The working life of Museum of London

The end is fast approaching!

Already week 8 and the pace picked up from previous weeks as a team of 4 worked on Registered Finds for the whole of Monday. Returning to glass items from The Highway (LD74) from a few weeks back, these objects were waiting for new finds numbers and updated identifications from specialists. Last week this took place which meant that this week, they were sketched on the back of their finds card, packed with foam and stored in a systematic fashion according to our LAARC standards. Whilst volunteers completed the glass, Adam completed some recently rediscovered pieces of quernstone from Ludgate Hill (LH74), which had been hiding amongst the general finds for several years. The day ended with the final Conservation Practices workshop with archaeological conservator, Liz Goodman.

Tuesday’s team switched to general finds and continued to make progress with the pottery from the huge London Docks site (LD76). A mixture of mainly post medieval ceramics this week, but several more boxes of material packed to a far better condition. Glynn’s next task is to start reboxing this material into context number order. Fingers crossed, the pottery will get finished by the end of VIP4 and we can find out how much shelving space this reboxed site will take up. Tuesday’s volunteers ended the day with their final workshop – Jacqui Pearce’s Tobacco Pipe talk.

Wednesday’s U3A/Mossbourne academy team of volunteers have now ended their sessions working on finds. The students now set about working on the digital documentation for the Shoreditch Park site (NNR05) creating a basic spreadsheet listing its artefacts. Certain members of the U3A worked at home, focusing on their research topics, whilst others came in to LAARC to learn how to put together basic powerpoint presentations and slide shows. Jackie Keily’s leather finds workshop completed the day.

Thursday’s team was reduced to one, who boldly continued with the London Docks (LD76) pottery.

Despite several volunteers unable to complete the whole of the project, we’ve still achieved an incredible amount this fourth time around, with 11 sites updated in the registered finds, almost 150boxes improved in the general and the whole archive for Shoreditch Park sorted.