The working life of Museum of London

When visiting an archaeological site anywhere in the world, one of the most common mechanisms used in presenting the past and interpreting the way that people lived is through the numerous examples of the countless broken fragments of pottery found. Unsurprisingly, when my colleagues at the Museum of London Archaeology Service (MoLAS) dig a site in London, the amount of pottery they excavate ends up filling boxes (sometimes numbering into their hundreds….).

Why, however, is so much of this material found? Firstly, pottery is durable and so tends to survive well even when broken, secondly it has been readily available to Londoners since ‘London became London’ after the Roman Conquest of AD 43, and (thirdly) the millions of people whom have cumulatively lived in our city over the last 2000 years all would have used pottery in some shape or form. Think about how many plates, dishes and cups etc that you have already broken, and decided you should throw out or give away. Multiply this against the above factors and you can see how the Museum’s archaeological archive is filled with so much of this stuff.

Given the large volume of these excavated materials then it is little wonder that I represent just one of a number of people whose job it is to deal with either the Roman, Saxon or medieval and later pottery found from London’s archaeological sites. While the fragments I handle date from the later Saxon period in London (generally after AD 950) to later Victorian pottery, I also have colleagues who work on Roman pottery alone. It is a job that excites many (whilst also baffling a few).

At the most basic level of analysis, the identification of pottery is important because accuracy provides the main framework by which we can date the excavated layers, pits, privies, rubbish dumps, buildings etc we find in London (though this is the same for any archaeological site, anywhere in the world).

But how can we be so sure about our identification and our chronologies? We are fortunate that for the medieval period we now know something about where the pottery that sat on Londoner’s tables and their cooking areas was made. Here we have relied on the identification of the kilns and those waster pits around them containing their (broken) products, to match up against the similarly excavated in London. We therefore now know that the white-fired pottery with a green glaze so commonly found in excavations on medieval London was made in Kingston and its immediate environs simply because many of the pottery production centres making these pots have been excavated.

Chronological refinement can also be achieved for the tonnes of pottery found dumped behind London’s medieval wooden waterfront sequences, where dendrochronolgical analysis (tree ring dating), together with other evidence (for example coins), can be used to show when particular types of ceramics where most popular. Put another way this has shown that the products of a particular kiln or a particular style and shape of pottery (for example different shaped jugs) could be present in dumps dated to 14th century but completely absent in those dated earlier or later.

However, there is more to interpreting broken pottery than what I have written above. Different periods require different techniques and responses. This is the case when analysing the pottery dating to the Georgian and Victorian period, the material culture (not just pottery) of which I am particularly interested in. Much of my eight years working for MoLAS has been spent looking at the pottery excavated from sites around Spitalfields market, prior to its present day redevelopment. It is the interpretation of the pottery and other things discarded in quickly abandoned privies between the mid 18th and 19th century that provides the focus of my next blog.