Archives

One of the most interesting jobs I have done so far in my new home town has been helping to digitise the museum’s accessions register. That is, the list of all the objects to which the museum has legal title as opposed to objects on loan. This involved simply copying the entries in the paper register onto a database, which sounds boring. But it wasn’t. The act of data entry introduced me to a fascinating series of objects which I had never encountered before, because the museum where I worked for much of my life was located inland, miles from the sea, and my new home is a group of islands surrounded by sea. Also it was in England, and my new home is in the far north of Scotland.

My previous museum contained no net sinkers; the people of my new home have been fishing for 9000 years and oval stones with a groove round the edge are quite common finds. When it comes to World War II, my former museum boasts a modest collection of gas masks, and a few mementoes of the munitions factory created from a local stocking factory and an intelligence centre. Scapa Flow was a major naval base: we are talking about a whole separate museum site on Hoy full of guns, portholes, binnacles and other bits of warships.

You don’t find “luggies” or peat spades in south-east England because there wasn’t any peat to be cut.

In my former museum, I quite often used trade tokens or “jetons” for dating 15^th and 16^th century pits full of pottery. In Orkney museum, these are rare, but church tokens are quite common. Metal tokens of various shapes, made of lead or other base metals, were issued to people considered by the various reformed churches to be qualified to receive Holy Communion. Most were issued by the Presbyterian Church in Scotland, although they are known in other countries, and they were especially common in the 18th and 19th centuries, although they began in the 16th century. They were later replaced by communion cards. People were visited by the church elders during the weeks before Communion was celebrated (it was not a frequent service, only two or three times a year), and could be excluded for ignorance of the tenets of their faith, or for sinful behaviour. The Church of England didn’t do this so I had never met them before.

My previous museum was based on the site of the third largest town in Roman Britain, and was stuffed full of goodies from wealthy Roman town houses and villas. The Romans never set foot on Orkney. There are only a handful of tiny pieces of Samian pottery and Roman glassware which had somehow found their way this far north of the border to the brochs where the local Iron Age elite were living while their counterparts in southern England had accepted Roman rule and built themselves Roman villas. But there are boxes and boxes of Neolithic Grooved Ware. Before I came to Orkney I had seen a couple of bits of Grooved ware in the teaching collection at my university and that was it.

19^th century farm equipment – ploughs, horse harness, churns etc. – is pretty standard all over Britain, but it has different names in the local dialect, so I have had to learn a whole new terminology. For instance, how do you platt a pig? It took me a week to find out that a pig platting tub was a tub where you put your recently-killed pig to pour boiling water over it to get the bristles off. Read “Lark Rise to Candleford” by Flora Thompson for the gory details of pig-butchery.

Three years of data entry have taught me as much as all the reading I have done since I came here.