LAARC VIP

This week, LAARC kicked off its new volunteer project. Overall nineteen new volunteers joined our team to help create more space for future archives, whilst at the same time, improving the accessibility of existing archives.

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/