It is Volunteers’ Week this week. We hope to include some reports on the various activities soon.
Meanwhile:
The gardening team have been at their post every Monday for some weeks now, and the results are stunning.
The Wood Cabin continues to be popular. The cakes are described as “Fantastic!” And the sunshine has attracted customers.
And the work begins on the outside of our lovely buildings. St Ann’s Gate Architects who work on historic buildings are busy on the east wall of what was our cafe, while the south wall of the old chapel (Lecture Hall) is being demolished.
Conversation Club continues with its monthly Monday gatherings, currently in the City Centre Library, which is proving a popular venue. And the little ones continue to be catered for at Under Five Fridays, as described recently.
Behind the Scenes Tours continue on the first Saturday of each month.
Volunteers are still busy processing archaeological finds discovered by members of the public, entering the information on the British Museum Portable Antiquities Scheme database.
Volunteers are running the computers hot with keeping the ever-changing museum situation monitored and recorded, particularly, at the moment, keeping records of where items are, in their various temporary ‘homes’.
Tourists and vacationers continue to be enthralled by the Wessex Gallery and by our temporary exhibition, Salisbury On Camera, all expertly guided, when needed, by our Engagement Volunteers.
And we have a continuing programme of online talks, Dr Phil Harding giving a talk in the Medieval Hall, youngsters involved with Fashioning Our World, Young Curator’s Club and Summer Discovery Days. All of which are supported by Volunteers.
We wrote recently of pottery recognition training at the museum, led by Lorraine Mepham of Wessex Archaeology (look for her at The Salisbury Museum Archaeology Festival, talking about her favourite find on Saturday 23 July). Originally intended as training for PAS (Portable Antiquities Scheme) Volunteers, it was opened up for a necessarily limited number of other Volunteers, and everyone was fascinated.
The conclusion of the two days’ sessions was on Post Roman pottery.
One of the abiding mysteries of what used to be called the Dark Ages (ie the Post Roman or Anglo Saxon period, on which quite a lot of light has recently been shone but which is still mysterious in many ways) is what happened to the advances of the Roman period?
Early on, the Romans had introduced the potter’s wheel , but apart from around places like Southampton (Hamwic) where there were imported goods, wheel thrown pottery disappeared after the fifth century BC. We trainees found it difficult to distinguish Saxon from the pre-historic pottery of five hundred years before!
Saxon pot (burnished)
Improvements were made, of course, and slightly finer finishes were achieved by burnishing (rubbing leather-hard unfired clay pots with a stone to give it a smooth finish) and the use of slip (watery clay mix) and glossy and colourful glazes later began to become the norm.
Specialised vessels began to appear – dripping dishes, pipkins (small pots sometimes on legs), chafing dishes, frying pans, cauldrons, costrels (for carrying drink), as well as jugs and bowls and jars, for serving, working with, and for storage. Decoration and colour became more exotic and burnishing less common.
Medieval Laverstock jugs in TMS collection
Potteries in Wiltshire and nearby became well known – Laverstock; Surrey (producing white wares); the Kennet Valley; Michelmersh (producing grey wares) and at Minety, Wiltshire, where the potter’s wheel made a return early on.
By c AD 1500 the fabric of pottery no longer showed up with inclusions (substances – shell, grit, broken pot – added to give strength to the clay). Wheels and ‘properly’ built kilns which gave higher temperatures and strengthened the pot that way, became the norm.
Stoneware was imported from Germany and tin-glazed earthenware from other parts of the Continent, which was much copied in England.
StonewareTin glazed
Then, after the 17th century, almost all homes in the south, certainly in Hampshire, Dorset and Wiltshire, would have had Verwood pottery in the kitchen and for everyday use. It was a type of pottery rather than all coming from Verwood (in Dorset). It was an industry that probably existed in the late Middle Ages (the earliest known kiln dating from the 1600s) and continued until 1952 when the last pottery closed down, in Verwood itself. In those last days, the village of Verwood was producing anything and everything in pottery, from pleasant (but not high-end) dining crockery and bread bins, to money boxes, pot-pourri containers and bedpans. The Dorset Owl is the iconic image of the industry, made to hold water or cider for workers in the field.
Dorset Owl
The last of the Verwood potters, making his wares in the mid 20th century much as the Romano-British must have done centuries before. A primitive wheel, driven by a ‘boy’ who operates it with his pole.
We didn’t go further than this as the PAS does not generally record anything after about 1750. But what a history! Examples of the pre-historic pottery which we studied in the first session are to be seen in the Wessex Gallery and most of the types of pot in this section are in the Ceramics Gallery. Many thanks to Lorraine.
This past week, a number of Volunteers with different museum skills had the chance to take up training from Lorraine Mepham of Wessex Archaeology – on Pottery Recognition.
Organised by Finds Liaison Officer Sophie Hawke, initially with PAS Volunteers in mind, Engagement and Learning Volunteers, and others, with their own needs and interests around the topic, also attended.
We are talking domesticity and archaeology here, rather than fine wares and art, but we covered most aspects. The Portable Antiquities Scheme Volunteers need to be able to identify the sherds which are brought in for recording on the British Museum’s PAS database, and to be able to describe them for the record. Pottery is very important as a dating tool for other finds from the same sites.
As Lorraine explained, the pottery remains can inform about the purpose of an archaeological site, the status of the people living or working there in the past, and tell us about production (eg technology), trade (Local? Foreign?), and even about food types, as well as fashion and design changes.
Pottery is always clay, of course, and these days, scientific analysis can tell us exactly where the material came from (though the analysis is expensive!). Science may also tell us, even after centuries, what food was last inside the pot.
Clay, on its own, isn’t usually strong enough to last, unless fired at very high temperatures. These temperatures could not be achieved early on, in simple bonfire or ‘clamp’ kilns, so mixing the clay with something was important. We thus were introduced to ‘temper’ – anything from straw and grasses to pounded limestone, shell or flint. Or, indeed, smashed up pot fragments. Identifying the temper is one of the ways of identifying the pottery.
Early Neolithic (Stone Age) pot looks like ‘rocky road’ (my description!) and almost good enough to eat. If lucky enough to find a piece of rim or part of the semi spherical base, that helps with recognition as there may be holes near the rim, for suspension, or the blackened rounded base will be the clue that they were made for cooking – suspended over the fire, not for setting on the ground.
Early Neolithic pottery
By the Bronze Age, pots could be larger, with flat bases, and more decorative with markings made in the soft clay by anything handy. Pots are often found in burials. Interestingly, adult burials have decorated pots, children’s graves have plain….
In late Bronze Age and early Iron Age pottery finger-tip decoration is common. Seeing the marks of finger nails and of ‘pinching’ in the clay, from thousands of years ago, is quite something.
Early Iron Age (tempered with oolitic limestone described as “like ants eggs!)
By the Late Iron Age, contact with the continent, and with the spreading Roman Empire, saw the introduction of the potter’s wheel, and, gradually, improved kilns. But not everywhere. Fine wares began to appear, with slightly inferior British versions following on.
Late Iron Age
We had two days of training so look out for more on this blog, about Roman and Medieval pottery, next week.
How the chance discovery of a workshop, abandoned in the 1960s and left frozen in time, helped Colne Valley Museum preserve the dying tradition of making clogs – an object synonymous with working class life in the mill towns, mining villages and steel communities of nineteenth and twentieth century Britain.
Clogs, of course, were also worn in rural areas, and the clips which can be seen across the front of these clogs, although particularly fine in this case, are not uncommon metal detectorist finds and come in to The Salisbury Museum for the Portable Antiquities Volunteers to identify and record.
Museum Volunteers who work with the British Museum’s Portable Antiquities Scheme and with the Wiltshire Finds Liaison Officer, Sophie Hawke, met for ‘real’ this week (ie NOT virtually!). And we learned how to draw.
Below are examples of archaeological illustrations, and works of art in their own right. Photographs, even with modern cameras, won’t create the kind of image needed by the archaeologists to record their finds. Tiny objects must be re-sized to be clear, and huge objects shrunk, to fit on a page! The drawing must be accurate so that nothing is lost, or added, in the processes. It is important to capture the shadow while not allowing that shadow to obscure any detail, and to be sure that the shadow, in the image, is accurately indicating shape.
(These are taken from B Read ‘Identifying Detector Finds’ which includes illustrations by Nick Griffiths, our tutor for the day)
Some of those present were experienced with drawing and painting, others not, but it made no difference. This was a whole new ‘thing’.
When processing finds for the PAS, observation is important to aid description, so that helped. Scratches must be diagnosed as being either intentional, during manufacture, or…just scratches. Colours, eg enamel, gems, must be interpreted correctly. Colour is never used in the drawings but must be shown, and that is done by having a code to indicate the colours.
Mystery item? (Victorian penny 1900, shown for size comparison)
This item turned up in the Portable Antiquities Office at the museum this week. No date, no provenance or context unfortunately, so unlikely to be recorded, but interesting nevertheless.
It is a tenterhook. Tenters were used from at least the 14th century – big wooden frames on which newly made cloth, recently washed to remove muck and oil, would be stretched and dried. The cloth was, as you can see below, held to the frames by these metal hooks.
Salisbury was once surrounded by fields of these tenter frames and we have seen this painting as an example, before:
Tenter frames visible in the extreme left of picture, somewhere near St Martin’s Church
Weavers were still listed in the censuses as at work inside the city of Salisbury in the first half of the nineteenth century and so tenter frames may still have been seen on the outskirts of the town then, perhaps even on the Greencroft or along the Southampton road.
Meanwhile, also in the office this week and perhaps with the same origins, this object……Does anyone have any idea what it is? At one end it has a ring not unlike a crown bottle cap remover, and another, rectangular, opening. At the angle the metal is sharp at the edge as if for cutting and leads down to, at the other end, a pierced ring, as if it would be screwed down to a surface….
As regular readers will know, the Wiltshire Finds Liaison Officer, Sophie Hawke, is based at The Salisbury Museum. She also visits Wiltshire Museum at Devizes and oversees the recording of archaeological finds from anywhere in Wiltshire (sometimes even further afield) for The Portable Antiquities Scheme which, in turn, is based at the British Museum.
A number of the museum Volunteers work with Sophie. The one millionth record nationally was made recently, but more than 1, 500, 000 objects have been recorded so far (some objects being recorded in groups).
The PAS website says this:
The Portable Antiquities Scheme’s database holds records of archaeological finds discovered by members of the public. These are found while carrying out a wide range of activities including metal-detecting. Our first record was made in 1998, the half-million mark was reached in March 2010, our millionth object, a Roman coin from the Seaton hoard, was recorded in September 2014, and we recorded our one and a half millionth object in July 2020.
As of today, the figures are:
1,564,850 objects within 1,003,399 records.
Amongst objects most recently recorded by Sophie and her team are buckles, a seal matrix and a decorated part of a stirrup, a thousand years old, as well as Roman coins.
If you are interested, the PAS website is easy to search.
Richard Henry was Finds Liaison Officer for Wiltshire until a very few years ago, and our colleague here at The Salisbury Museum.
His new book, Hoards from Wiltshire (Amberley Books, 2021) is a lavishly illustrated account of some of the very best of finds from the county, and reminds us of the fabulous Hoards Exhibition of 2018. Many items in the book are on display in the museum.
I’ve got mine! Available to purchase in The Salisbury Museum bookshop….
Several of the museum’s Portable Antiquities Scheme Volunteers attended training today given by British Museum experts Andrew Brown and Sam Moorhead, on Iron Age coins. Not actually at the British Museum of course, but via Microsoft Teams. One of the great wonders to come out of the horrors of the last year or so is the ability to ‘attend’ training, conferences, exhibitions and other events, remotely. In fact, there have been opportunities to attend such things when otherwise, distance, cost of transport and numbers might have prevented attendance at all.
It was training of the highest quality by experts who know their subjects so well that it seemed effortless and was presented in such a way that it was accessible even to those of us who were largely beginners. Our Finds Liaison Officer, Sophie Hawke, was there as well, so from now on we can no longer pretend we can’t ‘do’ Iron Age coins!
The standard ‘history’ of this country is that there was no such thing as writing, or money, before the Romans came. It isn’t quite accurate, partly because of the influence, via the trade and sharing of ideas that occurred before the invasion of AD 43. Coins from Europe, and even the Middle East, have been found here in contexts that show they must have come over with traders in the 2nd or 1st centuries BC. Early British coins started being produced soon afterwards.
A two thousand year-old coin may not be at its best, and thus difficult to identify:
SSWM
In better condition, is this one (below), dating to c 100BC. There is an effort here to copy the head of Apollo, and a bull on the reverse, common on coins made in southern Europe.
SSWM
The earliest coins were cast in clay moulds, so no coin was ever exactly the same as the next but, quite quickly, they began to use stamps which had an engraved design and could be hammered into soft metal.
This one (below) was imported from Gaul having been made about 50BC but it is very like some British made coins of the time, with a blank side’ while the other shows a stylised horse (facing right) which was a common motif all over Europe. The prototype of this coin was a gold stater of the reign of Philip of Macedon (359 – 336BC) – father of Alexander the Great.
SSWM
This coin (below) is very local having been produced in eastern Wiltshire c 35BC:
SSWM
The horse is, in this example, more recognisable, though they always tended to be stylised, sometimes appearing as no more than a collection of raised lines and dots in the metal. Again, the horse faces right and appears with a wheel below it.
And, finally (below), a British Iron Age coin, pre-Roman (in fact this coin is probably exactly 2 000 years old) with an inscription. Look closely and you can see the head facing right, pointed nose, a simple cross for the eye, raised dots for curly hair. On the reverse, yet another horse (facing left this time) with TED above and AN below. Much of the time we don’t know what the letters meant they may have been sometimes just copies of marks seen on foreign coins but sometimes we do know that they are part of someone’s name and they could also represent the name of a tribe.
All these coins were identified and described by Salisbury Museum PAS Volunteers who love their work….as you can imagine!
It isn’t known how coins were used in this country then. They clearly had value but were not for popping down to the market with. Iron Age Britons appear to have traded using cattle, otherwise presumably bartering smaller objects if, indeed, most did any ‘buying and selling’ much at all. They must have been status symbols of some kind and used as special gifts. Perhaps carrying a coin helped show who you were – they certainly were representative of different tribes, or regions in this country, just as coins are of nations today. It may have been a way of taking your wealth with you if you were travelling or trading over long distances, or emigrating, much as a credit card is today.
Thank you to Andrew Brown and Sam Moorhead of the British Museum for their training today and to the PAS for providing that training.
We wrote recently by way of welcome to Sophie Hawke who had begun a job share, mainly at The Salisbury Museum, with Wiltshire Finds Liaison Officer, Wil Partridge. Today, Sophie writes:
Farewell Wil!
It was good see our view of Salisbury Cathedral from the office window again this week as I popped into the Museum briefly to say goodbye to our colleague, Wil Partridge, Finds Liaison Officer for Wiltshire as he leaves the Portable Antiquities Scheme and The Salisbury Museum, for a return to academia. Wil has been a FLO in several counties prior to joining The Salisbury Museum in 2018. He is still going to be working at Wiltshire Museum on the Wealth of Knowledge Project so we will see him regularly (Covid allowing). Good luck, Wil, missing you already, keep in touch!
I have now increased my hours to become full time FLO. Work has continued on identifying the finds we took in before Christmas, and I am grateful to the PAS volunteers for their work identifying and recording finds remotely, from finders’ photographs. We have had further PAS training via Zoom, including Roman Radiate and nummi coins, further database training and Early Medieval metalwork.
Several people have found objects in their gardens during this lockdown, including a couple of Roman coins, one of them pierced, so we hope to see those once The Salisbury Museum reopens (planned for 17 May). We have provided NW Young Archaeologists’ Club with information for their session looking at the Portable Antiquities Scheme and the Treasure process.
I attended a Teams tea break with other new FLOs this week, so it was good to catch up with them and see how well they are finding their new roles and the challenges faced starting a new job in lockdown! We will meet virtually again after Easter.
Do contact the PAS office at The Salisbury Museum if you have any finds queries:
Wil has moved on (though continues to have links with Wessex Museums as Sophie outlines above). The museum Portable Antiquities Scheme Volunteers who have worked with Wil look forward to seeing him later in the year as, of course, we haven’t had the chance to see him and properly wish him well on his future career path.
Sophie now takes over full-time and when Volunteers are allowed back on the premises (might it really happen in the early summer?) they can expect to see her in what is fondly known as ‘Narnia’ – the tiny office above the entrance porch at The Salisbury Museum.