LAARC VIP

Hi, I’m one of two Archaeological Collections Officers working on the LAARC VIP Project. I shall mainly be in charge of the Metal Store Project.

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.  

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.