The working life of Museum of London

Kate Roberts: Archaeobotanist

Job title: Archaeobotanist
Department: MoLAS Archaeobotany

What is your role as an archaeobotanist?
As an archaeobotanist, I look at seeds that are extracted from soil samples taken on site. I identify seeds using the reference collection drawings, identification manuals and the experience of my colleagues and myself for reports.

I then enter the information into a database and try to interpret the results using the archaeological and ecological information available.

The seeds can provide information on trade, diet, the environment and some industries, particularly cloth production and the brewing industry. It all gets written up into reports which are then integrated into the MoLAS site reports.

What where you doing before this?
I was working as an Archaeobotanist at the Cambridge Archaeological Unit, doing similar work to what I do now as well as managing and carrying out processing and sampling strategies and going out on site visits.

Why did you decide to become an archaeobotanist?
I became interested when archaeobotany was covered in one of the courses at University. I asked to do my dissertation on this and as a result, worked in labs at University with people who were generous with their time and knowledge, providing mentoring.

I liked the identification work and the people who taught me, mainly in their own time, encouraged me to keep trying. After that I was lucky to be offered a job with the Cambridge Archaeological Unit, which involved more informal training, again with the same people.

What do you love about your job?
I love the diversity offered by my job. I enjoy the identification process, but I also enjoy the research, statistics and the computer related work as well as writing reports.

I love identifying something that I haven’t found before, like ‘boldly going where no-one has gone’! Being certain of the identity of a part of a fruit or vegetable or plant is also a challenge I enjoy because many things look very similar, especially when they have deteriorated due to preservation and deposition.

I enjoy the discovery and the taste of real people’s lives because everyone eats and throws away their waste. I get to see a cosmopolitan view of the people rather than just the elitists, which is often the case with other archaeological material.

It is about getting to know the real people and about their lifestyle, not just the dead people and their treasures.

Have you always wanted to do this and why?
I did not always want to be an archaeobotanist. Originally I was more interested in history and wanted to be a historian. However, having attended the science courses, I got increasingly interested and I really enjoyed the whole process during my training.

It was accidental luck that brought me here. Imagine, if I was not an archaeobotanist I would have probably ended up as a secretary somewhere!

What do you need to become an archaeobotanist?
If you want to be an archaeobotanist, you have to have an eye for detail and have patience. Much of the work can be repetitive, however, this is balanced out because you do many different tasks such as sampling, microscope work, inputting data using IT software, report writing and even get to go out on site.

If you are interested, it is worth doing an MA, especially to find out if you would really enjoy the job. Having an MA is not essential but it does make it easier to understand archaeobotany and gives you a wider understanding of more forms of environmental archaeology, which helps to put archaeobotany into its context.

What do you hate about your job?
There is a lack of structure in terms of career progression since it is a very specialised subject so moving to other areas is harder although there are possibilities of managerial positions.

What is the funniest or unpleasant thing that has ever happened to you in this job?
The discovery of an ant nest whilst washing a sample was one of the strangest and unpleasant moments. I took out some soil to float and suddenly all these ants started to crawl out and started climbing up my arms and clothes, biting everywhere. The smell of the samples is also quite bad!

Where are you going in the future?
I’d like to have more training in different aspects of archaeobotany. I only do plant macro fossils at the moment. I’d like to learn more about pollen and wood identification. I’d also like to learn more about GIS and other data programmes so that my analysis is more useful and interesting.

This job entails constant learning and I enjoy this.

Final thoughts
If you want to get an insight into real people that just looking at treasures does not usually give, this job would be ideal.

The end of the UK financial year is always a busy time for us, as so many of our museum projects have deadlines around this time. This means lots of exciting new content coming up soon, but no exciting blog posts this week!

In the meantime, you can read some exciting news about a MoLAS discovery: Archaeologists find Bronze Age skeletons on Olympic Park Aquatics Centre site.

This project is to be launched soon and we’ll tell you all about it properly then, but in the meantime the Guardian have a podcast report on an inclusion project from the Museum of London called Podcasts from the Past, “which invited the long-term unemployed to provide audio descriptions of Museum of London exhibits”.

If you were able to ask a museum specialist or curator any question(s) you liked, what would you ask?

Do you have questions about the forthcoming Jack the Ripper exhibition at the Museum in Docklands, or the Capital City project (a major rebuild of the galleries that tell the story of London from 1666 to the present day) at the Museum of London? Has your visit to Outside Edge or London, Sugar & Slavery raised issues? Is there something you’d specific you’d like to see us write about on the blogs?

You can leave a comment below or contact us directly.

While we can’t promise to answer every question we’ll do our best to answer each one. If you want to see the answers you could subscribe to our blog so you’ll see new posts as they’re added.

Don’t be afraid to ask something ’stupid’ - it’s probably something lots of people wonder about but don’t dare ask!

Thanks to the wonders of acronyms, you can use something called ‘RSS’ to subscribe to a ‘feed’ from a blog and be notified when new posts are added. It’s much easier than remembering to check back for new posts, and you can often read the posts directly in your RSS application. It makes reading your favourite blogs as easy as reading email.

I use a website called bloglines so I can see my subscriptions from anywhere in the world, but you can also use software installed on your computer. If you use Gmail, MSN or Yahoo! for your email, you can add RSS feeds to your homepage on each site.

A bit confusing? This BBC article, News feeds from the BBC, explains what RSS feeds are and how you can get started.

Once you’ve got the hang of that, you could subscribe to our Events feed to find out when new events are added; or to some of our Flickr profiles, so you could see new photos as they’re uploaded.

If you prefer a direct link, try: http://feeds.feedburner.com/MuseumOfLondon
http://feeds.feedburner.com/MuseumofLondon/RomanGlass
http://api.flickr.com/services/feeds/photos_public.gne?id=14132510@N04?=en-us&format=atom

The new Museum of London Archaeology website has been launched, combining information from the Museum of London Archaeology Service (MoLAS) and the London Archaeological Archive and Research Centre (LAARC). The site provides information about our independent professional advice and services to property sector and heritage clients across the UK and access for the public and researchers to the records and finds from over a century of archaeology of London.

Visitors can learn about getting involved in archaeology and search our archive catalogues as well as find information about all our publications.

We hope you find the new site useful and interesting, and we’d love to hear your thoughts, either as a comment below or via the contact form.

MoLAS‘ Kieron Tyler has made a video blog for the BBC about excavations on the Olympic site, “the largest archaeological site ever excavated in Britain”.

A few years ago the Museum of London Archaeology Service (MoLAS) excavated a site at Priory Crescent, Prittlewell, Essex. It turned out to be ‘perhaps the most spectacular discovery of its kind made during the past 50 years’ - the 7th century grave is probably that of an ‘Anglo-Saxon King of Essex’. The occupant of the grave was dubbed the ‘Prince of Prittlewell’ and the ‘King of Bling’ in newspaper coverage at the time.

I think the videos made on site are a fascinating view of the objects in situ, and Ian Blair does a brilliant job of explaining the archaeology of the site so I’m sharing them on the Museum of London Archaeology playlist on YouTube. Hopefully we’ll be adding videos from more recent sites to this playlist as time goes on.

You can learn more about the excavation, the finds, the occupant of the grave and the site itself at our site, Treasures of a Saxon King of Essex. The site also features 3D reconstructions of two finds - the gold buckle and a blue glass vessel.

There’s also a British Archaeology article, My Lord Essex which provides a lot more information. The ‘King of Bling’ theme was picked in Channel 4’s Time Team episode.

I’m delighted to tell you that the new Roman glass blog, written by Angela Wardle, a Finds specialist for the Museum of London Archaeology Service, is now live. To quote from the ‘about‘ page:

In 2005 at 35 Basinghall Street London, a large dump of waste from a glassmaker’s workshop was excavated by the Museum of London Archaeology Service for Stanhope plc.

…

This website tells the story of the discovery, and how John Shepherd and I, with other colleagues, are working on this amazing collection of glass in order to learn more about the glassworkers of Roman London.

There’s also a related photo gallery on Flickr.  Angela will be explaining more about some of the images in the gallery as the project progresses.

We’re still ramping up our blogging efforts and this blog isn’t really live yet, so for the moment most of the content is from the IT point of view - you will see more interesting content soon! In the meantime, another post from me.

People often look puzzled and ask why a museum needs computer programmers when I tell them that my job title is ‘Database Developer’ and that I work for a museum, so I thought I’d explain some of the things my job involves. One of the purposes of this blog is to give you an idea of the range of careers and activities possible in a museum. You might be surprised at how diverse they are.

Museums often have IT staff who can work with databases, because often they have big ‘Collections Management’ databases that record everything about their objects - for example, where the object came from, where it is, what conservation work has been carried out, whether it’s on loan or on display, and which collection it belongs to. The collections management application might also store research on the object, captions for websites or exhibitions, and other specialist information.

The Museum of London is unusual because it also has an Archaeology Service (MoLAS), which runs a big database of excavation (field), finds and environmental data, as well as geomatics and mapping services data. MoLAS have specialist forms so archaeologists and specialists can record and analyse their data. Part of my job is to update and maintain these applications, as well as working with people to understand their requirements then design and create new applications.

I also create special scripts (in a language called SQL) to pull records out of the different databases so they can be used in websites. Sometimes I help create the websites too.

My job is very varied, and what I do each day depends on which projects I’m working on, and what kinds of requests come through our internal helpdesk system.

For example, this week I have been reviewing graphic designs for a website on Roman London, and I’ve been working with Angela, a Finds specialist at the Museum of London Archaeology Service, to start a blog about her Roman Glass research. She’s written some text and put together some images, we’ve worked out how we’ll deal with crediting different photographers, and it’s all coming together. I’ll link to it when it goes live, hopefully next Friday.

I also did some work on our new forums, answered some helpdesk queries, and did some research into an appropriately lightweight solution so we can provide dynamic access to a repository of metadata about collection objects, using a standard called OAI-PMH (the ‘Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting’). Finally, I have been trying to find the time to plan an database migration so we can move our archaeology databases to a new, bigger server with a new version of the database software we use (a database application called Oracle) on it.