An Unusual Conservation Problem...

[endlessrarities]

It's all change at work.  The field team's back from their recent excavations, and the office is full of new people and rather old things. 

For a little while, we find ourselves the custodians of all manner of objects.  They're dug up, cleaned and stablised, then they stay on the shelves until all the rigmarole with Treasure Trove is resolved, and the objects are assigned to an appropriate museum.  Often in the rush to get the site published, the finds get neglected - I've had numerous complaints from museum curators who've found themselves taking custody of grotty, manky finds that are still in more or less the same state they were in when they were dug out of the ground in the first place.

Naturally, we don't want to be associated with that sort of shoddy workmanship.  We want our finds to be clean, stable, marked up as required, and nicely packaged.  To make life more complicated, the assemblages grow to accomodate new finds recovered during the environmental processing works.  Then there may be years of delay before the assemblages move on to their new homes.  This of course causes a crisis of space management.

With massive amounts of finds coming in from the 19th century pottery site, I'm having to rationalise space in order to try and make room for the new arrivals.  Thankfully, there's extra staff around to help facilitate this.  So all those silly little jobs that have been hanging around for months can now get done, and there's new bits and bobs to poke through and play with!!

Some of the new arrivals are causing trouble already.  You wouldn't expect conservation issues from a 19th century pottery site, but my friends in the field team have created a nice thorny little problem for me by bringing me some rather unusual finds.  They found a pit filled with dumped debris from the pottery, and recovered a nice selection of pot lids for posterity.  The only problem is that they'd been dumped before firing.  They're raw clay -- they haven't even been fired into their 'biscuit' state. 

They've been unpacked and set out on trays to air-dry over the weekend.  Hopefully they'll be a little less slippery on Monday, and after a few weeks I'm hoping it'll be possible to clean them up a bit.  It's certainly presents an unusual challenge - but then, that's probably why I enjoy the job so much!
 

Comments

[slysidonia.livejournal.com]

Will your pot lids be left raw? Or, will they be biscuit fired?

[endlessrarities.livejournal.com]

They'll be left raw, i.e. in their historically accurate state. If they'd achieved biscuit status, life would be much easier...

At the moment, we're not sure if they constitute samples or finds. There's plenty we could do with the clay with regards to analysis for sources, etc. but there's not much point in doing that when you've got historical records which include order books!

We don't even have to declare them as Treasure Trove because they're so modern. Maybe they'll just get photographed and binned:-(

[red-trillium.livejournal.com]

I've never thought about the issues with finding old greenware. If you fire it to preserve it are you then loosing the historical significance? But if you don't fire them then they are very fragile.

How will you guys treat them?

[endlessrarities.livejournal.com]

'Greenware'... That's a nice new word that I must add to my vocabulary so that I sound like I know what I'm talking about...

I honestly don't know what's going to happen. It's a case of 'watch this space'. The museum folk may say, 'Bleaugh! We don't want this mucky thing crowding up our stores'. On the other hand, they may say, 'Wow! You don't get finds like that very often. Keep it!!!' If I were a curator, I'd opt for the latter, but I'm not, so I don't know what the answer's going to be. What if it's the only example of its type that we find on the site? What if it's the only example of its type that's been found to date full stop??

We shall see...

[red-trillium.livejournal.com]

I'm pretty sure greenware is the right term for unfired clay. But you'll have to forgive me, it's been decades since I've been in a ceramics class!!

I can see the storage being a pain for it, but at the same time how often is greenware found that "someone" (yah, I know...money, time, priorities.....) can do chemical analyses on to compare the clay components of where it came from vs where it was found. Also, I can imagine some museums/instructors/artists would be intrigued to have something original that they could try to fire like the original artisans have.

What a quandry and an interesting one at that. Do please keep us updated!!

[endlessrarities.livejournal.com]

It is an interesting one. And I'll bear in mind that if the museums don't want the objects, some artisans might want to take custody of the things rather than see them junked. One does have a mattock hole in it, though the others are pretty much undamaged, which is remarkable in itself.

I'm concerned that the things will crack as they dry out, but there's not much we can do about that as it would cost far too much to conserve something that's of relatively little historical value...

I'll keep you posted on their process, and see if I can get a few photos...