The working life of Museum of London

This month zoologist Alan Pipe talks about the resources for the identification of fish and wild bird bones from archaeological sites in London…

Viewers of ‘Time Team’ and readers of archaeological site reports will be familiar with the recovery of animal bones from a wide range of species, usually dominated by those of domesticated mammals of major economic value for meat, milk, wool or traction. With increased wet-sieving of bulk soil samples, particularly over the past four decades, archaeological recovery of smaller species from all vertebrate groups; fish, amphibians, reptiles, small birds and mammals, continues to expand.

London sites produce particularly diverse assemblages of fish and wild birds and each unfamiliar ‘new’ species presents challenges in identification, indeed some bones are not identifiable to species-level. Museum of London Archaeology holds a useful reference collection used for identification purposes. This concentrates mainly on British fish, birds and mammals and has been built up over the years as a valuable resource in support of MOLA zooarchaeological studies.

Even with access to a reference collection and the increasing availability of reference literature and images, the relatively unfamiliar morphology, fragmentation and often small size, of archaeological fish bones are obstacles to their recovery and identification and this has resulted in their relative neglect by many workers and a reliance on external specialists.

 In an attempt to improve our own internal capability, MOLA Osteology has now established a solid nucleus reference collection of the economically important freshwater (e.g. pike), marine/estuarine (e.g. herring and cod) and migratory (e.g. salmon and eel) species most commonly encountered on London sites.  Researchers interested in studying the fauna of London should contact the LAARC

Gold finger!

Last week saw the second Continue Creating workshop for 2010. This is part of the Inclusion Programme and past participants of all projects are invited back to a workshop every month. It’s social, fun and a way of maintaining a relationship between the Museum and our friends. May’s workshop saw us making C19th style Jumpin’ Jack puppets. Sadly, I can’t seem to upload all the images so here are two of the stars. As you can see, they have a contemporary twist!

The growth of industry and advent of new manufacturing techniques brought with it associated occupational hazards for those going to work in the factories, building sites, dockyards and railways of 19^th century London. This could involve fractured bones resulting from falls from heights, amputation of limbs that were caught in machinery, burns and other workplace incidents. Another cause of illness at work was related to the materials and chemicals involved. One example of this was known as ‘phossy jaw’, where the vapor emitted during the manufacture of ‘strike anywhere’ matches could result in gangrene if the poisonous phosphorous fumes penetrated the jaw bone (Picard 2005). This could lead to the formation of an abscess and disfigurment with surgical removal of the jaw bone the only treatment.

The excavation of St Mary and St Michael Church, Whitechapel by MOLA revealed one possible example of this affliction.  The skeletal remains of an adult male aged 26-35 years displayed active, localised bone changes to the mandible (lower jaw). There were areas of fine pitting together with occasional large pits to the buccal (cheek facing) and lingual (tongue facing) surfaces of the jaw. Towards the mandibular rami (posterior jaw) were areas of eroded bone that revealed the underlying spongy bone structure. The outer cortex of the bone also appeared abnormally thickened.

Radiographs of the jaw revealed regions of irregular, thinned bone and also areas of increased thickening towards the mentum (chin). While a diagnosis of ‘phossy jaw’ is difficult to prove conclusively, this helped to identify osteonecrosis of the mandible, a condition where the blood supply to the bone is disrupted resulting in the necrosis (death of bone cells). Such changes may also be caused by a range of other conditions and infections such as syphilis.

The identification of this condition from excavated skeletal remains provides a rare glimpse into the dangers faced in the work place and the changes related to the expansion of cities and industrialisation at this time

I had some bite-sized staggered posts planned, but instead time/crashing computers/ going on leave has dictated a highlights post of what’s going on at the moment.

Firstly, we welcomed Nanny of the Maroons into our London, Sugar and Slavery Gallery. Queen Nanny is a gallery performance that Lynda  has been working on for a while now with the support of some fantastic and talented writers, musicians and advisors, not least Carlina who plays Nanny:

Queen Nanny looks out with Jamaican Plantation scene behind.

So far, what has been in the gallery is a working performance; script in hand, laptop on ahem, lap, and live acapella singing in place of our soundtrack. This was kept as a working performance so that we could invite active feedback from our Museum visitors and use this to fine tune our final Nanny character.

Discussion with audience members was really useful, the feedback we received was both positive and constructive, and mentioned pace, volume and content of the performance, which we were able to incorporate into rehearsals and revisions over the following weeks.

The final piece will be performed here at Docklands on Saturday at 2.30pm and 3.30pm, and Sunday 2.00pm and 3.00pm (entrance is free!), and will be scheduled into the events programme across both the Museum of London and Docklands sites over the coming months, as well as forming part of a larger Black History event we are planning in October. If you have any queries about Nanny, please feel free to get in touch.

The Crossing the Seas team take a turn in front of the Camera for a group interview.

Onto the Crossing the Seas project now,  and all the interviews have been carried out by Lynda and our expert team of young people from Newham, both behind the camera and conducting the interviews.

Lynda and Freddie set up the shot for an interview.

Lynda is finishing off the edits in order for them to be compressed and installed onto the touch screen interactive in the LSS Gallery, and I’m finishing off the transcripts so they can go into the Museum collections. I’m slightly word blind at this point, but the content of the interviews are so interesting that you don’t mind the length of time it takes to go through the entire dialogue.

I will update you once the interviews are installed, and would like to hear your feedback.

Finally, a beautiful splash of colour:

Detail from Price of Sweetness Bowl.

This year we have two batches of bowls to go into the Gallery; the set that have just gone into the Gallery have been made by a Elders group from the African and Caribbean Voices Association based in Stratford. This was a Women-only group who worked with Historian Angelina Osborne and Ceramicist Licy Clayden to create these beautifully colourful pieces.

The next set of bowls to go in have been made by families visiting Docklands over the half-term, who were inspired by the words of creative writer and performer Breis. While simple in design, the bowls have been decorated with creative and crafty phrases and slogans. When they’re in I’ll put up some images.

I’ll leave you with this lovely detail of a Caribbean Sunset, and don’t worry, I haven’t forgotten about the Mixtape…….

The excavations at the Royal London Hospital, Whitechapel (RLP05) in London’s East End have yielded a small, but unique, group of pottery and glass relating to the selective clear out of hospital equipment around the 1860s. Excavated from the Bedstead area of the east wing of the Hospital, this adds to the large volume of fascinating disarticulated human and animal bones already found from the old Hospital’s cemetery.

Filled with pharmaceuticals from the dispensary of the hospital, the two glass prescription bottles (see image below) have the embossed text of ‘STOLEN FROM THE LONDON HOSPITAL’ written down the side. This warning ensured that if taken, they could not be refilled and resold: similar warnings on glass from this period are common with companies sometimes prosecuting individuals for illegal reuse.

Glassware from the Royal London Hospital

However, it is the specially commissioned blue transfer-printed whiteware crockery bearing the image of the London Hospital that provides most of the stuff thrown away here. Supplied as a special commission, probably by one of Stoke-on-Trent potteries, it is thought these pots were brought to coincide with the hospitals extension and refurbishment during the 1830s. In addition to the new board room furniture and hospital equipment added, pottery was also purchased for use in the wards. The blue transfer-printed whiteware vessels found were used as wash basins, saucers, plates and jugs but the most well preserved vessels are the sputum mugs (see below image). These spit mugs were used to collect the patient’s phlegm, water was then added to distill its contents which were concealed by a removable funnel….

Sputum mug

Nearly all the commissioned pieces have numbers ranging from 1 to 4 painted on their base – we think this was the individual ward or floor they belonged – to make sure each could be accounted for.  The remaining hospital pottery comprises plain whitewares bedpans and an invalid feeding cup used for serving pap – a mixture of flour or bread and diluted milk – usually to infants.

Ward crockery was necessary as patients to the hospital had to supply their own tea, sugar, and butter and so needed jars to store their food and plates to eat their meals from. It is therefore easy to imagine the many ways in which this pottery could have been broken, not least because running water was not extended beyond the first floor of the hospital until the early 20th century, and therefore boxes of washing up water had to be carried up and downstairs for the nurses to wash the crockery. Any breakages were taken out of the nurse’s wages!

Comparisons can be made between this assemblage and the objects curated by the Royal London Museum with pottery bearing similar images of the Hospital also present. Like the excavated examples, many have also have a number on the base and the range of vessels in their collection includes a teacup and saucer, a butter dish, sugar and soup bowls, and hygiene wares such as a chamber pot and soap dish.

Combining and further researching the Royal London Museum’s with our excavated collection will significantly add to understanding the context of use and the pottery and glass in London’s hospitals during the mid to late Victorian period.

By Dr James Morris

Recently I’ve been working on the animal bone from the Royal London Hospital (RLP05) excavated by MOLA in 2006. Some of this consists of waste from the hospital kitchens, and gives us fascinating evidence for the diet of both the patients and staff. The hospital was founded in 1740 and archaeological evidence suggests that the associated burial ground was in use from 1820-1854. The remains give a brilliant opportunity to combine the zooarchaeological data with the historical records, which show hospital food has never been great.

However, amongst the animal remains were a number of more unusual finds which were not from the hospital kitchen. Attached to the hospital was an anatomy school and many of the animal bones appear to originate from the activities carried out there. This includes a number of dissected cows, sheep, horses, dogs, cats and rabbit s, buried as partial or complete skeletons. We even have evidence that some of the skeletons were wired together to be used in teaching anatomy. There have also been a number of surprises including the skull of a guinea pig, the partial skeleton of a tortoise and a headless monkey. The tortoise was missing the skull, shell and most of its feet, which may have been kept by the anatomy school or deposited elsewhere. Similarly the lack of the monkey’s skull and neck vertebrae would suggest that the head had been kept by the anatomists.

As a British based zooarchaeologist, finds of tortoise and monkey are incredibly rare, and therefore we needed to turn to experts outside the Museum of London for help to identify the bones to a specific species. If you have been watching the BBC’s ‘Museum of Life’ with Jimmy Doherty (who makes very nice sausages, I’m lucky enough to live close to his farm) you’ll know that we have one of the world’s best zoological collections in London at the Natural History Museum. So it was with some excitement that I made my way to the Natural History Museum, only to arrive there and realise I’d gone to a free museum during a school holiday. After battling through the crowds, I was lead by Colin McCarthy, Collections Manager for Reptiles, Amphibians and Fish, to the museum’s old dry store number one. If you saw the first Museum of Life show it’s the amazingly huge store full of a host of old specimens ranging from zebra to tortoises (have a look at episode 1, 17min 40sec into the program). I could have stayed in there for days, but under Colin’s excellent guidance we quickly identified the tortoise as being a European tortoise either Greek or Herman’s.

Identification of the monkey required me to visit the zoological department and the mammals collection which is held over a number of different floors at the back of the museum. Identification of the monkey was much trickier and involved a good few hours examining different skeletons held in the museum’s collection. The monkey collection is held in row upon row of metal cabinets that don’t have windows. That means you need to be prepared for a surprise when searching the collection. At one point, standing on a step ladder to access an upper cabinet, I did open a door to be greeted face to face with a snarling monkey. Fortunately it was an old stuffed specimen, unfortunately, by the time I realised that I’d already undone any reputation I had as a cool zooarchaeologist by letting out a manly yelp, much to the amusement of the other researchers using the collection. Eventually we identified the monkey as a Mona Monkey, which comes from south-west Africa.

You may ask why go to such trouble to identify these species? Well, the tortoise may be one of the earliest archaeological examples of tortoise from the United Kingdom, and the Mona monkey is the first example of such a species to have been found archaeologically, certainly in London and possibly in the United Kingdom. Analysis of the specimens and the site is still ongoing, but these skeletons show how far and wide animals were traded at the beginning of the 1800s: the tortoise is likely to have come to London from the eastern Mediterranean and the Monkey from south-west Africa.

The next step is to investigate how the anatomy school acquired such animals and why, and what they were used? Identifying the bones to a species is just the beginning of the investigation.

A big thank you to Colin McCarthy, Louise Tomsett and Paula Jenkins for helping arrange my Natural History Museum visit and helping me on the day.
 
You can also find out more about my background and my other research at http://www.animalbones.org

At work in Elephant and Castle

As a newbie to the museum, I thought I’d say hello by introducing the project I’m currently working on, People and Change. The project, which was devised by Lucie Fitton, is working with predominantly adult asylum seekers to produce art work that will be displayed in the London, Sugar and Slavery gallery. The gallery has multiple themes and the one we’re exploring with this group is Change. Rosemarie Marke, an acclaimed painter and ex-aslyum seeker who was born in Sierra Leone, is leading the group. We’re working in two centres in Peckham with lots of different individuals. Each is producing a drawing or painting of what change means to them. Some have chosen to draw things associated with home (house, landscape, objects) or parts of London life that are totally new to them – e.g. football stadiums, London buses, British festivals. The more talented and regularly attending members, however, have branched out and are now producing more abstract work. We are encouraging them all to write something about the picture in their mother tongue, and this will be displayed with the piece on the wall with an English translation.

Simply being at the centre, reveals how rewarding and challenging this project is for both the Museum and the participants. Prior to this project, I had never been inside a support centre for asylum seekers and I have learnt a lot. Both centres are community halls that open one afternoon a week to offer a range of services – a hot meal between 1 and 2pm, medical consultation with a nurse, a crèche and nanny, advice on housing, employment and benefits, English lessons and arts and craft activities. There are usually at least 40 people there and in broad terms, half are young mothers with children under 5 and half are men between the ages of 25 and 40. Although we don’t talk about this, we know from the support workers that many are separated from their family, often recovering from trauma and in constant uncertainty over their future. For some people, even getting to the centre is quite a triumph. Either psychologically, or logistically, it can be very difficult. One of our regular attendees lives in Edmonton but goes to the centre every day.

We never know who is going to sit down when we set up our materials on the tables after lunch, but there are a few faces who have attended nearly all of the sessions. We meet quite a few people only once but even in one afternoon an individual can produce a very interesting piece of work. We don’t ask participants their story, unless they bring the subject up themselves, but sometimes people will tell us something about home. Often though, talk focuses around colour and technique and sharing artistic tips. One person had never seen a paintbrush before and until he was corrected by Rosemarie, was painting using the non-bristle end.

Home in Eritrea and Home in London

The point of the project, from the museum’s point of view is to give these individuals a voice in the gallery. From their point of view, we hope, it is to be able to express something and to share a calm experience for a few hours a week. There is not too much talking, which makes the session quite relaxing and takes the pressure off the participants to speak English all the time. We hope that the prospect of displaying their work at a high profile gallery is fun and confidence giving and we very much hope that the artists can be at the unveiling. There are a lot of factors, however, that guaranteeing this could be very difficult.

We are working in Peckham until the end of March and hope that the work should be up by autumn. When it does go on display, look out for work by the following characters – Gloria, Dawit, Mal, Bernard, Maria and Dani.

If so, we would like to hear from you!

Over at the Museum of London Docklands, Lynda (Community Access Officer) and I have been working in partnership with students and staff from Newham Community Links to prepare a programme of video interviews. This project forms part of a series of community involvement projects that are currently underway.

The young people involved in this project have been commissioned to research, organise and film interviews on the theme of ‘the Children of the Windrush Generation’. This will explore the experiences of London-born adults with Caribbean parents, documenting their memories of childhood, attending school and growing up in London during the 1960s,1970s and 1980s.

The final interviews will be installed into a permanent touch-screen display in our ‘London, Sugar and Slavery’ Gallery. We currently have some great people lined up to interview, but are still looking for more interviewees. If you would like to take part, please contact us here: crossingtheseas@museumoflondon.org.uk.

So who is our project production team and what have they been up to so far?

Meet Shona, Grant, Tola, Freddie, Charley and Jason.

We have been working together since January, when Lynda and I went over the the Newham Community Links Centre to introduce ourselves and explain the project brief. We discussed the ways we would be working, what we needed to research and film, and a rough timetable of the project. It was a chance for the group to decide whether they wanted to get involved, to ask questions and to let us know if there was a particular aspect of the project they were most interested in (for example music/soundtrack production). It was also a great opportunity to catch up with Sophie, who is one of the Centre Managers, and who has been extremely patient with us whilst we got the project brief together (Hello Sophie! and thank you!) 

For the first week, the group came over to the Museum of London Docklands to get acquainted with the Museum space, and to take a look at the touch screen interactive in the LSS Gallery that their final work will go into. We had some great discussions in reaction to the Gallery, and followed this up with a look at the film ‘500 years later’ by Owen ‘Alik Shahadah – we have shown this film to previous project groups at the Museum, and find it always serves as serious food for thought.

The second week was all about getting our head round the periods of the 60s-80s, and in particular, focusing on what was happening in London. Using the timeline produced by the Roots to Reckoning team (Neil Kenlock, Armet Francis, and Charlie Phillips), each group member selected a particular event or issue from each respective decade, and used the wonder of Internet connections to research related articles and photos. The information collated made up the beginnings of idea/mood boards for each decade, which we will continue to build on over the project. From these boards we also drew up four working categories: Education, Entertainment, Career and Ambition, and Lifestyle. These will be developed into the final themes the interviews will go into on the touch-screen installation.

Last week we were joined by Rib Davis from the Oral History Society, who led an introductory workshop on recording Oral History and practical interview techniques. Rib has worked on a series of fantastic Oral History projects over at The Lightbox, and has a wealth of experience having carried out hundreds of interviews. It was great to pick his brains regarding interview etiquette, finding the right questions to get people talking, and of course, the art of laughing without making a sound (essential for audio-only interviews).

I particularly enjoyed listening to the practice interviews, when our young people took up the interviewer roles. It was a sly opportunity to earwig into the teenage lives of Lynda, Shona, Jason and Rib – I heard snippets of disgruntled trumpet practice, football matches vs. live music, and the inevitability of growing old and relying on Lucozade, it was pretty fascinating!

And so, the project continues on this week, which I hope to update you with in the not-too-distant future. Major kudos must be given to our group (both staff and students), who have kindly volunteered to come in during their half-term break (which Lynda and I are really very happy about, otherwise I will eat all the biscuits). I am also hoping that we will actually get some of our young people on here to update the project blog, and I do believe we have a mix-tape in the works……..  

 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.