June 29: The London Archaeological Archive and Research Centre (LAARC)

So...maybe posting something every day was unrealistic. Our days have been so jam-packed, that I finally have the chance to catch my breath and put some of my thoughts to blog post.

On Monday, we split up into two groups. My group spent the morning at the London Archaeological Archive and Research Centre (LAARC). We toured one of three LAARC facilities, located in a nondescript warehouse down a side road. It felt very much like an "undisclosed location."

To look at it, you wouldn't know that the building contains miles of artifacts that document the social and working history of Greater London. In fact, as of 2012, LAARC holds the Guinness World Record for the largest archaeological archive in the world. The LAARC has information on around 8,500 archaeological sites in London, and houses the full archives of around 3,500 sites. The bulk of these archives are post World War II, as bombing around the city left holes that revealed many treasures, including the remains of Roman temples and Medieval fortifications. These days, most finds occur when a building is being built or renovated in the city. It is the law (since 1990) that any building plans include a plan for archaeological excavation (at the builder's expense). As a result, many designers try to build as shallow and small a footprint as possible, to minimize the need for major excavation.

Kat, the Learning Program Manager, first took us through a part of the warehouse containing nothing but moving stacks of uniform boxes and boxes (and boxes) of bone and pottery, organized by the earliest date and site of a particular digging project. I thought it was odd they were organized by the date they were found, rather than the date they originated, but Kat explained that people usually search by dig project/site. Archaeologists are most concerned with where something was found, what it was found with, and what is was found in.

Artifacts are grouped into registered finds (those unique, distinguishing objects you might see on display in a museum) and general finds (bits of pottery, iron nails, and other odds and ends), which are more likely to be found at a site. As a group, the content and percentages of general finds at a site can provide a lot of insight about how a particular area was once used.

One of the general finds Kat showed us--and let us hold (!)--was a brick that had been totally incinerated during the Great Fire of London in 1666. The brick had been in the basement of a shop around the corner from Pudding Lane. They have reason to believe that barrels of tar were stored in this basement, which explains why the brick is absolutely charred through, and hints at the huge explosions that must have occurred in the city during those five days. We aren't able to post pictures from the LAARC facility, but here is a picture of a couple of similar bricks on display at the Museum of London.

Bricks burned in the Great Fire of London in 1666

Different materials are housed in separate areas, as they have different preservation requirements. For example, bone and pottery are pretty stable and are kept in plastic bags and grouped in boxes; paper requires acid free materials; metals are packaged with silica to prevent erosion; and plastics are just a nightmare, because they aren't made to last.

This video from the LAARC website shows how the artifacts are packaged and stored.

In addition to the boxes of pottery and bone, which some poor guy was painstakingly repackaging and relabeling behind us while we visited, Kat showed us some other items in the archive: a flint hand axe dating from the Paleolithic, parts of a Roman Italian marble plaque, burnt and petrified seeds from an old bakery that caught fire in 120 AD, burnt thatch from Shakespeare's Rose Theater (which is currently buried and preserved under the Financial Times building in Suffolk), a tiny (and still intact!) glass tear-catching vessel from a Roman mausoleum, and a very fancy, long-toed leather shoe that is thought to have been confiscated from an unauthorized maker and thrown into the Thames. The leather of the shoe was so thin and the workmanship was so fine, that I was amazed at how well-preserved it was.

This was a true "behind the scenes" tour. Not only were we able to see how a massive amount of artifacts is processed and organized (which gives me hope for my own piles of family artifacts in my closet[s] at home), but we got just a glimpse of the massive amount of information and material there is (and is yet to be found) about the long and layered history of London.