The working life of Museum of London

For this 7th Volunteer Inclusion Project, we’ve only been focusing on one type of material – POTTERY!!!

The site we’re concentrating on (General Post Office, Newgate Street) has over 650 boxes of pottery. Unfortunately some of it is suffering from poor storage but over the past five weeks, archive volunteers & visitors to the museum alike, have been working hard improving the packaging of these finds.

So what type of pottery have we come across so far?

The earliest pottery sherds we’ve seen date right back to the Bronze Age. We haven’t got lots of these but can tell they’re much older than the rest as the pottery is coarse, has irregularities that suggest it was hand made rather than on a wheel and if there is any decoration, it’s usually in the form of finger-nail decoration or twisted cord/string.

When we come to Roman pottery, there’s been an abundance. The most recognisable fabric is Samian, which is a beautiful reddish brown colour. Sometimes we find decorated sherds, with animals, flowers or human figures on. These were made by pressing the clay into moulds, which were then thrown on the potter’s wheel. We also get the potter’s maker’s mark on the base if we’re really lucky and several of these have come up during the Hands-On Archaeology sessions.

There are hundreds of types of Roman pottery – far too many to try and explain on these pages – but if you want to find out more about Roman pottery, visit the museum’s ceramic catalogue. Types we regularly get on our table include Mortarium, Highgate Ware, Amphora, Colour Coated Wares, Burnished Wares and Flagons. Click on any of these words to find out more.

When it comes to Medieval pottery, things start to become more shiny. This is because we now start to get glazed pottery. For London this happens around the end of the 11th Century. We’re gettign a full range of glazes and fabric types on our table when working through the boxes, including London ware, Mill Green Ware and Kingston ware. Again you click on any of these words to find out more about them.

When moving into the post medieval layers, the pottery continues to be glazed, but we’re starting to get more typologies and different vessel types. Some of the easiest to recognise is Stoneware, which, surprise surprise, look a bit like stone. My personal favourite are so called Bellamine Jugs, which have a bearded face on the neck. But as well as stone ware, we’ve been seeing a lot of London Redware, a fair amount of Surrey Hampshire Ware, Staffordshire Ware and Tin Glazed wares and some rather nice examples of transfer print wares and porcelain. Click on any of these word to see more examples.

So, there’s been a right old range of pottery we’ve been fortunate to repack on our table. But you may be wondering why we keep all these bits?

Well, pottery is the number one way that we date archaeology. As many people have studyed and researched the various fabric & forms, we now have quite good production dates for each type. After an excavation, the pottery specialist will look at sherds from each layer dug up and indentify an earliest and latest date based on the typologies. From this we can then date the other materials and make comparisons, not only with the other objects in that layer but also with other layers found on that site.

This all helps put the site into phases of history, which then helps us interpret what happened on the site, which in turn builds up up knowledge of the past. The final stage in the process is using this information to develop our gallery spaces, where we can share the information with everybody!