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A Town Unearthed: Folkestone Before 1500 – Community & Archaeology.

By Annie Partridge on July 7, 2012 in Community Archaeology, Day of Archaeology, DayOfArch2012, Education, Excavation, Finds, Iron Age, Prehistory, Roman, Romano-British

Hello and welcome to my post! My name is Annie and I one of the lucky few who are undertaking a Community Archaeology Training Placement being offered by the Council for British Archaeology and I’m doing it with Canterbury Archaeological Trust. Here’s a link to the CBA web-site where there is more information on the placements, the project is set to continue for a few more years so do keep an eye out if you are interested in signing up!

Anyway, down to business and I’ll start with a quick run down of the project. A Town Unearthed: Folkestone before 1500 is a 3 year community project centred around uncovering Folkestone’s rich and varied history through a variety of activities including archaeological excavation, lectures, school visits, events, talks, forums, and exhibitions (to name but a few!) with volunteers taking a lead in organising, stewarding, and generally making things happen. The project is in it’s final year and I have been tasked with being in charge of the archaeology side of things which is where our Day of Archaeology day comes in….

…Last year the archaeology side of the project centred around a Roman Villa which is tragically falling off the edge of a cliff (estimates are predicting the whole site will be gone in 50 years). The Villa was uncovered and open to the public from the 1920s-1950s when post-war austerity forced it’s closure and it was re-buried until the 1980s when some archaeologists went in to see how much was being lost; since then more has gone over and it was decided to open it up to have another look. Around 200 people from Folkestone had a go at excavating the site over 3 months, with plenty more dropping in to have a look, and the results were surprising. Only a portion of the Villa was re-excavated and produced some fantastic finds of the period, but more exciting perhaps was the discovery of a large Iron Age settlement beneath the floors of the Villa. This settlement appeared to be industrial in nature, as a large number of quern stones, made from the local Green Stone found on the beach below, were discovered, and have been found in the gardens of the houses surrounding the area (many of them now making up attractive fireplaces and rockeries!); some were even incorporated into the fabric of the Roman Villa. This year we are not returning to the Villa site but are instead test pitting in the gardens of the houses near to the site in the hope of picking up some Roman or Iron Age features to establish the extent of the site. On our Day of Archeology day we were mid-excavation in our first ‘pit’ and I’m going to give you a insight into how I like to involve my volunteers on community projects.

So our day starts and we immediately pick up where we left off on the previous day with everyone getting stuck in with the trowels…

We find an interesting green patch of clay, which turned out to be a very unexciting modern dumping episode…

..we persevere…

…giving the trench a quick scan with the metal detector…

…and come up with a bullet! We also had two coins (possibly Roman) and a few buttons which may have been from military uniforms. Folkestone played a large part in both the First and Second World wars and to find evidence for this is very exciting for me…

..and finally starting the recording. I’m a big believer in volunteers getting involved in all aspects of archaeology, including the paperwork, so if you ever end up on one of my sites I will torture you with it..

…and there we have it, a day of community archaeology with a fantastic bunch of people who I’d like to thank for their hard work and dedication to the project. Although this particular test pit did not produce any Roman or Iron Age features we had a lot of pottery from the period so I’m satisfied. We’ll be test pitting all through the summer. I am blogging about my placement so if you’d like to have a look at what I’ve been up to, or want to keep up to date on this project then here’s the link.

Thanks for reading!

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Academic Research: A Day of Meetings…

By Chris Green on July 2, 2012 in Anglo-Saxon, Bronze Age, Day of Archaeology, DayOfArch2012, Digital Archaeology, Early Medieval, Education, Iron Age, Roman, Romano-British

I work as a researcher at the School of Archaeology, University of Oxford. My job is to look after the GIS elements of a large (ERC funded), 5 year project to study the English landscape from 1500BC to AD 1086, which we call the EngLaId project. For any who don’t know, GIS stands for Geographic(al) Information Systems (or sometimes Science) and it is, essentially, computer software that lets you create maps and analyse data in its spatial context (to cut a long story short!). Our project is using GIS as one of the tools in its armoury in order to try to understand continuity and change in the English rural landscape over the period of 2,500 years from the Middle Bronze Age to Domesday. My job mostly involves bringing together a large number of pre-existing datasets within GIS software (specifically, ArcGIS) and trying to find patterns and trends over time.

ArcGIS. Spatial data: contains Ordnance Survey data © Crown copyright and database right 2012 (OS OpenData)

However, Friday was not a day that involved a lot of GIS work for me. Two of my colleagues on the EngLaId team work at the University’s eResearch Centre (OeRC). During the morning, a few of us went over to the OeRC to meet with them and a Professor of Visualisation (Min Chen) and his team. We had a long and interesting discussion about innovative ways of visualising data. Prof Chen made a distinction between the two purposes of visualisation: to enable better academic understanding and exploration of data and to enhance public presentation of data. The former is where his team’s research interests lie and they have done some fascinating work on creating ‘glyphs’ to display multiple data attributes at once. The previous time we met with him, Prof Chen had shown us a series of glyphs that described the behaviour of sperm, which was most memorable for the erratic travel paths of the sperm found in ‘rats on drugs’! The meeting ended with me being invited to take part in a workshop on geospatial visualisation at the end of August.

I returned to my office for a couple of hours, ate some lunch, and set my computer to running some GIS tools. I then returned to the OeRC after lunch, leaving my processing processing, for our biweekly EngLaId team meeting. We normally meet here at the School of Archaeology, but the building is being partly rewired over the summer, so there is currently no space to hold meetings here. The team meeting lasted until after four o’clock, and seemed to be productive.

When we got back to the office, my colleague was told there was in a rat in her office (presumably disturbed by the builders), but I don’t think this rat was on drugs… As it had been a long day, the pub beckoned, so we swiftly adjourned to there. I had to return to the office later to check on my GIS processing (and pick up my bike), which had completed by that time.

Friday wasn’t really a typical day for me, as I am more usually found working at the computer in our attic office. But it was a fairly productive day over all, despite the relative lack of normal work. If anybody wants to know more about EngLaId, then please feel free to check out our own blog.

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Making Sense of Analytical Data

By Tim Young on June 30, 2012 in DayOfArch2012, Romano-British, Science

After the inital excitement of the arrival of new material in the lab, curiosity had to be curbed and the main task of the day tackled. This task was to process and interpret anayltical data acquired last week during many days work on the SEM. I use many different analytical techniques to investigate the more important archaeometallurgical residues passing through the lab – and the analytical SEM is one of the most useful.

Backscattered electron image of a tapped Roman iron smelting slag. The field of view is 2.5mm.

The backscattered electron images reveal compositional contrasts through their grey scale. In this image the dominant phase, appearing pale grey, is fayalite (an olivine mineral, approximately Fe2SiO4).

Across the centre of the image is a discontinuity, produced by the chilling of the surface of an individual lobe of slag as it flowed from the surface and cooled in the air.

The crystals are large, suggesting the slag cooled slowly, and the lobe margin is not marked by the development of much iron oxide, so this example probably cooled right in the mouth of the furnace.

As well as producing these images, the analytical SEM also permits chemical microanalyses from tiny spots or areas of the sample.

The second backscattered electron image shows a tiny detail of the first image, with the location of microanalyses.

Detail of Roman tapped iron-smelting slag. Field of view is approximately 0.17mm.

The instrument provides the chemical analyses, but they then have to be recast as mineral formulae – and that was today’s task. With many hundreds to do that was a substantial task in front of the spreadsheet. Gradually a picture emerges of the overall composition of the slag and of its constituent minerals.In this instance, the slag proved to be typical of residues produced during the smelting of iron ores from the Forest of Dean. That is a useful result in itself, allowing one aspect of the economy of this Roman settlement to be understood. As other samples from the same site are interpreted further details will emerge – permitting reconstruction of the yield and efficiency of the furnace as well as aspects of the technology itself.

Processing microanalytical data, to convert the microanalyses into mineral formulae.

Archaeometallurgical residues provide a very direct link back to a particular occasion in the past, when an artisan did a particular job in a particular way. The waste material provides key evidence for that moment in time. Although studying the waste, rather than the product, might seem perverse, there is often a richer set of evidence about hte nature of the process to be gleaned from the residues than from the artefact. Crucially, the residues also typically remain close to the site of the activity, whereas the products were dispersed after production and may not be able to be linked back to their point of origin.

Careful investigation of such archaeometallurgical residues may allow us to come as close as we ever could do to looking over the shoulder of the Roman smith at his work.

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Objects, Advice, and a Bit of Thinking…

By Nicola Hembrey on June 29, 2012 in Day of Archaeology, DayOfArch2012, Finds, Roman, Romano-British

A day in my life as an archaeologist and finds specialist for English Heritage

As one of the small team of archaeologists within the Intervention and Analysis Division of English Heritage, based at Fort Cumberland, Portsmouth, and working 80% of full time due to the three young herberts who more than fill a million percent of the rest of time, my days are always full, and rarely the same. Technology, determination and flexible bosses enable me to cram a fair amount into a week.

My day starts at around 5am with a reading of emails, then the next couple of hours are given over to lunchboxes, breakfasts, hens, cats, dogs, hamsters, after a smidge of yoga before the madness starts. Throughout this time I also tend to listen to the radio or the reading or the violin practice, while catching up on my Twitter feed (@Nicola_Hembrey), which is great for archaeological news (and a little bit of gossip!). Once the school runs are done I dash to the office, and I’m usually sitting at my desk with a fennel and ginger tea by 9.15am. I have a super view out over Hayling Island, and on a clear day I can hear, Table 2, your lunch is ready, from the pub over the stretch of water! I’ve been at the Fort for thirteen years and I love working within such a diverse, committed and interesting group of colleagues, although the annual ten months of horizontal rain can be a something of a trial.

Fabulous office! Sharp eyes will note the obligatory boxes of finds and X-Rays. Sadly the shelves and stacks of books, and the lovely view, are out of shot…

Yesterday I was – unusually – able to give myself over to an almost entire day of concentrating on one thing; the middle poster above is taken from the site I project manage, the Roman settlement opposite Silbury Hill, which we evaluated in the late summer of 2010, and for which the report is almost complete, hence a day of reading all the specialist contributions, and polishing up my own! I have written the artefacts report, and together with my colleague Vicky Crosby, who led the excavations, I’m working on the overview. I’ve been doing a great deal of thinking and reading in recent weeks about any ritual aspect to the site. We hope to submit the report to the local journal, the Wiltshire Archaeological and Natural History Magazine, in good time before the end of August deadline. The project team have been brilliant in getting this to publication so quickly – in archaeological terms at least! – while under considerable pressure and uncertainty from our recent round of restructuring.

Today, though, I don’t have the luxury of getting back to the Later Silbury report, as I have to finish off the list that I’ve been mentally carting around all week, to avoid next week spiralling away before I’m even out of this one. The illustrations need a final check. My mountain of library books needs renewing. I’ve been asked to write a caption for a photograph for a colleague’s memorial event leaflet. I have to write the final section of my performance review. Timelog doesn’t complete itself. I desperately need to catch up on reading the Assessment Report for a project which I have been asked project manage following the redundancy of another colleague, a process which has been difficult for all of us, and the effects of which will be felt for a long while. I whizz down to our stash of outreach material, to find a few objects to donate to a project that wants to bury artefacts at sea for 25 years. I also reply to someone who is working on the update of the professional side of the EH website, after spending an hour writing comments on the pieces of text that he has sent me.

Current reading, mostly concerned with the theorising of artefacts. Books strapped up in the old-fashioned way make me very happy…

Last year I was able to write up the small assemblage of finds that came from our work as part of the Silbury Hill Conservation Project, and I was also lucky enough to revisit the finds from previous interventions in the area. The Monograph text is currently with our publications team. One of the most interesting objects was an unusual copper-alloy bracelet which came from the base of a Roman ditch, but was of Later Bronze Age or Earlier Iron Age date. This sent me off on a long thought process about the significance of heirloom artefacts – those old objects that are important to people because of their association with another person, or an idea, or a particular time in their life. It made me wonder whether getting to grips with this idea from a present perspective could illuminate our thinking about the importance of old objects in the past; something nigh-on impossible to get to grips with within the archaeological record. This led to the beginnings of a project that I’m hoping to get off the ground with a few colleagues; a public survey, with a large social media element, in which people can post details of their object, and from which we can analyse the data later. I made a phone call, to see if there had been any response yet to our proposal; nothing so far. Hopefully it will happen. Keep your eyes peeled for Objects Of My Affection.

Finally while in the office I had a quick look over my website. I’m secretary and web editor for the Roman Finds Group, a forum for all those with an interest in the subject (do check us out online; we’re really very good). I added the details of our forthcoming meeting at the British Museum in April 2013, in which attendees can visit the Pompeii exhibition as part of the very reasonable conference fee (sorry, ad over now!). I’m lucky that EH gives me a small amount of time in which I can sit on this committee.

I leave in time for the return school run, and spend the next couple of hours listening to stories of everyone’s day and making supper, while keeping my emails (and Twitter!) open from the iPad in the kitchen. It’s the best way to stay on top of things.

I then spend a while re-reading comments that I wrote earlier in the week, on a finds report within a site publication which we have funded through our grants programme, National Heritage Protection Commissions. The report had been a long time coming, but turned out to be really well researched, well thought out and well written. I can easily see it becoming a ‘go-to’ text for finds reports when it’s published. If I have the space within my deadlines I like to write my comments and then leave them a day or so before sending, just to make sure that I haven’t missed anything.

Working from home, commenting on a lengthy finds report. I don’t normally print out this much paper! Note the extremely hi-tech phone…

Finally, I respond to an email from the Activity Lead of the Ploughzone Activity Team, which has recently been formed as part of the National Heritage Protection Plan. He needs all team members to comment on a proposal. Almost all of our communication is by email to keep costs down, as we come from EH offices all over the country. I add it to my mental list for next week, and mark the email unread, to remind myself.

Later I’ll do some more reading, and thinking, if I don’t fall asleep first.

So, there it is, a typical day in the life of this (lucky) archaeologist. I seem to have got all the way to the end of this post without including a picture of either an object, or myself, which is probably something of an oversight (particularly the former!). Here’s a happy picture of me (at front, red shoes) with the gorgeous site team at Later Silbury, instead.

Nicola Hembrey, Archaeologist (Artefact Analysis), English Heritage @Nicola_Hembrey

29 vi 2012

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The Bitterley Hoard – Day of Archaeology Blog

By Peter Reavill on June 29, 2012 in Anglo-Saxon, Day of Archaeology, DayOfArch2012, Early Medieval, Excavation, Iron Age, Medieval, Museum Archaeology, Periods, Post Medieval, Prehistory, Roman, Romano-British, Viking

Dear followers of the Day of Archaeology,

I hope you have found some my posts interesting today – just wanted to say thanks for reading them and also thanks to Dan Pett and Lorna Richardson (and the rest of the team) for doing lots of the organising for this social media event.

If you want to stay up to date with what’s going on at the PAS keep an eye on our blog and news pages

http://finds.org.uk/blogs/

http://finds.org.uk/news

That’s all from me for this year

All the best

Peter

Peter Reavill

Finds Liaison Officer Shropshire and Herefordshire

Portable Antiquities Scheme

peter.reavill@shropshire.org.uk

Blog: http://finds.org.uk/blogs/themarches/

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Michael Marshall: Assessing Small Finds From Roman London Part 2

By Museum of London Archaeology on June 29, 2012 in Commercial Archaeology, DayOfArch2012, Historical Archaeology, Roman, Romano-British

So the many, many boxes of nails, thank god, are now a distant memory. At the assessment stage we only do a fairly coarse quantification in order to determine the potential of the material for further work. This sometimes just involves weighing and counting the fragments but when preservation is good enough some other data can be collected such as number of complete nails from each context (divided into broad size categories), minimum number of nails and comments on particularly distinctive styles or features. The point of this isn’t to write a definitive account of the use of nails on the site but to assess their potential for further analysis, decide what role they will play in the final publication and how they can help us to address research questions.

Unfortunately, it’s probably not worth doing much more work on the Southwark nails as they are in terrible condition. Most are completely encrusted or incomplete and the assemblage is quite small with a maximum of c. 15 fragments from any given context making any inferences of limited value.

Much more exciting this afternoon is the Roman glass and glass working waste which will definitely feature in the final publication. As mentioned briefly in my previous post, this seems to be the first Roman glass-working evidence from this side of the river. The types of waste include ‘moils’ (glass from the end of the blowing iron left behind when you crack the vessel off) as well as a variety of melted, fused and runny lumps. Threads, pulls and trails etc derive from more detailed manipulation of glass during decoration or the addition of handles etc.

Glass working waste from Basinghall, London: Threads and Nails( (c) Andy Chopping, MOLA)

The assemblage is relatively small so far with only about 25 moils worth of fragments accounted for, each of which equates to a vessel manufactured onsite. This estimate is based on EME (estimated moil equivalent) a technique lifted from pottery studies (EVEs) which is calculated by measuring the proportion of the moil diameter present in each fragment. Of course many more vessels could have been made and the moils recycled or not recovered. Vessels were being made from both naturally coloured blue-green glass and amber coloured glass.

Glass working waste from Basinghall, London: Moils ( (c) Andy Chopping, MOLA)

The general range of waste types is not dissimilar to those found at the much larger glass-working dumps at Guildhall Yard and Basinghall Street across the river in Londinium (see pictures below) and, like those dumps, the waste was found alongside lots of broken vessel and window glass intended for recycling. Raw Roman glass was brought all the way from the Mediterranean so recycling this ‘cullet’ made good economic sense. Identifiable fragments of bottles, beakers, jugs and jars from amongst the smashed up vessels suggest a probable date in the early to mid 2nd century AD for the glass working.

If glass working interests you check out this website http://www.romanglassmakers.co.uk/linksrom.htm and a great little book called Glass workers of Roman London by John Shepherd and my colleague Angela Wardle, which provides an interim popular account of their work on the Basinghall assemblage and the techniques of glass making. Their work on the final monograph is nearing completion, but luckily the new evidence from Southwark should still just about make it into the gazetteer of glass-working sites included in the text, and contribute to their discussion of the organisation of the industry.

That’s enough from me. I don’t have time to tell you about the lamps, finger rings, combs, figurines, crucibles, hairpins, querns, toilet instruments, tools or the large and interesting assemblage of glass vessels I have already recorded from the site. Unfortunately, I can’t even tell you about the cosmetic mortar or the blue blobbed glass beaker, probably an import from the Rhineland, which I recorded yesterday. The whole point of the assessment stage is so we can get our head around what we’ve got, and how best to study and publish it, so if you want to know more you’ll need to hang about. This is certainly shaping up to be an interesting site and I’ve already spent too long waffling here and not enough time doing my glass data entry.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I need to get back and finish this context before the end of the day, so I can get to the pub on time.

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Friday in the Office. Jake Streatfeild-James, Field Archaeologist, AOC Archaeology Group – North

By transit_monkey on June 29, 2012 in Conservation, DayOfArch2012, Finds, Roman, Romano-British

I was in to work early this morning. The sun was out as I headed around the bypass to the office. As soon as the key is in the door it starts to tip down outside, so I’m glad that, whereas I’m usually in the field, today I am helping out the conservation department process a large assemblage of Roman ceramics. The finds come from Roman fort in central Scotland, near the Antonine Wall. During the last four days I’ve been labelling pot, some of which I remember from last summer’s excavation.

I will have worked for AOC in their Edinburgh office for a year this July, first as a site assistant and now as a field archaeologist. In my first year I’ve learnt a lot: what it means to do a ‘watching brief,’ what to look for during an evaluation and the art of report writing, even picking up some experience of community archaeology along the way.

Carrying on from where I left off yesterday afternoon, I’m continuing to excavate the material left inside a Roman bowl. The bowl was lifted from ground in one piece, and was discovered in the backfill of a pit which contained other Roman material. On Roman sites, pots like this often contain human or animal remains- burials or ritual deposits, but in this case there is only the backfill of the pit, suggesting that the bowl had outlived its use and was discarded.

Next there is a collection of Samian, high status pottery from Roman Gaul. This group of sherds was discovered in a concentrated area of the site, and might make an entire vessel: time to break out the adhesive! This is a first for me and my only comparable experience is gluing a mug back together. This is a tad more complicated.

It nearly goes back together, and I don’t have any bits left over. The conservators agree it’s a success. Would they lie to protect my feelings?

Finally there’s some preparation to do for a watching brief on Monday morning. My site box, spade, and personal protective equipment all need gathering together and checked before I leave for the weekend.

Hope it doesn’t rain on Monday.

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Georgina Brown RCAHMS Day of Archaeology

By RCAHMS on June 29, 2012 in Day of Archaeology, DayOfArch2012, Iron Age, Prehistory, Romano-British

I am Georgina Brown, a surveyor and cartographer in the Landscape Section at RCAHMS. The site that I have chosen is the archaeological landscape around Inveresk. At this point, I had better admit to a slight bias in choosing this site as Musselburgh is my adopted home town. Very little of the archaeology in this area is actually visible on the ground; most is buried below the modern day land surface and has only been revealed when an excavation has taken place or when it shows up as a cropmark in the fields; however, when you put all the discoveries together, they tell a fascinating story.

Roman remains were first noted at Inveresk in the 1560s but the story of the fort and its environs is still being added to today. Parts of the Roman Fort were excavated in the 1940s and many other structures and artefacts have since been discovered around Inveresk during excavations preceding building work. The remains of houses, streets and wells of the civilian vicus were unearthed at Inveresk Gate, the base of a possible viewing stand for a Roman parade ground was discovered at Lewisvale Park and, close by, altar stones to Mithras and Sol were found during the construction of the cricket pavilion. Most recently, Roman and Iron Age skeletons along with the remains of an enclosure, possibly used for storing military supplies shipped in from the continent, were found at the former Brunton’s Wireworks site. The area’s outlying features – Roman temporary camps and field systems – have been revealed as cropmarks on aerial photographs. Add to this list Mesolithic flints, a 900m long Neolithic cursus, Bronze Age burials, Iron Age house remains and you have a very rich and varied “invisible” archaeological landscape.

Map of Roman Remains at Inveresk

Inveresk Cropmark remains

To have a look at these sites and a map showing where they all lie, try the following links.

Inverest Fort

Roman temporary camps

Westfield Cursus

Altars to Mithras and Sol

Skeletons at the former Brunton’s Wireworks site

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Rebecca Jones RCAHMS Day of Archaeology

By RCAHMS on June 29, 2012 in Day of Archaeology, DayOfArch2012, Roman, Romano-British

My name is Rebecca Jones and I’m a Romanist. My regular work at RCAHMS is as an Operational Manager in the Survey and Recording group where I am responsible for Data and Recording, overseeing a range of projects relating to the data in our online database, Canmore, and its mapping application, and working in partnership across the sector to deliver information to the public. Information Management is one strand of my research interests but another is very firmly placed in Roman military archaeology.

Scotland is one of the best places in the Roman empire to study the archaeology of the Roman army. Repeated attempts to conquer Scotland left a legacy of remains that are the envy of the rest of the Roman world. One of the places where this is most evident is the Roman fort of Ardoch in Perthshire. This is the location of one of the best earthwork Roman forts in Britain, and the plain to the north of the fort was a marshalling ground for large armies on campaign through Perthshire to the north.

The fort itself was occupied several times leaving a legacy of multiple ditches still surviving as earthworks. I have accompanied several tours of the site and visitors never fail to be impressed by the scale of the defences. Some of these were excavated in the late 19^th century by the Society of Antiquaries of Scotland and some of the photographs from those excavations are amongst the most fascinating early excavation shots held in the Collections at RCAHMS.

But not only is the fort an amazing site. To the north lie at least five marching camps. These were temporary structures occupied by invading armies who were housed in rows upon rows of leather tents. We are fortunate that they built ramparts and ditches around the perimeter of their encampments, for it is these that leave visible archaeological remains. Imagine a field of tents from T in the Park or Glastonbury: after the weekend is over and the tents have gone – what have you left? No doubt a sea of litter but the Roman’s did not live in our disposable culture. Once the litter is cleared you probably have a muddy field. But then six months later? Is there any evidence that those tents were there? But if a regular perimeter rampart and ditch with particular rounded corners and entrance protection is built, then that leaves an archaeological footprint that we can detect as Roman. The majority of the camps at Ardoch have been levelled through centuries of ploughing and only the perimeter ditch can be seen from the air through differential cropmarkings in dry summers, although stretches of three still survive as upstanding earthworks.

Rebecca Jones explaining the camps at Ardoch

A handful of other camps in Scotland have revealed internal rubbish pits and ovens through aerial and geophysical survey and excavation but for most camps, it is the perimeter which we can identify. The camps at Ardoch witnessed one of the largest Roman forces that ever took to the field in Britain, with the largest camp enclosing over 54 hectares / 130 acres.

It’s this combined evidence of the transient Roman army plus the troops stationed in the fort here for several years, that make these seemingly peaceful fields in Perthshire so fascinating.

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The cow bell is re assembled. Samples of old fill can be seen to the right.

Heard of the Blackmoor Hoard? This is the Blackmoor Cow-Bell..

By Claire Woodhead on June 29, 2012 in Conservation, Day of Archaeology, DayOfArch2012, Finds, Historical Archaeology, Museum Archaeology, Roman, Romano-British

Hi, I’m Claire, the archaeology conservator at Hampshire County Council Arts & Museums Service. Today we’re hoping to be able to post about the whole archaeology department’s activities, but we’re kicking off with conservation and my cow-bell!

The cow-bell is part of an assemblage from Blackmoor in the parish of Selbourne. Much of the assemblage carries novel old restoration attempts which are very interesting, but now failing. My task with this cow bell was to remove the old brown wax fills (which were becoming covered in a fine white deposit) and the thin wooden inserts used to support joins. I then had to carefully clean the cow-bell to remove any residues, and reassemble it with modern and reversible acrylic adhesive and a spider tissue backing – sort of like a thin conservation grade papier mache!

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