The working life of Museum of London

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