disturbance of its material history. In the last thirty years or so, such building developments have precipitated archaeological investigations. During these excavations in many instances skeletal human remains are revealed, some of which have been retained for their scientific research value.

The skeletons in the exhibition are all from such developments that have taken place and have been retained as part of the research collection that is curated and archived at the museum. They cannot be returned to their original cemeteries for reburial, as those sites have been built upon. With a very few exceptions the remains are anonymous. Where we do know the names of a few of them who died in the 18th and 19th centuries it has proved impossible to trace any living descendants. The skeletal remains are treated with great respect and the idea of the exhibition is not that it is to see the skeletons of these people as curiosities but as significant repositories of information that can assist many fields of research including that of modern day medics and clinicians.”

Myrofora Neoptolemou, Newcastle University Museum Studies MA student writes:

As part of my MA Museum Studies course, I had my two months work experience at the Museum in Docklands and Museum of London. An informal appointment in advance with Frazer Swift, the Head of Learning, to discuss both sides’ expectations, turned out to be very useful. I expected to gain for my placement a wide experience of museum’s operations/activities. Therefore Frazer wisely decided to split my placement into the Access & Learning Department for the first month and Early London History and Collections Department for the second. In this way he successfully satisfied my expectations as I could experience learning and curatorial job of the museum as well!

For the first moment it was clear that the museum respected its volunteers and is interested not only gaining from them, but also offering them experience that will increase their knowledge, develop their skills and be useful for their career progression. All the museum staffs were so friendly and helpful. Even I know I will soon forget the names, I am sure I will always have their smiley faces engraved in my memory! Good communication and relationships amongst the members of any organisation is of vital importance. It makes your work even more interesting, exciting and inspiring!

Kirsty Sullivan was my supervisor while working in the Access & Learning Department. Working with her it was just a pleasure! I was first involved in the evaluation procedures which sounds like a bit of boring paperwork. I found so useful to know what visitors think about the services and helpful for constantly improving them, trying to satisfy different people’s needs and expectations. In this way each visitor is faced as an individual, given the opportunity to express his/her opinion and feel crucial and valued as his/her voice is heard.

In addition, I attended several sessions for primary and secondary schools, groups with special educational needs, families, toddlers (under 5’s) and carers and adult tours. I feel so lucky because the museum has full programmes of various events and sessions such as storytelling, drama and object handling. Schools sessions were designed to be relevant to the National Curriculum. The freelancers, who led the sessions, catered for different classes’ needs and used their prior knowledge to be flexible and adapt the sessions’ structure.

My work experience coincided with the opening of the Jack the Ripper and the East End exhibition. I was interested in creating the exit evaluation questionnaires of this temporary exhibition and I was given the chance! I had never developed a questionnaire, but with Frazer’s and Kirsty’s co-operation and step by step advice, I managed to put together a questionnaire which matched what the members of the project team wanted to find out. Then Frazer edited it and cut down a lot of questions. He has plenty of experience in evaluations and he respects the time taken by the museum’s visitors to fill in a questionnaire! The last step was interviewing people and getting a sample of 100. This was a challenge! I tried to be smiley and kind with the visitors while asking whether they would like to help the museum evaluating the exhibition. I tried being smiley even after people refused, which was not the easiest thing, I have to admit! It is amazing how different people feel about the same artefacts and how they react alternatively to the messages communicated in the exhibition! The whole activity was very informative and useful and I found it was an enjoyable experience thoroughly!

Museum of London Archaeology Service excavations at 20 Fenchurch Street, London have uncovered a late Roman masonry cellar.

A team of c. 20 MoLAS archaeologists were carrying out the excavations as part of a massive and complex redevelopment programme on behalf of Land Securities. The first phase of work lasted 15 weeks; a second phase is anticipated in the autumn, and a third phase will start in spring 2009.

Site history
In the Early Roman period, the site of 20 Fenchurch Street was probably occupied by a temporary fort, established to protect the city after the Boudican revolt. Later it lay close to the south-east corner of the second Roman forum, constructed in about AD 120. It was also a high-status area of the medieval City, serving as home to wealthy merchants.

Victorian and modern basements and foundations have removed much of the archaeology on site, with only deep pits remaining from later periods. However, early Roman occupation is well-represented archaeologically by an abundance of surfaces, post pits, beam slots and other structural evidence from the first and second centuries.

Roman cellar revealed
We uncovered three sides of a late Roman cellar in the centre of the site. It measured five metres north-south and more than seven metres east-west, with the eastern extent being beyond the edge of the excavation. We found over 2.5 metres of the cellar’s depth, but it was cut off at the top by the modern basements. Most of the masonry had been ‘robbed out’ by people in search of stone after the cellar fell into disuse. However, the substantial ragstone foundations remain to show that it must have been part of an impressive building.

To the north, the wall was dug deeply into the natural slope, forming a terrace behind it. We also discovered evidence of a possible stairway into the cellar from the north. The ceiling had been supported by a large square column base built of Roman bricks. It was floored with mortar directly onto the natural sands.

“A” is for…?
We have no evidence for the building to which the cellar belonged or for what purpose it was used. Apart from pottery and building materials, the only associated find was a fragment of a decorated glass vessel with the letter “A” inscribed on it.

MoLAS Roman glass specialist Angela Wardle has had the opportunity to examine the piece of glass. It is noteworthy because very little 4th-century Roman glass of this quality has been found in London.

Angela says, “This tantalisingly small fragment is from a shallow convex bowl dating from the 4th century, in the typical colourless, rather bubbly glass of the period. Bowls of this type were made on the continent, in the Cologne workshops. The letter ‘A’ is probably part of an inscription which ran around the edge.

The letter could be part of the word VIVAS, but this is surmise; there are other possibilities, such as a name. These bowls are usually decorated with horizontal bands of wheel-cut abrasion, as here, but also with free-hand engraving. It’s possible it may have depicted a hunting scene – but it’s really anybody’s guess!”

The most famous bowl of this type in Britain was excavated at Wint Hill, Banwell, in Somerset, and shows a hunting scene. The design on the Wint Hill bowl is cut on the outside of the bowl but is intended to be viewed from the inside, through the glass. Therefore, the inscription, which essentially means “Good health and long life,” is cut retrograde. The Wint Hill bowl is in the Ashmolean collection and more information about it can be found on their website.

We’ll never know if our fragment comes from anything as posh as the Wint Hill bowl, but it’s nice to imagine it might.

Two podcast tours of London’s East End are now available on the Museum of London’s YouTube channel or as direct downloads. They were produced for the exhibition ‘Jack the Ripper and the East End‘ at the Museum in Docklands.

The tour starts at Whitechapel tube station and takes you through the streets of London, re-populating them through photos, maps and interviews with experts.

Watch Part 1 of the Jack the Ripper and the East End tour on YouTube (09:49 minutes)

or

Download Part 1 of the Jack the Ripper and the East End podcast tour for your iPod (m4v file, 90MB)

Watch Part 2 of the Jack the Ripper and the East End tour on YouTube (07:42 minutes)

or

Download Part 2 of the Jack the Ripper and the East End podcast tour for your iPod (m4v file, 71MB) [Incorrect link was updated on 15 December 2008]