The working life of Museum of London

Kings, Saints & Soles

One of the joys of the VIP projects is that we don’t really know what we’re going to rediscover each week. As we moved into the third week of VIP5, we came across some superb artefacts along with some that just baffled us.

Things started with the introduction of our final VIP5 team – the Saturday crew. As per the other daily team’s first week, we concentrated on general finds to start off with. Saturday’s team of three were confronted with some animal bone from the London Docks site (LD76) and within minutes we had pieces of jaw, legs and some massive horn cores go from old bags into lovely new ones. But it wasn’t long until we had our first puzzle of the day. Amid the animal bone seemed to be a weird horn like object. Upon closer inspection, it turned out to be wood and seemed to have an iron nailed sticking out of it- a quite unusual bit of knotty wood. At present we haven’t been able to figure its function yet, but we’re hoping the MOLA wood specialist will get a chance to cast his eyes over it next week and come up with an answer.

So with Saturday’s team inducted, VIP5 stepped up a gear on Monday and volunteers started their day with more pottery to process from London Docks. An excellent effort was made and 10 boxes were transformed. After lunch, the volunteers stuck with ceramic, but joined Adam to work on the registered finds project strand. Over 200 Medieval floor tiles  from 1974’s Trig Lane excavations (TL74) were checked for good packaging and duly accounted for. Mainly basic standard floral and geometric patterns, one tile stood out and had half a face on it (see above). We think the face may depict a king, possible Edward I and as it’s a larger tile than the rest, was likely to have been a centre piece.

Tuesday continued in much the vein with LD74 pottery being packed in the morning and TL74 finds in the afternoon. However, with only a few additional boxes of ceramics to pack, Tuesday’s team also got their hands on some glass and stone registered artefacts.

Wednesday’s VIP Graduates, returned to their main focus for this project, LAARC’s leather collections. Having audited all the registered leather during week 2, it was pleasing to see the new boxes in a good state on our trolleys ready to go away. The next task was to tackle Trig Lane’s (TL74) general leather finds. Within these boxes, were mainly shoe soles, shoe uppers, shoe vamps and shoe waste. And there was a lot of it. Over 25 boxes all from one single context (context 368) were repacked into good manageable sized bags.

Thursday’s team switched things around and started their day with the registered finds, completing the final two boxes of ceramic tiles from Trig Lane (TL74) before tackling the sites lead objects. Some incredible items were seen when auditing the lead, not least the four objects above. Their afternoon saw them get through another batch of boxes from London Docks’ (LD74) pottery assemblages and bring us one step closer to completing that site.

Each day this week, we finished the sessions by paying a short visit to our ceramic and glass store to take a look at some of the museum’s collection of medieval tiles.

What will week 4 bring as we strive to make headway with the London Docks pottery and continue the metals from Trig Lane? Plus, round 2 of our specialist workshops to look forward to.