General finds.

15 sites down. Fully repacked. Pottery. Animal Bone. Building Material. This includes major sites such as Custom House (CUS73) and 106 Borough High Street (106BHS73). Glynn and the volunteer team have steadily worked their way through all the boxes, reorganising them into material, then context number and saving several shelves of extra space in doing so. Hooray!

Metal Store.

Sites from Baynards Castle (BC72) up until  Guildhall (GDH85) have had their registered finds relocated to the new shelves and now sit there in a good logically, much more accessible fashion. Over 50 shelves have now been made available, which are ready for the metalic general finds to find a home on them. In addition, Adam & the volunteer team have repacked any small things along the way, reboxed previously unloved artefacts and generally made what was once LAARC’s unofficial dumping ground a good looking storage space. Hoorah!

University of the 3rd Age – Mansell Street Archive

This year’s U3A have completed a fantastic job on improving the conditions of the Mansell street excavation (MSL87) Important material including cremation urns and burial goods are now stored in good quality boxes, with correct packing & organised logically. Their work has even attracted the interest of oversea journalists eager to find out about projects involving the retired generation. We look forward to their final research presentations next week.

 

Workshops

A different kind of workshop this week, as each day’s volunteers spent the afternoon at the museum itself, first learning about human remains with LAARC’s Osteology area – the centre for Human Bioarchaeology, followed by a visit to the museum’s rotunda, to see where the 17000 skeletons now live. After that it was up to conservation to learn about how the museum preserves its artefacts and finally a special visit to the National Scheduled Monument beneath the NCP carpark – The Wonderful Roman Fort Gate. Big thanks to all who showed us around as well as the Museum of London Archaeology Specialists who have run workshops over the previous weeks.

 

And so that’s almost that for part one of LAARC VIP. Of course with the christmas party still to come the fun’s not finished yet and although a new set of volunteers will be joining us in January, this set of volunteers won’t be forgotten and we hope to keep them informed with any other volunteer opportunities as well as LAARC events.

 

The challenge now is to see if we can reach our goal of transfering the archives up until 1990 on to the new shelves. Only two weeks left…

The general finds project is still going swimmingly and their challenge is to finish the mighty Custom House site (CUS73) in the next two weeks. This week more pottery has been repacked, including several more impressive samian sherds and a smart example of a medieval drip tray for collecting overspilling fat from cooking pots.

 The U3A are now into their 8th week also and although the rest of their time is dedicated to research aspects of the Mansell Street excavation, this week several still came in to continue packing the remaining bits of pottery and building material from MSL87.

Finally, the last two specialist workshops took place this week and saw the return of Alan Pipe and Jacqui Pearce sharing their knowledge of animal bone and medieval ceramics with the remaining groups.

  

This week our focus was limited to updating my side of the Project (general finds), as Adam is away fighting bulls in Madrid!

General Finds:
We are still currently working on our largest site to-date – Custom House. Although appearing to be somewhat of a slow week, volunteers have in fact updated a huge amount of pottery – 52 boxes out of 106! This is especially staggering considering the boxes are found to be packed to the brim. One box I updated contained 70 separate bags.
CUS73 is also the first site which has adequate publications. Volunteers have been using excavation reports to check some the illustrated pottery we have been repackaging.

Out of interest the Thames Discovery Programme (for which the LAARC is currently providing swivel chairs and other useful things like computers) will be focusing their initial FROGing on Custom House! Details about the project and how you can join in can be found at their newly deployed website: http://www.thamesdiscovery.org

With Adam back next week (and hopefully un-maimed), I think we will be get even closer to finishing site CUS73. Plus we’ve got the MoL specialists in: Animal Bone and Medieval Pottery!

General finds:

Work continued on the material from custom house (CUS73), completing the 103 boxes of animal bone and making a start on the 106 boxes of pottery. A mixture of roman and medieval contexts were previously stored in small, multi stapled bags, which have a tendancy to get lost within the box. The repacked material is now stored in context order in good standard size bags with clear legable labels.

Workshops:

The workshops this week included a second run for Roman ceramic specialist, Amy Thorpe, who explained the various types of Roman pottery found from the sites volunteers have been working on.

 

The other workshop was lead by Post Medieval ceramic specialist Nigel Jeffries, fresh from his appearence on BBC’s Inside Out programme. Working his way through a brief history of ceramics, the talk focused on tin-glazed earthenwares, stonewares and transfer wares, including an explanation of the story depicted on the willow pattern plates – the chinese equivalent of Romeo & Juliet.

Metal Store:

Finally overcoming the Beddington Sewage Farm material (BSF81-87), volunteers moved on to complete sites from 1981, including some impressive material from Swan Lane Car Park (SWA81) and even transfer all the finds from huge sites such as Billingsgate Lorry Park (BIG82). The next hurdle is HOR82-86; the Horse Fair site in Kingston.

 Eastern Cemetery Sites:

The University of the Third Age are now in their 6th week also and continuing with general finds from the site. This week they tackled the animal bone. For more infomation as to how they’re getting on visit their wiki : http://laarcvipu3a.wetpaint.com/

General Finds.

Glynn and his team of volunteers this week finished off their second big site – 106BHS73 – which had produced some excellent Roman material last week and some equally impressive post medieval sherds this week.

To compliment their work, we held a roman pottery workshop in the Ceramic & Glass store with MOL archaeology specialist, Amy Thorpe and found out about amphorae, samian, burnished wares and mortarium.

 

Metal Store

The metal store tackled the tricky year of 1980 this week. The first half of the week saw vip volunteers join existing LAARC volunteers working on the huge site from Southwark Street – 15SKS80. There are over 2000 individual metal artifacts from the site,  and they were previous stored by object type but have now been reorganised into material then registered find number order. They now await packing with foam or acid free tissue.

 

There were no U3A volunteers this week, but there return next week when they start to tackle the general material from MSL87 – Mansell Street.

 If you would like to find out more about any of the sites, you can type in the sitecode on LAARC’s online catalogue:

http://www.museumoflondonarchaeology.org.uk/English/ArchiveResearch/ArchiveOnline/

and all LAARC’s photos for this and other projects can be found on flickr:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/laarc/

The second week of the LAARC’s VIP project has really started to make an impact on the Archive – with new volunteers on board, new shelving space acquired and a study of Milk Street’s archaeology by Museum of London specialists.

General Finds:
Having started repackaging pottery from the 1972 Milk Street excavation (MIL72) last week, this week we have really achieved a lot! All Ceramic Pottery has been repackaged and ordered as well as all the Animal Bone, and we have made a start on the site’s Building Material. Along the way we have discovered some interesting animal scenes on Roman Samian Ware and the remains of a few moggies amongst the large collections of Animal Bone. Already our work shows the vast improvement that can be made to the storage and packaging of material as well as the extra shelf space – in addition we’re discovering artefacts that have been completely forgotten about!

   

Metal Store:
Although focus has been on the general finds this week, Adam and volunteers have still made great headway in the metal store. All site codes to 1975 have been segregated and some fantastic artefacts have been brought to light. A metal plaque belonging to an antique knife cleaner (researched by Andy) will certainly be entered for our object of the month. In addition a database has started to be complied to make sure we know where all this material is being moved to!

Roman Cemetery Sites

For more info, take a look at http://laarcvipu3a.wetpaint.com/

Museum Specialists:
This week we started our workshops with the Museum of London specialists. Jacqui Pearce examined some of the reconstructed pots from MIL72 – some great examples of Kingston Ware (London) and Surrey/Hampshire border Ware. The Glass & Ceramics store was a great resource for seeing how the site’s examples fit into the history of London’s ceramics.
Alan Pipe took us through some of MIL72s huge amount of animal bone, pointing out the subtle zoological differences between Cow, Sheep, Pig, Horse, Cat…and Duck!

  

The project falls into three strands; General Finds improvements, Metal Store Improvements, Roman Eastern Cemetery sites improvements

General Finds: This week we started working with ceramics from 1972’s Milk Street excavations (MIL72). At the start of the week, pottery sherds from various contexts could be found over a range of 6 shelves, the boxes weren’t organised by context order, often several materials were within one box and bags weren’t labeled and sealed according to our standards. At the end of week one, we now have a continuous run of contexts for the ceramic finds, in standard packaging and standard boxes. Just by doing this, we have created a shelf and a half of extra space. Hooray!

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And along the way, already we have come across some incredible artefacts, including almost complete medieval jugs and a range of roman pot sherds. Some volunteers have already started to compare these sherds with complete vessels in our Ceramic & Glass Store (http://www.museumoflondon.org.uk/ceramics/) and next week specialists from MoLAS will be running workshops to provide further information.

Metal Store: Although the focus has mainly been on General Finds this week, we have kicked off the second strand of LAARC VIP and already seen vast improvements.

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 LAARC’s metal store has suffered over the years mainly through lack of shelf space, which has meant that General and Registered metal finds have sat together on shelves and certain sites (due to iron being transfered from cardboard boxes to wider plastic air tight boxes) have material on temporary shelves.

After week one, all the registered finds from 1972 and 1973 have been transfered to new racking and sit in order of finds number, making locating a object much easier.

Roman Cemetery sites: the third mini project is in collaboration with the University of the third age. This week was actually the second session for them but the first where they handled artefacts. We concentrated on ceramics, mainly from burials, which had been stored in various sized boxes, often padded with newspaper from 1989. Not ideal. Now however, with effective packing, vessels are padded with acid free tissue, stored in standard boxes and fit much more sweetly on the shelves. Almost a whole shelf of space has been created.

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For more on the U3A/LAARC project visit its mini website: http://laarcvipu3a.wetpaint.com/

I have actually worked at LAARC for almost four years and I started as a volunteer a year before working here. I studied classical archaeology at university and then went straight into being a field archaeologist once I had graduated. I have worked on sites both inside and outside London, including the site in Southwark where the earliest marble inscription with the word “Londinium” was found (which can be viewed in the museum’s Roman Gallery) and a site just outside of Rome itself where I got to excavate a mosaic and a temple covered in painted wall plaster.

My previous role at LAARC was to curate its registered finds, which saw me supervise a team of excellent volunteers, packing and updating the storage conditions of this part of the archive. However, the job also involved assisting researchers, leading tours of the stores and running outreach and handling sessions as well as organising open days. I’ve even been lucky enough to have given a presentation on the LAARC at a conference on the other side of the world in Seoul, Korea.

I’m looking forward to this the role as it allows me to focus on a single project and improve the condition of our metal store, which has not been in the best of states for some while now.