The working life of Museum of London

Half way through – New sites galore!

Fresh from our break last week, where volunteers got a chance to dig at our Burgess Park community project, it was back to the archive for more packing and auditing.

Monday’s team started with some roman coins from the 1976 London Dock’s (LD76) site completing the lot. These coins went from being loose in plastic bags to nicely protected in small coin boxes. In the afternoon, they moved over to General finds and completed the pottery from the large St. Thomas Street site (1STS74), moving on the building material.

Friday’s group were back to registered finds in the morning and were on fire! They got through over 60 boxes completing 7  brand new sites; St Swithin’s Lane (SL75) St Magnus, New Fresh Wharf (SM75), Westminster Abbey (WAM75), 175 Borough High Street (175BHS76), Christ Church Greyfriars (CHR76), Fenchurch Street (FSE76) & London Docks (LD76) getting through ceramic, bone, stone, wood and glass artefacts. In the afternoon they moved on to completing all the big heavy boxes of building material from St Thomas Street (1STS74).

Wednesday’s groups started work on general finds for the first time, tackling boxes of pottery from the Triangle of Billingsgate Buildings (TR74) before recording their experience with photographs. Their session ended with a visit to our ceramic and glass store to compare their sherds with the complete vessels within the museum’s collections.

Our YAC group spent their time solely in the ceramic & glass store, looking at complete examples first, then moving on to complete all three boxes of pottery from the 1974 excavation at Union Street (8US74). By being in a room full of these complete goodies we were able to once again match our sherds to complete examples, but, as all of these pots had been published, we also matched the sherds to the illustrations in the publication.

The workshop this week was focused on pottery, in particular, tin glazed earthenwares. We were fortunate to have our Head of Department (who started off his Museum of London career as a pottery specialist) lead this session.

An additional bonus this week was the visit from the team of trainee archaeologists currently working on the Burgess Park Training Excavation in Southwark. The group visited the archive on Thursday and as well as looking around our stores, visited Museum of London Archaeology’s finds processing areas and offices. They finished by spending some time in the ceramic and glass store, where they became VIP volunteers for 30mins, packing some more finds from the pottery archive of The Triangle site (TR74)

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