The working life of Museum of London

Romans & the Registered Finds

As we rolled into week 2, the volunteers started work on the registered finds side of the project.

The first site worked on has been the General Post Office excavations on Newgate Street, 1975 (GPO75). Monday’s team of 10 knuckled down straight away and audited over 1000 objects, including all the ceramic and all the stone artefacts and then making good headway with the glass artefacts. An amazing assortment of accessioned objects appeared as volunteers checked the packing and updated the location of these beauties. One of the star objects was a complete bellamine jar, but there was an abundance of samian maker’s stamps, mortarium maker’s stamps, Roman tiles with animal paw prints on, examples of Roman graffiti and Roman lamps also within the ceramic boxes. An amazing coin mould cropped up in the stone boxes along with plenty of sharpening hones, architectural mouldings and a few huge quernstone fragments too. Finally the glass boxes provided plenty of treats with moulding bowl and handle fragments and one particularly nice glass with an air twisted stem.

Friday’s folk continued with the boxes of glass and gave us our second object of the week – an amazingly reconstructed roman bottle. They were also treated to an array of spectacular finds including moulded bowls, painted window glass, complete bottles and a spectacular deep blue roman vessel depicting a chariot scene.  By the end of the morning session we’d almost completed all the non metallic boxes of registered finds from this large site. This was followed in the afternoon by work on the coins and copper artefacts. Over 40 boxes of finds were audited - a phenomenal amount of material for one week – an excellent start to the project.

On both days, we made a brief visit to our ceramic & glass store to see some complete examples to compliment our audited sherds; Monday’s team looked at the roman ceramics whilst Friday’s took a look at some of the glass. Both groups ended their days with a talk and handling  session on Roman household objects led by the Museum of London’s curator of Roman collections, Jenny Hall.  Jenny kindly showed us loads of goodies from various archive sites; keys, cauldrons, knives, spoons, door hinges, handles and an awesome fragment of weaved basket which has incredibly survived almost 2 millennia.

Wednesday’s groups also worked with material from the General Post Office excavations (GPO75), with coins being the first port of call. Both our group from Capital Arts and our team of Young Archaeologists learnt the technique to pack a coin properly into small plastic “crystal” boxes. Having completed 10 coins each, each volunteer then had the opportunity to record their work via photos and video. Some excellent close up shots of coins were taken and the younger volunteers began some entertaining news-report like pieces.

All in all, an excellent week of work. Next week – leather!

For more photos from the project visit our Flickr site by clicking on any photo or the word, Flickr and to find out more about select pieces of this blog, click on any word highlighted in red above.