The working life of Museum of London

Into the 2nd half of the project…

Things really started off this week with our Saturday duo of volunteers who focused on material from New Fresh Wharf (NFW74) Amongst their finds were leather shoes and  stamped samian pieces. The remaining bits of worked stone from Harp Lane (HL74), recently rediscovered with the general finds were also repacked and given registered finds numbers, completing the finds from that site.

This week continued with Monday’s team all on general finds in the morning. Working on building material from Harp Lane (HL74), they persisted with repacking the bricks, tiles and stone, improving the packing of them to our standards. Building material does have lots of potential for research, however, there’s only so many bricks and tiles you can ask volunteers to pack before it starts getting mean, so in the afternoon, the team returned to registered finds and updated the packaging and location for the remaining objects from New Fresh Wharf (NFW74). Their day ended with an excellent workshop from Jacqui Pearce on clay tobacco pipes.

Tuesday’s team were split into two groups in the morning with the first starting work on some fine roman & post medieval pottery from London Docks, The Highway (LD74). Some smashing bits of delftware came up after they had repacked some marvelous decorated samian. The other half completed a whole site in one morning as they tackled the finds from Northumberland Wharf (NW74). These finds were in a right old mess with everything in brown paper bags. By lunch time, they had been nicely reorganised into plastic bags with good labels and a logical sequence. After lunch all volunteers were on hand as we took a look at some incredible leather artefacts from Seal House (SH74). Their day ended with the leather finds workshop from Jackie Keily, which included some of the best examples of leather excavated in London.

Wednesday’s mighty force of 12 volunteers tackled the building material from Shoreditch Park. Over 20 boxes of building material were sorted out. Before the session, the finds were stuffed to overflowing in bags, the labels needed updating and the range of contexts within each box was all over the place. With the volunteers woking on the finds and Adam reboxing and organising them in to context order as the session went on, by the end of the day they were all in order. And we even managed to reduce things by a box! Their day ended with a quick visit to our ceramics and glass store followed by Geoff Egan’s medieval/post med metal finds workshop.

No volunteering this Thursday, but back to normal next week as we hope to continue with the last site in our targets for the general finds (London Docks, LD76) and the next big site in the registered finds (Seal House, SH74)

For more photos visit our flickr site.