The working life of Museum of London

By Dr James Morris

Recently I’ve been working on the animal bone from the Royal London Hospital (RLP05) excavated by MOLA in 2006. Some of this consists of waste from the hospital kitchens, and gives us fascinating evidence for the diet of both the patients and staff. The hospital was founded in 1740 and archaeological evidence suggests that the associated burial ground was in use from 1820-1854. The remains give a brilliant opportunity to combine the zooarchaeological data with the historical records, which show hospital food has never been great.

However, amongst the animal remains were a number of more unusual finds which were not from the hospital kitchen. Attached to the hospital was an anatomy school and many of the animal bones appear to originate from the activities carried out there. This includes a number of dissected cows, sheep, horses, dogs, cats and rabbit s, buried as partial or complete skeletons. We even have evidence that some of the skeletons were wired together to be used in teaching anatomy. There have also been a number of surprises including the skull of a guinea pig, the partial skeleton of a tortoise and a headless monkey. The tortoise was missing the skull, shell and most of its feet, which may have been kept by the anatomy school or deposited elsewhere. Similarly the lack of the monkey’s skull and neck vertebrae would suggest that the head had been kept by the anatomists.

As a British based zooarchaeologist, finds of tortoise and monkey are incredibly rare, and therefore we needed to turn to experts outside the Museum of London for help to identify the bones to a specific species. If you have been watching the BBC’s ‘Museum of Life’ with Jimmy Doherty (who makes very nice sausages, I’m lucky enough to live close to his farm) you’ll know that we have one of the world’s best zoological collections in London at the Natural History Museum. So it was with some excitement that I made my way to the Natural History Museum, only to arrive there and realise I’d gone to a free museum during a school holiday. After battling through the crowds, I was lead by Colin McCarthy, Collections Manager for Reptiles, Amphibians and Fish, to the museum’s old dry store number one. If you saw the first Museum of Life show it’s the amazingly huge store full of a host of old specimens ranging from zebra to tortoises (have a look at episode 1, 17min 40sec into the program). I could have stayed in there for days, but under Colin’s excellent guidance we quickly identified the tortoise as being a European tortoise either Greek or Herman’s.

Identification of the monkey required me to visit the zoological department and the mammals collection which is held over a number of different floors at the back of the museum. Identification of the monkey was much trickier and involved a good few hours examining different skeletons held in the museum’s collection. The monkey collection is held in row upon row of metal cabinets that don’t have windows. That means you need to be prepared for a surprise when searching the collection. At one point, standing on a step ladder to access an upper cabinet, I did open a door to be greeted face to face with a snarling monkey. Fortunately it was an old stuffed specimen, unfortunately, by the time I realised that I’d already undone any reputation I had as a cool zooarchaeologist by letting out a manly yelp, much to the amusement of the other researchers using the collection. Eventually we identified the monkey as a Mona Monkey, which comes from south-west Africa.

You may ask why go to such trouble to identify these species? Well, the tortoise may be one of the earliest archaeological examples of tortoise from the United Kingdom, and the Mona monkey is the first example of such a species to have been found archaeologically, certainly in London and possibly in the United Kingdom. Analysis of the specimens and the site is still ongoing, but these skeletons show how far and wide animals were traded at the beginning of the 1800s: the tortoise is likely to have come to London from the eastern Mediterranean and the Monkey from south-west Africa.

The next step is to investigate how the anatomy school acquired such animals and why, and what they were used? Identifying the bones to a species is just the beginning of the investigation.

A big thank you to Colin McCarthy, Louise Tomsett and Paula Jenkins for helping arrange my Natural History Museum visit and helping me on the day.
 
You can also find out more about my background and my other research at http://www.animalbones.org