Museums

In the Orkney Museum in Kirkwall, in the ‘Merchant Lairds’ gallery, there is a large lump of butter excavated from a bog. Records show that rents and taxes in the Northern Isles were often paid by tenant farmers in butter as well as grain. There is even a skerry in Scapa Flow named the “Barrel of Butter”. The butter was usually poor quality fat known as ‘grease butter’,  intended as a lubricant rather than for eating. The Merchant Lairds of the 17^th and 18^th centuries then sold it abroad, to the German merchants who visited Orkney and Shetland. It was a well-documented trade. Shetlanders also paid part of their rent in butter, storing it during the year until payment was due in early summer.

 ‘Bog butter’, a waxy substance which may be either actual butter or tallow, has been recovered from peat bogs in Ireland and Scotland. It was deliberately buried in wooden containers or wrapped in things like animal skins or bark. This is a good method of preservation, as peat bogs are highly acidic and low in oxygen and so bacterial growth is inhibited. The earliest examples known so far date back thousands of years ago to the early Bronze Age. Bog butter typically does not contain salt, and does contain cattle hairs.

Burying a valuable commodity may have been intended to keep it safe from robbers in unsettled times, or to accumulate enough for a rental payment at a later date, or even to hide it from the landlord. A number of writers suggest that the taste of butter intended for eating is improved by burial in a bog (I do NOT recommend trying this.) Several reports mention bog butter being used for waterproofing, for making candles or cement, for greasing wool, or possibly as ritual offerings.

 I have never so far found a reference to the need to grease the axles of carts in any of the publications which describe the wheeled wooden vehicles used in medieval and early post medieval Europe. Diaries describing the difficulties of travel talk about dreadful tracks, and wheels coming off carriages, but do not mention stopping for the wheels to be greased. Other wooden machinery such as windmills, or windlasses for lifting, where friction would also have been a problem, would probably have needed greasing as well. 

However, from archaeological sources it is known that the use of animal fats to grease the moving parts of wooden vehicles goes back to at least the third millennium BCE. A wheel from a sled belonging to an Egyptian pharaoh, which had been used to transport heavy goods, was found to have been greased with animal fat (tallow). So had some chariot wheels from a later Egyptian tomb. The ancient Greeks used animal fat to lubricate chariot wheels during the Olympic Games. The Romans in the early centuries AD are said to have  done the same and in the early middle ages, it was used to grease the wheels of royal carriages and the lifting gear for castle gates. Other lubricants in antiquity included plant and fish oils. By the 18^th and 19^th centuries CE moving parts were starting to be made of metal and mineral oils took over.

So when you next pile your slice of toast high with cholesterol, or pay the garage bill for lubricating the many moving parts of your car, think of the days when a humble crofter’s wife churned rather nasty butter to pay the rent and keep the wheels going. And if you find a reference to greasing cartwheels with butter in early modern Europe anywhere, please let me know.

No, “Striking gold in Sunderland “ is not about panning for precious metal in the icy waters of the River Wear. It is about one of my favourite types of antique pottery. The museum where I worked before my retirement had a small collection of later post-medieval pottery, the period when ceramic production had been industrialised. I first came across it when I was checking these objects against the catalogue, making sure that all the records were complete. I ‘m not usually terribly keen on pottery unless it is at least 700 years old but I make an exception for Sunderland lustreware.  It’s the beautiful iridescent pinky-mauve glaze. I especially like the plaques with transfer-printed images of things like bridges, railways and ships, often with some kind of written text.  This one says “May Peace & Plenty on our Nation Smile, and Trade with Commerce Bless the British Isle”.

Sunderland Lustreware was first developed at the Wedgewood factory in Staffordshire around 1805. It was produced from the early 19^th century to the early 1930s in factories in north-east England, initially in Sunderland (Tyne and Wear). Plaques were one of the commonest forms, together with jugs, although there were examples of many other shapes, even rolling pins. This piece is in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, who made the image available.

And how does gold come into it? Lustreware is a term referring to pottery with an iridescent metallic glaze. This is produced by painting a mixture of clay and metallic oxides over a first glaze and then re-firing it at a lower temperature. The beautiful pink colour on Sunderland lustre ware comes from traces of gold in this second glaze.

One of my favourite places in the world is a museum store. I love being in an ice-cold warehouse surrounded by shelves and shelves of exciting cardboard boxes labelled with tempting codes which entice you to open the box and view the goodies within.  Or not labelled so you have to open the box to see what’s inside. Or even more intriguing, different labels on the two ends of the box. Or glass-fronted cupboards full of almost complete pots or a stone coffin complete with skeleton or…. But perhaps you may ask, and rightly, why is all that stuff that never goes on display and the public never sees being kept there at the taxpayers’ expense?

Most of this stuff comes from archaeological excavations. When a dig takes place, the finds will initially go to the headquarters of whichever body is carrying out the dig. When they have done the necessary studies and the site has been published, the finds will usually be deposited in the county museum and the archive, plans, sections and paperwork will also be stored somewhere suitable. So any local authority museum is faced with an ever-increasing mass of finds, very few of which will ever go on display. Only a very few finds from excavations, things like the Scar plaque, are worth putting on display. It would be impossible to display fifteen tons of squashed sherds of Grooved Ware, or half a roomful of butchered cattle bones and they wouldn’t be very interesting to look at either. But that is not what they are there for. And you can’t throw them out to make space for new ones.

The important thing in any science is that any scientist can test conclusions that have been published and see if they are valid. If you are doing this in say, chemistry, you can just get hold of some apparatus and chemicals and do the experiment all over again and see if you get the same result. But in archaeology you can’t do this. Excavation destroys the evidence as you retrieve it. You have to have the original objects and the detailed records of how they related to each other if you wish to reconsider someone’s conclusions. A few years ago an archaeologist looked again at a collection of human bones in Kirkwall museum and came to a totally different conclusion to the original bone specialist. No doubt further study will extend the argument even further. This couldn’t have happened if the bones hadn’t been kept after the excavation was published.

New techniques are being developed all the time. Recently, in this same museum, two international projects have revisited the finds from excavations carried out years ago and published at the time. They were using newly-developed techniques on this material. One was looking at the particles trapped in dental calculus on 5,000 year old human teeth, which can tell you the most amazing things, for example which spring these people got their water from, and what they had been eating. The other was collecting residues from 5,000 year-old potsherds to use for enhanced methods of C14 dating. If those shelves and shelves of boxfuls of human skeletons and smashed potsherds had been discarded on the grounds that they were already fully published, all this new information would have been lost.

I have a particular interest in the problem, as a piece of research I was once involved with at another museum came to something of a full stop because a large number of the finds I needed to look at had been thrown away. Someone had written a report on them which they considered adequate at the time and then discarded them, keeping only a few sample pieces. They were medieval glazed roof tiles, which of course are bulky (although rather pretty).

Of course it is impossible to keep indefinitely all the masses of broken brick, stone, and smashed up animal bone that come out of the ground on large excavations. Some of it has to be thrown away, preferably before it gets into the museum store. But you have to make sure that you throw away the right stuff, for example, most of the material from mixed or contaminated layers, where finds from many different periods or centuries have, by various processes, been jumbled up together. But it still means a large and ever-increasing quantity of finds in the store.

And of course there are all the social history finds which do not come from excavations but which have both their own historical value (or not) and their own problems. A faded postcard of the local artillery battalion during WWI doesn't take up much space. A small fishing boat with a hole in it does.

And somebody with the right training has to look after all that stuff. Someone has to know what is in that store and where it is, so that they can arrange access for people doing research on the objects. It’s no use having the best collection of spindle whorls in south-east England if nobody knows which of two hundred boxes they are stored in. Somebody has to make sure that the temperature and humidity of the store is suitable at all times. I once spent six months breathing in Rentokil fluid in a leaking amateur storage facility in England, repackaging pottery that had got loose when the cardboard boxes it was packed in had got damp and collapsed. Good job the sherds were individually marked (most of them). Someone has to see to the packaging of the objects, stacking them so that the ones underneath don’t get squashed by the ones on top. Someone has to prevent moths and beetles from eating the wood and the textiles. Someone has to make sure that the fire alarms and burglar alarms are working, and that PhD students who are studying material in the store don’t walk off with objects to use in their evening classes (yes, this was rumoured to have happened at a national museum when I was young). These are only a few of the things that have to be taken into account. And there are also the Health and Safety issues to consider.

It is right that the general public, whose taxes and donations keep many museums going, and the members of the local council who allocate funds, should ask why a museum needs both a bigger store and people with university degrees who earn a staggering 27K per year to look after it. We have to explain to them that many earth-shattering discoveries in archaeology are made, not outside on site, but inside an old warehouse, by someone taking another look at boxes of finds which have been carefully looked after by someone like me.

I saw this mosaic pavement every day of my working life for many years, every time I crossed the main gallery of the Verulamium museum. All of the mosaics in the museum are beautiful, but the Dahlia mosaic particularly appealed to me, I don’t know why. It comes from a townhouse in the Roman city of Verulamium, and probably dates from around 175 – 200CE. It would have been on the floor in Roman times, although it is now fixed to the wall of the museum.

It is made of black, red and white tesserae, and has a large central flower in a square with small motifs in each corner of that square. The flower is set within a circle and the whole mosaic is overlaid by a grid of nine squares surrounded by a pattern known as” three-strand guilloche”. There are flowers in the four corner squares of the grid. The excavator, Sir Mortimer Wheeler, referred to the large central flower as a dahlia and the four corner flowers as roses, but to me it looks more like a water lily or lotus, set in a stylised circular pond indicated by the wave pattern of the innermost circle surrounding it.

The mosaic was in one room of a small second-century CE house in Insula IV. The house was L-shaped and surrounded almost all the way round by a veranda. There were five rooms, an extra one projecting from one arm of the L, and two small buildings close by which might have been for cooking. At least two of its rooms had mosaic floors and the veranda had a red tessellated pavement (little brick cubes). The veranda also had painted wall plaster coloured green, white and black. Unfortunately this nice little residence was built over a swallow-hole, not uncommon in chalk areas like St Albans, and partly collapsed before the end of the third century CE. It happens even today. The site was levelled around 300CE when this area of the town was redeveloped.

Wheeler (1936, page 146 (2) considered it to be a “good example of careful pedestrian work.” I think it is very pretty. I would have chosen it for my floor any day.

(1) Image by Carole Raddato from FRANKFURT, Germany, CC BY-SA 2.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0>, via Wikimedia Commons

(2) Report of the Research Committee of the Society of Antiquaries of London No.XI Wheeler, Verulamium: A Belgic & 2 Roman Cities  p146 Pl XLIVB  REM Wheeler, D.Lit., V.P.S.A. andT.V. Wheeler FSA  1936

My two favourite artefacts found in Orkney both Viking-age brooches, and both are thought to have originated in Ireland. One comes from a hoard, the other from a burial. Although they are slightly damaged, reconstruction shows that they were very beautiful when they were in use.

The Skaill brooch is a penannular silver thistle brooch. It comes from a hoard of silver objects discovered in 1858 near St Peters Kirk, at Skaill, Sandwick, on West Mainland, by a boy digging up a rabbit hole. Alas, there were no archaeologists at that time to call in, and the hoard was dug up by local people and later reassembled by local antiquarians. It consisted of 8kg of brooches, neck and arm rings, pins, ingots, hacksilver, ring money; and 21 Arab coins, which allowed its dating to the late 10^th century CE.  The size of the brooch is not reported in any of the sources to which I have had access, but thistle brooches, while varying a lot in size, are usually around 20cm in diameter by 52cm long.

The Westness brooch was found in the grave of a wealthy Viking woman at Westness on the island of Rousay. The grave was discovered by accident in 1963 by a farmer burying a dead cow, who fortunately notified the archaeologists. The stone-built grave was in a Viking cemetery and is that of a young woman who probably died in childbirth, as it also contained the bones of a newborn infant. It contained many rich grave goods. This brooch was probably intended for fastening a cloak or shawl, and was more elaborately decorated than the Skaill brooch. It was 175mm long, silver-gilt decorated with zoomorphic gold filigree, large amber studs and red glass inlay. The amber studs were already missing when it was placed in the grave. Although the grave is believed to be early 9^th century, the brooch is thought to have been made in the mid-8^th century, so that it was 100 years old when it was buried with the young woman.

Both of these brooches are in the National Museum of Scotland. They are on display and you can access the collections database to see images of them online.