Inside the Museum of London

Day 1 of the Archaeological Archive’s 10th Anniversary Celebrations

If you happened to visit the Museum of London today, did you spot us? The staff and volunteers at the London Archaeological Archive & Research Centre (LAARC) have begun our 10 week residency at the Museum to share our work with you! And if you weren’t at the museum today, here’s what you missed:

Outside our “London Before London” gallery, our archive manager had a selection of goodies:

• Visitors handled objects made in London almost 2000 years ago
• Visitors looked at the original records sheets that archaeologists wrote whilst they were digging up sites.
• School groups had fun trying to figure out a mystery object whose identity was revealed by an  x-ray
• Teachers admired a range of artefacts dug up by school children during our 2005 community project
• Londoners searched our online catalogue to find out what’s been dug up in their area
• One budding young archaeologist tried on a hard hat and held a trowel for the first time!

Meanwhile, a bit further on in “Archaeology In Action” all this was going on:

• Conservation students from University College London were showing people how a piece of wood deteriorates if not looked after.
• There was more guessing of mystery objects using x-rays for answers
• Visitors were handling, comparing (and sniffing) pieces of leather, all conserved in different ways.
• You could take a look at how conservators remove very fragile objects from an excavation

Alongside the conservators were LAARC volunteers:

• Packing archaeological finds, they were chatting to visitors about what they were doing.
• Visitors were able to pick up and handle real objects
• You could discover how we store artefacts at the museum and why we do so

To cap things off several visitors joined us for our afternoon workshop – Hands-On Archaeology – where they learnt a bit about London’s Archaeological history, got their “hands on” some real roman pottery, worked alongside volunteers and sorted pots into different types and helped us improve the way these pot sherds are stored.

So all in all it was a pretty awesome day. It was great to meet so many visitors and share a bit of our work with them. And if you weren’t there today, don’t worry, we’re doing it all again tomorrow and on Friday and indeed, we’ll be around for the next 10 weeks, so come along and say hi.

For more information about our various events visit our website’s events pages: events pages link