The working life of Museum of London

Leather, Bones & Bedpans

A focused week as we channeled our energies into completed two large collections from two large sites.

General Finds

On Glynn’s side of the project the huge London Docks site (LD74/LD76) still confronts us. The site is really important in our understanding of Roman London as the so called Shadwell Tower was found here. This was possible a gate  tower along the city wall, but may also have been a water tower. Either way, volunteers this week achieved the first hurdle of completing the site’s pottery archive. It’s been quite a task, but we got there and along the way repacked amazing stuff like the bellamine jar and redware bedpan above.

Onto the animal bone again now, which prior to us working on it had many old crammed to the brim bags piled on top of each other within the largest boxes we allow in the archive. The process of them being put into nice new bags and into much more accessible boxes has begun and over 250 bags of bone have been transformed this week.

Registered Finds

On Adam’s side of the project the focus was still on Trig Lane (TL74). Having completed all the registered boxes of bone, ceramic, wood, stone, glass and leather, this week the focus turned to the final non metal materials from the site. Wednesday’s VIP Graduates completed the auditing of all the fibre and textile artefacts from the site whilst Adam decided it was too mean to get volunteers to repack/audit the faecal remains, so he did them. Monday and Tuesday’s teams made excellent headway with the General Leather Finds from the site (over 50 boxes! – one context had over 25 boxes alone) which Wednesday’s graduates completed in the afternoon.

Thursday’s team started the final lot of stuff from this mammoth site and completed the standard sized iron objects, leaving only the copper and large iron boxes for Saturday’s team. Fingers crossed, we’ll start a new site next week!

Specialist Workshops

The second round of workshops took place this week, with Monday and Tuesday’s teams learning all about archaeological leather and Wednesday and Thursday’s teams examining Human Remains.

Thanks to volunteer’s Wayne and Magdalena for their photographs. For more photos from the project visit our Flickr site