The working life of Museum of London

The start of the Registered Finds Project!

For week 2, the volunteers got their hands on some Registered Finds – objects that have been issued their own finds number as they have an individual importance.

Monday’s team got off to a flying start working through all the finds from the St Thomas St excavation in 1974 (1STS74). The 6 volunteers saw the full range of artefacts from Roman samian stamps, to bone counters, to wooden writing tablets to leather hobnail shoes. Altogether 541 objects were checked and by effective packaging and reboxing, the site reduced from 19 boxes to 15!

Tuesday’s team began VIP5’s first mammoth site – Trig Lane (TL74). One of the first huge waterfront sites dug by the Department of Urban Archaeology (DUA), this archive has 215 boxes to get through. However, Tuesday’s 6 managed to audit all the site’s bone artefacts and all its wooden objects too. One object that stood out was this curious wooden piece (see below). Possibly a joint or some kind of fitting, we weren’t too sure. Any suggestions let us know in the comments field.

Wednesday’s VIP Graduates mixed their day up a little, starting off with some of the pottery from London Docks (LD76). But it was back to the leather finds from Trig Lane in the afternoon, processing a few more boxes and coming across some awesome bits such as the leather at the top of the page and this spectacular decorated strap.

And Thursday’s team picked up where the Graduates left off, continuing all day with the leather and managing to get through the whole lot! The final thing they got to see was this amazing 15th Century boot.

Week 2 saw the first of our specialist workshops with Monday and Tuesday’s lot examining a human skeleton and discovering how disease and trauma can be identified in bones. Wednesday and Thursday’s teams learnt more about archaeological leather and saw some sweet examples of roman, medieval and later shoes found on waterlogged sites.

Saturday’s team are due to start today and then next week we’ll be splitting the days up working on both strands of the project. Who knows what will turn up ? To see more photos visit our Flickr account

The return of LAARC’s Volunteer Inclusion Project!

We’re back! This week saw the start of LAARC’s 5th VIP project, which we’ve quite cunningly named… VIP5! 30 volunteers working their way through the neglected archives of the 70’s. So what have they been up to?

As per every VIP project, each day started with an hour’s induction into the LAARC. Volunteer’s are issued with  a shiny new volunteer handbook, their photos are taken for their ID cards and we take them on a health and safety focused tour of LAARC, highlighting the under appreciated dangers of staples and how to avoid squashing people in roller-racking.

VIP5 has seen the best start so far over all our VIP projects with almost a full complement of volunteers making week one. This time round, each day has six volunteers witha nice mix of ages, sexes, backgrounds and social situations. Monday, Tuesday and Thursday’s volunteers are all new (Saturday’s new volunteers are starting soon) and each day followed the same structure this week. After the induction, they all were introduced to repacking general finds, with some boxes of animal bones to get their mits on. Over the three days, all the animal bone from 1976’s London Docks excavation (LD76) was processed and transformed from disintegrating brown paper bags to brand spanking new plastic ones.

Included amongst the bone were some fabulous examples including a complete dog skeleton (see above), a deformed chicken leg and a cow bone with additional bone growth and the “cloaca” – the hole where the pus would have drained out from. We were very lucky to have MOLA zooarchaeologist Jim, come and identify some bits and pieces and MOLA osteologist show us the difference between human and animal bone during their tea breaks.

Each afternoon, volunteers moved from animal bone to pottery from The Highway (LD74). In doing so they encountered various sherds of Roman and Post Medieval ceramics, from mortarium to delftware. To complete their day, we thought we’d treat them to their first visit to the Ceramic and Glass store to handle some complete versions of the fragments they’d earlier been repacking.

So that was Mon, Tues and Thurs but what about Wednesday? Well, Wednesday welcomed our “VIP Graduates” back to the project. With experience from VIP1, 2, 3 & 4, the grads are focusing on leather finds with the view to reducing the space they take up so eventually they can be reintegrated into the rest of the registered finds. The first site they got to update was the awesome Trig Lane excavation from 1974  (TL74), one of the first and largest sites excavated  by the old Department of Urban Archaeology (DUA). Some spectacular medieval shoes, straps and scabbards were amongst the beauties they audited this week.

And so week one ends. Next week volunteers are introduced to Registered Finds and we have the first round of specialist workshops to look forward to. All good stuff.

For more photos from the project visit our Flickr Account

 Dental disease and other afflictions of the teeth were suffered by many in the nineteenth century. The analysis of skeletons from St Mary and St Michael, Whitechapel, London revealed over 80% of adults with carious lesions (cavities) and 90% with mineralized plaque deposits (calculus) stuck to the surfaces of their teeth. This suggested a starchy diet that was high in carbohydrates and containing sugars, as well as poor oral hygiene. Almost 80% of individuals had also lost at least some of their teeth during life, most likely through decay and disease.

 The nineteenth century also saw major advances in the practice of dentistry and the development of new restorative techniques. New materials such as amalgam (mercury and metal) were introduced to fill cavities and prosthetics were used to replace missing teeth (Roberts and Cox 2003: 323).

These false teeth could be made of ivory, bone or porcelain and human teeth were also often used. These came from live donors or could be extracted from the dead, earning some extra money for body snatchers if the bodies they exhumed were too decayed to sell to anatomists (Richardson 1988).

 An example of dental work was recovered during the excavation by MOLA of  the cemetery of St Mary and St Michael. A maxillary (upper jaw) prosthesis was found associated with an adult female burial. This comprised a thin plate of rose-gold coloured metal that was carefully fitted around the remaining teeth. A high degree of skill had been used in the construction of this item and the metal was molded around the gums and palate in order to hold it in place. Four ceramic teeth were fixed in place by small gold pins. These replaced the right premolars, left second premolar and first molar teeth that had been lost during the individuals life. A dark material to the central aspect of the occlussal (biting surface) of the right secondary molar suggested that this person had also had a cavity filled.

This evidence provides an important glimpse into the types of dental treatment available. However, the construction of such dentures would have required considerable time and skill and would have remained out of reach of many individuals from poorer backgrounds in London.

LAARC VIP5

We’re back! And refreshed after the coldness of January, we’re revitalised and ready for the fifth LAARC Volunteer Inclusion Project (VIP5)

Over the next few weeks we shall be recruiting 20 new VIP volunteers for 10 weeks of finds handling, archive improving and skill acquiring work. Sites that we intend to improve this time around include the huge Trig Lane site from 1974 (TL74), the London Docks site, also from 1974 (LH74) and the excellent Chaucer House site from 1975 (CH75)

In addition to the new 20, we welcome back 6 VIP Graduates, who have all volunteered in previous VIP programmes. Their work will also include a focus on leather finds, in an attempt to improve a large quantity of our leather collection.

The VIP project is slowly transforming the Museum’s archaeological collections, taking neglected finds from the 1970’s, objects that never had the funds to be housed properly, and giving them a new home, in a clear plastic bag with two legible labels and numerically organised neighbouring objects in new sturdy, standard sized boxes.

The previous projects have seen volunteers improve 1245 boxes of general finds, audit over 10,000 individually registered finds, move archives from 353 sites excavated between 1972 – 1987 on to new shelves in our metal store and complete work on the whole finds archive from 2005’s community excavation in Shoreditch Park.

As per previous projects, we have organised four specialist workshops which aim to provide volunteers, both VIP and throughout the Museum of London, with basic background knowledge of the material they will get to handle

Find out how we progress by viewing these blog pages which are kept updated each week as well as our project photos on Flickr.

Like a number of my colleagues in the Museum of London’s Department of Archaeological Collections and Archive, I belong to the Society of Museum Archaeologists (SMA). 

At last year’s annual SMA conference, I (along with many others!) enjoyed an excellent presentation from Detective Sergeant Vernon Rapley about the work of the Metropolitan Police Service’s Art and Antiques Unit. D.S. Rapley discussed several recent cases of fakes and forgeries, such as the infamous case of Shaun Greenhalgh.

D.S. Rapley’s talk provoked a lot of interest and discussion amongst SMA members, and we recently had the privilege of learning more about the world of fakes and forgeries with a guided tour of the ‘Fakes and Forgeries’ special exhibition put together by the Metropolitan Police Service’s Art and Antiques Unit at the Victoria and Albert Museum, London. Of particular interest to me were the archaeological artefacts that had been forged, including a number of Anglo-Saxon coins.

Walking around the exhibition and listening to our guide, Detective Sergeant Ian Lawson, you couldn’t help but be struck by the lengths that people had to gone to in order to establish a history or ‘provenance’ for the objects they had created. In many cases, documentation ‘proving’ the authenticity of the objects had been forged, including letters from Museum curators.

The special exhibition and work of the Metropolitan Police Service’s Art and Antiques Unit has really brought home the need to work closely with other museums, particularly in London, to tackle fakes and forgeries.

Paget ’s disease

A major difficulty when diagnosing pathological disease in archaeological skeletal remains is that many conditions may only affect the soft tissues of the body, such as the skin or organs. This may result in the death of a person before bone changes took place, leaving no visible traces on the skeleton to be observed. Some diseases, however, may directly affect the bones. The way that bone responds and the distribution pattern of changes throughout the skeleton, enable certain pathologies suffered in life to be identified.

One such pathology occasionally encountered in the osteological analysis of archaeological human bone is Paget’s disease. During life, the human skeleton constantly remodels, repairs and grows. Paget’s disease disrupts this normal routine and results in an increased bone turnover. This can affect single or multiple bones and involve the entire skeleton, resulting in severe deformity and enlargement of affected areas. The skull, spine, sacrum and upper legs are the most commonly involved.

This rare condition was first described by James Paget in 1877. Today the exact causes remain unknown and multiple origins are thought likely. In modern cases, the disease is more common amongst males than females and tends to affect older individuals.

The osteological analysis of post-medieval population from Bow Baptist Church, London by MoLA revealed one individual who displayed bone changes consistent with a diagnosis of Paget’s disease.

An older male aged 46 years or over displayed thickening of the cranial bones with new bone formed to the internal and outer surfaces that was porous and pumice stone like. Examination of radiographs revealed enlargement of the bone cortex with areas that displayed a ‘cotton wool’ like appearance.

The vertebral bodies also showed enlargement and this was more apparent in the lower lumbar regions of the spine. Radiographs showed sclerotic areas (thickening) at the margins of the vertebral centra and areas of porosity to the internal trabecular structures. This gave a ‘picture frame’ appearance in radiographs. The disease had also resulted in deformity and enlargement to the clavicles (collar bone), scapula (shoulder) upper legs and pelvis.

Pathological fractures are a common feature of this disease due to weakening of the bone structures that may cause bowing of the limbs. This individual had suffered compression fractures to several vertebrae. This had also resulted in degenerative joint disease and osteoarthritis throughout the spine. Osteoarthritis was also recorded in the hands and shoulder joints.

This individual may have been unaware that he had such a disease during life as many cases are asymptomatic. However, some people can suffer bone pain, headaches and hearing loss.

For more information see:

Brickley, M, and Ives, R, 2008 The bioarchaeology of metabolic disease, Oxford

Ortner DJ, 2003, Identification of pathological conditions in human skeletal remains. London

Roberts, C A, and Manchester, K, 2005, The archaeology of disease, Third edition, Stroud

The End of Project Four.

Time has seemed to speed by during this project as we packed and checked off our final objects until February next year. Saturday’s volunteer helped check off the final objects from Seal House (SH74), viewing along the way some fine iron artefacts (see below photos) By the end of the day, there was only three more boxes left from the site.

Monday’s final morning saw them work on a dreaded box from London Docks, labelled “Misc finds”. Always an excitement to open, sadly it quickly became apparent why these had been left in this box as a mixture of materials, some nice, some rusty nails, finally got placed into the standard bags we require.

Tuesday’s team culminated their experience at LAARC with 15 minutes of fame as a reporter and photographer spent time with them during their last morning. A piece is soon to be written via the Museum’s Hub and Renaissance, highlighting the spectacular effort LAARC volunteers put in. Whilst snaps were being taken, the fantastic four also completed Seal House (SH74) material, finishing the final three boxes and even working on some remaining pottery sherds from London Docks (LD74)

Wednesday morning was a chance to sit back and relax as the U3A volunteers presented some of the finest PowerPoints we’ve seen in the archive. All topics were inspired by the Shoreditch Park archive and ranged from V1 & V2 bombs, to The Lives of The Family of 32 Dorchester Street, to War Time Rations, to Crime in Wartime Shoreditch. These excellent presentations included personal photographs, original rations books, sound recordings and Powerpoints with animation.

To celebrate the achievements of VIP4, each afternoon was spent at the Museum of London itself, with special behind the scene tours, starting with the recently opened Clore Learning Centre, followed by the fascinating Centre for Human Bioarchaeology and ended with a visit to the Roman Fort Gate, beneath London Wall.

Overall, the project has seen many successes and continued to develop Inclusive Volunteering Opportunities with archaeological collections. 11 site archives have been fully audited on the Registered Finds side of the project and another length of 20+ shelves full of boxes processed on the General Finds side. The next project starts in February 2010. See you then.

A History Of LAARC’s Object Of The Month Competition

For the past four years, the London Archaeological Archive & Research Centre (LAARC) has run an object of the month competition. Since its conception and humble beginnings, it has developed and evolved into a popular monthly event, enjoyed by LAARC visitors, volunteers and Museum staff alike.

Back in late 2005, the idea of an object of the month was not a new one. If you visited the websites of several museums across the country, you could find a monthly updated page dedicated to an object within their collections. The Museum of London however, wasn’t one of these and with over 6 million archaeological artefacts to choose from, it seemed a pity not to highlight our goodies.

LAARC volunteers regular get to rediscover incredible objects when working on site archives and it was a common for us to joke that certain objects were so good that they were definitely the best object of the day, if not the week, if not the year. So around Nov 2005 I thought we should do something about it. As luck would have it, the next month we inherited a suitable display case and come January 2005, our first outstanding object that caught our eye.

The first object was a Samian bowl from Borough High Street, which had been repaired in antiquity with lead rivets. (It later proved so good the V&A borrowed it for one of their exhibitions) And so the LAARC joined the many other museums and had an object of the month!

However, being the innovators that we strive to be, I wanted our Object of the Month to go beyond us simply picking an artefact and with the number of cool stuff volunteers were coming across each week, I thought about making it a competition, with several objects competing against each other to win votes; the one with the most became that month’s object.

And so it continued through January to December for the whole of 2006, yet the focus was still pretty much a competition directed at our volunteers and visitors to the archive. In 2007, we took it to the next step and hosted the competition on the LAARC website. This then progressed in April 2008 to the museum’s archaeology blog page, which gave voters the option to leave comments.

In 2009, the competition was due to continue on the blog site with the format the same as it always had been; three objects chosen by volunteers from the material they had recently been working on. However, around the start of the year, the blog’s server went down and forced to find an alternative host, I also thought it time to refresh the format.

For the past year, each month there has been one object selected by a LAARC volunteer, one by a LAARC member of staff and the final by a Museum of London curator. Unlike before, the objects were no longer necessarily from recently worked on archives, but could also include people’s favourite objects. Yet, the basic concept remained: Three objects, one vote, one winner selected by the public.

As the months passed the audience grew and each month saw more votes, a few comments about the objects from voters and even people requesting to nominate objects. Halfway through the year, special competitions were held, including former staff nominating, a special retirement competition and a “lucky loser” second chance month. Almost 1000 votes were received this year in total.

The final monthly competition took place in November, when for the first time seven objects were nominated, these by seven members of staff from seven different museum departments. As with previous years, all the monthly winners go through to December’s Object of the Year, which you can vote for by clicking here.

Having reached its peak, the LAARC competition now retires on a high, with its legacy continuing on these blog pages as the Museum of London now has its own Object of the Month, with contributions from all over our museum staff and volunteers. Thoughout 2010 you can discover a whole range of spectacular objects held within the museum’s collections.

Thanks for voting in the past and enjoy the objects in the future!

The penultimate week of our  4th volunteer project.

Keeping on track of things, we made steady progress this week, with a bit of work on pottery on Monday as our attempt to finish the boxes of pot from London Docks (LD74) continues. Interesting ceramics such as fancy decorated Tin Glazed ware and Angry faced Bartmann Jars were amongst the hundreds of sherds our hard working volunteers repacked.

Our second current aim – to finish the registered finds from Seal House (SH74) also progressed nicely on Tuesday, when volunteers checked all the ceramic accessioned finds from the site, including over a hundred tiles that made up a Medieval floor. This was followed in the afternoon by checking through the site’s general leather finds, namely post medieval shoe fragments, waste fragments and offcuts. Despite the sound of this, some spectacular bits cropped up including an extremly rare example of a piece of waste leather that was never properly cleaned when first used around 500 years ago. Tuffs of animal hair still remain on the piece of leather.(see above photo) Incredible!

Wednesday’s U3A team finished off their powerpoints for next week’s presentations and the effort they have put in is second to none. Next Wednesday looks set to be a fab morning as they present topics including War time gardens, the impact of bombs and the crows in Shoreditch Park!

Thursday’s lack of volunteers gave Adam & Glynn an opportunity to catch up on some reboxing and get closer to finding out just how much extra space VIP4 has produced.

In next week’s final week we shall be seeing if we can achieve those targets and finish the London Docks pottery and Seal House finds, before spending the afternoons seeing behind the scenes at the Museum of London itself.

In my previous blog article – Archaeology and the Digital World, I mentioned that archaeology often generates a wealth of digital records in addition to the traditional paper records you would expect to find in an archaeological archive such as context sheets, site notes and plans and sections.

More archaeologists than ever are using digital technologies to record on site. The most obvious example of this is the use of digital cameras, particularly during standing building recording investigations. As a result, we are finding that archives often now contain a significant proportion of ‘born-digital’ records, for which there is no paper equivalent. 

Despite significant advances in the field of digital preservation over the past 10 years, we still request that depositors provide selected key records in both digital and paper format. Our revised Standards for Deposition provide further detail about these requirements. We recognise however that this may need to change, even as soon as the next 12-18 months. 

One issue we are currently exploring here at the LAARC is whether or not to permit archaeological site plans to be provided in digital format only. Depositors are currently required to provide a hard copy plot of any site plans in addition to the digital version(s), which are generally produced in AutoCAD or ArcGIS software programmes. However, with the development of free software readers for AutoCAD DWG/ DXF files and ArcGIS shape files, and the ability to produce static versions of site plans in PDF or TIF format for researchers who simply want to see where a site is located (as opposed to undertaking more detailed site location analyses), is this really necessary?

We would be very interested to know your thoughts on this issue, and would welcome any comments. Do you think it is time to embrace digital only, or is it still too soon to forgo hard copy site plans altogether? What would you prefer to use if undertaking archaeological research at the LAARC?