Rebecca Shellenberger, a trained archaeologist and Corinium Museum's Schools and Families Officer, on how artefacts matter, but where you find them is just as important
Recently I was giving a short presentation to a Board of Trustees about a body of work that I had been wrestling with for a year. Afterwards, I was surprised to learn that the most interesting part of my talk for many of them was a two-minute section about how we accession, or take in, artefacts to the Corinium Museum. I thought it may be a worthwhile topic for a short blog.
To begin with, what is a museum? Museums hold space for people to come together. Museums are a place of understanding. Museums are keepers of knowledge – the good, the bad and the ugly. Museums store artefacts, and then try to interpret and convey the stories that brought those artefacts into existence. The museum itself is a living and breathing entity that evolves over time. We are constantly finding new things that alter history as we know it, and the way that we are displaying history should change as well. Questions such as, ‘is there a face in the museum that is like mine?’ or ‘whose perspective are we seeing in this interpretation?’ have recently influenced how we view history so that we get fuller picture of the past.
Every time we create a new road or a new estate, we unsheathe more history from its loamy home and museums step in to care for these displaced objects. But as headlines reported earlier this year, museums are running out of space. The obvious solution is to cull the carrion but, in our world, this is a more complicated undertaking. Sometimes it can be done, but we have been entrusted to care for these objects indefinitely, so simply turning them out because they no longer suit our purposes is not always possible.
Taking artefacts into the museum is called accessioning. We accept donations, receive deposits from firms such as Cotswolds Archaeology who are in the field doing the work, and occasionally our support group The Friends of Corinium Museum will make a purchase. We do not accept just anything of course. This is sometimes upsetting to people who drop in with an old shoebox of Great Aunt Edna’s bits of fossils and pottery. We will, of course, have a look (via emailed photo please), but the shoebox is missing one of the most important parts for us, the provenience. Since the work of archaeology is destructive by nature, gathering the information around the artefact is crucial because when the house or road goes on top, it may be lost forever. Provenience can tell us so much: What layer or time period was it found within? What items were associated with it? In what type of room was is found? The answers in the context can tell us the who, what, when, where and whys, whereas the artefact is just a small piece of the answer.
What you see on display in the museum is just the tip of the iceberg. Here we have about 2,250 artefacts on display, but in storage over several facilities we have about 90,000 to 1,000,000 objects. That collection is managed by just a few people, but the entire team of staff and volunteers at the museum help to shape, care and inform the collection and interpretation.
In the past ten years, we have tightened our guidelines for accessions. The decision was made that we are a museum defined by archaeology, and this means that things such as social history we may refer to a different site.
Now that we know the who and what of the museum, let us follow an artefact on its journey home….
In 2016, the Town Hall in Lechlade burned down. As a result, the town needed to rebuild it and decided to add a skatepark in the planning application. When something is about to be built, especially in an area where there is known archaeology, an archaeological survey/excavation is required, and a contract is put out to tender. In the case of the Lechlade Town Hall, a company called Foundations won the contract. At this point, they will notify the museum that work is going to begin and, should they find anything, ask if would we be happy to accession the artefacts. Foundations asked, and we agreed, they did the excavation and some artefacts were found. They gave us a report, or a statement of significance regarding the artefacts, and one rather nice piece was a Bronze Age archer’s wrist guard. Foundations will have done some cleaning and some general conservation, but the bulk of that work falls to the museum. This means that we need to have funding to conserve and store things if they will not be put on display. If they are put on display, as the wrist guard was, we need to find funding for total conservation (anywhere from £50 to tens of thousands of pounds), a case if necessary (cases range from £6,000 – £20,000 off the rack), mounting and interpretation (a few hundred).
Firms such as Foundations, who provide archaeological services, pay museums to store the artefacts indefinitely. In Gloucestershire, these prices can range from £75 – £150 per box. A funny aside here is that Gloucestershire is one of the more expensive counties in which to deposit artefacts, and the ripple effect is that the depositing fee adds to the cost of houses. It is a pittance, but worth noting with a chuckle – What did the Romans give us? Higher house prices!
But back to the topic…we receive the boxes and assign a unique number to each artefact, or group of artefacts. For example, within this box we had a lot of flint flakes. The flakes were admitted into the collection under one number. The number is the year/deposition site number/box number/artefact number. In numbering artefacts this way, it gives the collections team a chance to ‘lay eyes’ on every single artefact. You can imagine how exciting this is, but maybe also how tedious when we are viewing hundreds of pot sherds or bulk tesserae. Our wrist guard went off for a quote for conservation, but luckily it received an all clear that saved us some money. The wrist guard started its journey to the museum ten years ago, or maybe you can say 4,000 years ago, and is now on display for you to enjoy at your leisure.
When you visit the museum and see our beautiful artefacts on display, spare a thought for the journey that the object took from field to case. Remember also those many thousands of objects stored by the museum for use by historians, osteoarchaeologists, researchers and future generations, who help shape and share the stories of our past.
