The working life of Museum of London

Pots, Plaster &  Tip Top Textiles

For today’s blog, I’m going to get straight to the highlight of the week – our fantastic workshops on archaeological textiles. Curator of Fashion & Decorative Arts, Hilary Davidson headed over to lead the session which separated itself into three parts; medieval textiles found along the river sites, Tudor items found back in the days of the Guildhall Museum & burial garments found during the Spitalfields excavations at Christchurch (CAS84).

I think it fair to say that we were blown away by some of the material that survived in our collections, from decorated silks to knitted wool, from burial bonnets to Tudor socks. And even a medieval hair extension and Tudor codpiece popped up during the talk.

During the sessions, we tried to link things together by checking and auditing the leather & textile fragments from 1983-1986’s excavations. A couple of volunteers got to pack some textiles – one of the trickiest packing techniques there is – whilst others got to add sketches of the textiles to the reverse of the finds cards. Although the majority of objects were no way near as good a condition as those in the workshop, there were still some pretty amazing bits that’s we came across, like the 19th century decorative boot from Mansion House, (SON85), the shoe heel from Carter Lane, (CAT86) and the piece of rope from the former city of London Boy’s School (BOY86)

When not working on organic material it was on to our next big site in the general finds, Sir John Cass school, (CASS72). Monday’s team almost completed the animal bone with Friday’s team rounding it off before moving on to the pottery assemblages. already, several boxes are being saved by this basic repacking of artifacts and the accessibility has improved beyond a doubt.

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Wednesday’s groups tackled building material from the Triangle of Billingsgate Buildings site (TR74), completing it all in the morning, leaving only roman wall plaster for the young archaeologist team to complete. Both groups ended their session by visiting the ceramic & glass store to take photos to supplement their project and view some of the best wall plaster ever excavated.

As a bonus this week, we had the second set of students from the Burgess Park Training Excavation join us. After a thorough tour of all archaeological aspects of the building, they joint in with the VIP project by working on more general pottery from the Triangle (TR74) and Registered Finds from the Modern Foreshore site (MFS76)

For more photos visit our Flickr site by clicking here: FLICKR

And to find out more about any of the excavations we’ve worked on this week click on the highlighted sitecode in the text above.