Archaeology
July 2009
Piecing together the past
I took this photograph at the end of the day when things were quietening down. At its busiest you couldn't have squeezed another person around the tables.
Just one of the dozens of people who took time out their day to help us sort the pottery.
People of all ages lent their support during the course of the day.
Festival of British Archaeology 2009
Today’s events at National Museum Cardiff were Shadow Puppetry and Pottery Sorting.
I won’t write too much about the Shadow Puppet workshops because I covered these in a previous post – suffice it to say that they continued to be hugely popular with children, a fact demonstrated by the quantity of cut up paper and bits and bobs left behind when the crowds finally cleared.
The Pottery Sorting was a new thing though. Here, visitors were helping museum staff with the real business of archaeology. Back in 2002, an excavation was carried out at Llandaff Cathedral School in Cardiff and a very large quantity of 13th and 14th-century pottery was found. This was all brought back to the museum and staff have slowly been sorting it out. But there are only so many hours in a day and this is an awful lot of pottery so, as part of last year’s National Archaeology Week, we asked the public to help us make sense of it all. The event was so popular – and we still had so much pottery left over – that we ran it again this year.
So, with the help of about a hundred children and adults, Sian and Louise from the museum’s archaeology department spent today sorting the broken pottery into different types: glazed and unglazed, rims, bases and decorated pieces.
It proved to be a surprisingly addictive activity, with one girl staying to help out for over an hour, and a visiting Californian potter finding herself drawn into the challenge of grouping the sherds, and trying to track down elusive joins between pieces. Sadly, no joining pieces were found but, as Sian said: “there’s always tomorrow”.
And tomorrow the team will be joined by Mark Redknap, the museum’s medievalist who will be helping to make sense of it all.
Animations in a roundhouse
Visitors have flocked to the Celtic Village over the last couple of days to join with us in celebrating the Festival of British Archaeology. For me so far there have been several highlights. On Sunday people found shelter from the rain in the stone roundhouse, where in the dark the artist Sean Harris projected his animation film Dadeni onto the earth beaten floor. People are used to experiencing animations on TV, computers or in a cinema. Such an experience proved moving, eerie and played upon the senses. The moving images evoked past mythologies. You almost felt as if you had gathered with the ancestors around a warm fire and cauldron to share their stories, safe from the rain.
Tim Young and his team built a forge outside the Village. Their experiments in recreating the lost art of making Early Christian handbells drew the crowd. Tim felt, ‘It was a successful weekend. We were trying to understand the technique not to produce a finished product. If we were going to do this for ten day's solid we'd be getting it right completely by the end. As it is we've cracked how to do the hearth - that's great, I like it - but we need to build on it.’
Mark Rednapp, from the archaeology department here, was with them. I asked him about his thoughts, ‘The wonderful thing about experimental archaeology is that you leap from one idea to the next, one experiment to the next. Many things have passed through my mind: the skill needed to judge the temperature and timing, the amount of manual labour involved in keeping the bellows going, which remind us of early medieval slavery, but also of the apprenticeships learning from an early age by experience.’
The Festival continues until 2nd of August. Come and join my workshops ‘Colouring the past’ in the Celtic Village this weekend, the 25th and 26th of July.
Last day of the bell casting
Tim had almost ran out of charcoal when Andrew, the museum's blacksmith, found a spare sack at his smithy. It meant that the team could carry on raising the temperature of the fire around their last bell - set below the pile of charcoal burning in the centre of the pit.
This bell has only just come out of the fire, and although the clay coating looks cool enough, the inside is still red hot.
You can see the cracks in the coating - it was these which allowed the fire to penetrate and burn out some of the iron on the final bell.
You can see the hole in its side where the clay coating broke.
When it was cleaned up, the area around this had brazed nicely, and was left with a beautiful bronze sheen.
Top left: an example where the fire wasn't hot enough to melt the bronze. You can see the bronze lump still attached to the blackened iron.
Bottom: an example where the bronze has brazed the base of the strap slide, but hasn't covered the whole thing.
Top right: the best example, with a bronze coating over the entire strap slide. The only fly-in-the-ointment - a puddle of bronze had formed at the base of the piece, but this can be filed away later.
Festival of British Archaeology 2009
Tim Young’s attempts to replicate an Early Medieval church bell continued beside the Celtic Village today with the help of a team of volunteers who answered any questions that visitors to the museum had about the project.
It’s an industrial-sized operation, with gigantic bellows hanging from a wooden frame, and fire roaring from the furnace. Its aim was to coat a wrought iron bell with bronze in a process known as brazing. This involves encasing the bell, wrapped with strips of bronze, inside a clay mould and placing it in the fire. As the temperature rises the bronze melts and spreads over the surface of the bell giving it a fine, orange / yellow sheen.
Yesterday the problem was that the fire was too hot and the iron burnt out, today the problem was the exact opposite. Tim had two bells ready to go in their clay casings. Wary from yesterday’s experience he took one out a little early and the bronze hadn’t melted. Then it was a race against time to raise the temperature of the fire, while stocks of charcoal began to run low.
Thanks to vigorous bellow’s work, and some extra charcoal from Andrew Murphy, the museum’s blacksmith, the temperature was raised and the bronze melted on the final bell. Success! Partly. A crack in the side of the clay casing meant that part of the iron burnt away again, and some of the bronze escaped. Even so, Tim and his team have proved their approach works.
Better still, alongside the bell casting, they also tried to braze three Early Medieval iron strap slides which Andrew made based on an example from Llangorse, near Brecon. As you can see from the photographs, they had one great success, one partial success, and a near miss. With a little filing, the best of these should make a great display piece to set beside the original in the museum’s archaeology gallery.
Shadow puppets
Festival of British Archaeology 2009
Last Saturday, Sean Harris ran a Shadow Puppet workshop at National Museum Cardiff converting the main hall into an animation studio.
I wasn't able to go to the first day myself - which is why this posting is so late - but colleagues who were helping at the event took some photographs.
For those who missed it, but would like to join in the free family fun, the workshops continue ever day until 24 July.
Click here for details.
Animations and castings in the Celtic Village
Throughout the day, visitors were treated to twenty minute showings of some of artist Sean Harris's archaeological / mythological / phantasmagorical animations. Twenty visitors squeezed into an Iron Age roundhouse for each screening, the door was closed and the performance began, with the projection being cast onto the earth floor of the house.
It was a thought-provoking event which was enjoyed by all.
Festival of British Archaeology 2009
There were two big events today in St Fagans’ Celtic Village: screenings of Sean Harris’s animations which fuse Welsh myth and archaeological discoveries, and Tim Young’s project to recreate a Welsh early medieval church bell.
Sean took over a roundhouse for the day, turning it into a make-shift cinema, with the floor of the house providing the screen. It was a fantastic setting, entirely appropriate for Sean’s work which plays on the kinds of stories that Iron Age people may have told one another around the campfire of an evening.
I only managed to sit in on one of Sean’s screenings; most of my day was spent just outside the Celtic Village where Tim Young had set up his workshop. When we first arrived at St Fagans this morning I had thought that we’d have to abandon this part of the festival. Torrential rain had drenched the area and it was hard to imagine that he’d be able to light a fire in his charcoal bell furnace, but Tim’s greater experience shone through and he soon had things up and running.
The aim of his experiment was to create an iron bell with a bronze surface coating, replicating an example in the museum's collections. This involved taking a wrought iron sheet and wrapping it to make a bell shape. Bronze was then wrapped around the bell and the whole was encased in a mix of clay, sand and horse dung. This package was then popped into the bell furnace and covered by charcoal. A continuous rota of bellows-work raised the temperature with the aim of melting the bronze and causing it to flow across the surface of the bell.
This was the plan. Unexpectedly, the temperature in the furnace proved to be so hot that today’s two attempts both melted the bells. But lessons have been learnt and new plans have been put in place. Success is predicted for tomorrow when the experiment will continue.
The Vicus in action
Festival of British Archaeology 2009
Just one day to go before the Festival of Archaeology starts at St Fagans, and I thought it would be good to give you a sneak preview of the group who will provide us with our grand finale on the 1st and 2nd of August: the Vicus.
Today they set up camp at Caerwent Roman town, demonstrating activities from Roman medicine to tablet weaving and basketry. Then, of course, there were the battles, as Britons met Romans in a fight to the not-so-bitter end.
When they visit us at St Fagans they’ll be staging a Roman cremation – an event not to be missed.
Cleaning the village
Festival of British Archaeology 2009
Thousands of people visit the Celtic Village each month leaving little spare time for keeping up with the housework. Even worse, with summer in full swing everything is growing very very fast. Something had to be done!
With help from museum volunteers, extreme steps were taken. Everything was taken out of the roundhouses and cleaned. Outside the houses, vegetation was cut back, and the grounds were tidied. The result: two sparkling roundhouses.
Earlier in the year the third roundhouse became unstable and was taken down. Although sad in a way, this provided a great opportunity for a team from Reading University to excavate the ground upon which it had stood. So we learnt a lot from the controlled demolition of this house, but the work was not over. Piles of old thatch and soil still littered the Celtic Village, and these were cleared away by a team of United Nations' Association volunteers.
So the venue is ready, the events organised. Now we keep our fingers crossed for good weather.
Getting ready
Festival of British Archaeology 2009
The Festival of British Archaeology kicks off in just three days and staff at St Fagans National History Museum, National Museum Cardiff, and the National Roman Legion Museum are hard at work.
From the 18th of July until the 2nd of August our museums will be hosting an amazing array of activities to celebrate archaeology, from opportunities to join Roman soldiers in the barrack room at Caerleon, to Shadow puppet workshops in Cardiff, and a recreation of a Roman funeral at St Fagans.
For a full list of all the events and activities at our museums visit our Festival of British Archaeology web page.
Over the coming weeks I'll be blogging as the festival progresses, so if you can't stay until the end of the bell casting experiments, or you have to leave before the bone flutes are finished, then read about what happened here.
Most of the time I'll be based around the Celtic Village at St Fagans National History Museum so most of my posts will concentrate on the events held here, but I'll try to include information about things going on at our other sites.
April 2009
St Teilo's Church - the blog
We had a fabulous event at St Fagans yesterday. The weather wasn't quite with us - damp and overcast - but luckily lots of people were, and very many of them bought copies of the book!
I didn't catch the whole service as I was flitting around with boxes of books, but what I saw was very moving, and it felt intimate and totally natural.
Then a whole load more people arrived for the actual launch. People crowded into the Church and the two main speakers, Garry Owen and Eurwyn Wiliam, both did excellent jobs. Eurwyn spoke about the project from its beginnings, and as he's been involved with the project since its beginning 25 years ago it was a great overview. But, as always, humorous too! Then Garry Owen brought a lovely personal note, as he's a local boy who remembers the Church when it was still by the river Loughour at Pontarddulais. He really emphasised just how iconic the Church was - and still is - to the local community.
Finally everyone came over to Oakdale, the Workmen's Instititute, for refreshments and we were flooded with people queuing up to buy the book. It was like when you first arrive at a car boot sale! It was also great for me to finally meet some of the book's contributors, people I've only emailed up til now. I guess everybody was enjoying themselves as by 5.30pm some people didn't seem to want to leave!
The rest of the work for me is now to make sure all the relevant bookshops and retail outlets know about it. And making sure it's on the relevant websites. And sending out review copies... In a way, producing the book is only half the job: now we've got to sell it!
St Teilo's Church - the book
No blogs for a while now - but mostly because we've been working full tilt on the book (also because I've been off for a week...).
So, it's now at the printers, and there's nothing - well, hardly anything - more we can do now. If all is well the books will be in Cardiff this Friday, and we'll all be at St Fagans launching it on Sunday. If the weather is anywhere as good as it has been this last week or so then it'll be a truly lovely afternoon.
As exciting as it is to look forward to seeing the actual book (no matter how many proofs, dummies etc you've seen - the real thing always looks different!) this bit always makes me a bit nervous too. After it arrives, and I spot the inevitable typo that got away, or something I wish we'd changed when we had the chance, or... and after the launch event, I'll be able to reflect on what a pleasure it was to work on and how lovely everybody was to work with. It's a real privilege to have been able to learn so much about the whole project - one of the very best bits of my job is being able to get involved with such a variety of different projects that might otherwise have passed me by. But with this one in particular, I think, the depth of people's knowledge and skills, and their committment, is inspiring.
Anyway, look out for it, available in all good bookshops - soon!
