LAARC VIP

LAARC is about to start a brand new volunteer project which will develop the good work carried out over the past 6 years in previous projects

  

LAARC stores and curates over 180,000 boxes of London’s archaeology and although access to these archived sites is good we’re always looking for ways to make it better. One of our biggest problems is the condition of material excavated over 30 years ago. More often than not, excavations run on limited budgets and back in the day, bags and boxes weren’t a priority. This has left LAARC with several “old” archives stored in bags that have seen better days within random sized boxes Although previous projects have involved changing damaged and contaminated boxes, there are still non standard ones sitting on our shelves and there has never been the time or funding to sort out the bags inside.

          

However, thanks to HUB funding, we can finally start to tackle this backlog of 1970’s material. Over the next 6 months, with the help of teams of volunteers, we shall be rebagging, reboxing, relabeling and sorting out our general finds, with the aim of not only getting them in a tip-top shape, improving accessibility, but also generating more space, which can be used for future archives.

Running parallel to this project, we shall also be transforming our metal store, which has recently benefitted from new racking. These new shelves will form our metal registered finds archive whilst the current shelves will store our metal general finds – again improving accessibility whilst making efficient use of our space.

Finally, not forgetting the registered finds, we welcome back the University of The Third Age, who will be improving the condition of the finds archive for the roman cemetery site on Mansell Street (MSL87/MST87) excavated in the 1987.

 We shall be posting updates and images of our progress on these pages, so why not revisit these pages to see how we’re getting on.