The working life of Museum of London

The excavation continues and today we were helped by pupils from Camelot Primary School in the morning and Cobourg Primary School in the afternoon. A big thank-you to all the pupils who took part today; I think you can see from the photos that they had fun!

The digging is being supervised by Tom Hoyle, who works for Museum of London Archaeology (MOLA). This isn’t his first experience of community archaeology. Last year he worked on the Big Dig at the Museum of London Docklands. This was an indoor activity where families could learn how to dig in a replica excavation. The Big Dig will be running again on 24 and 25 July as part of the Festival of British Archaeology activities at the Museum of London and places on it can be booked on the day.

Tom is really enjoying the community dig at Burgess Park. He has worked at MOLA for three years and before that at Leicester where he found a Roman lead curse – the most exciting thing that he has ever found. Maybe Burgess Park will turn up something to rival this! Tom says he enjoys meeting the schools and helping them to learn about archaeology. As he says: ‘Every day brings a new challenge!’

Today also saw the marking out of the new trench which we will be opening up tomorrow. This trench will form part of the Museum of London’s training excavation which starts on Monday and runs for two weeks. We are excavating a trench facing onto Pepler Road, which should allow us to see what the houses were like on that road. We know that they are later in date than those on Trafalgar Avenue, so we want to see how they differ in terms of construction and the artefacts recovered.

In the picture above top, you can see archaeologist Ian Blair marking out the new trench. In the picture above, is Pepler Road, once a busy road with houses full of families living there. Today it is a road to no-where, as only one end of it survives, off Waite Street, before it becomes a meandering path through the park.

Jackie Keily, Museum of London

See our Flickr photostream for more photos from Day 9 at Burgess Park