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.

  

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/

We are well underway with the VIP Programme now - everyone has settled in and we are making great headway with both projects! Volunteers this week have discovered a smorgasbord of artefacts through repackaging objects in both the Metal store and General finds!

     

General Finds:
As of Monday we completed updating general finds from the VIP’s first major site – Milk Street 1972! And without pause we launched into the next one – 106 Borough High Street 1973. As of today we have managed to repackage all of the Roman pottery from the site which was a real task considering the poor state the material was in. More decorated Samian pottery was found this week, but my personal favourite is a rare Roman Cheese Press (below left). At this rate 106BHS73 should be completed by the end of next week!

         

Metal Store:
Not only have volunteers done a great job with the general finds this week, but the metal store project has also come along in leaps and bounds. Adam and volunteers have managed to segregate and update Registered and General material from all 1970s excavations. Although unidentifiable iron seems to prevail in the metal store, there have been some exciting discoveries. An inscribed spoon and tankard from site CUT78 (Cutler Street PLA Warehouses) are two amazing post-Medieval, lead artefacts. Close-ups of these and photos of other artefacts and the VIP Project can be found at: http://www.flickr.com/photos/laarc/

  

Roman Cemetery Sites

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

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/

  

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.