Mud to Museum: Work Experience 2024

By The Vindolanda Trust Work Experience Students 2024

(written by Robbie Palmer)

Over the past week we, four sixth form students from QEHS in Hexham, have been at the Roman Army Museum and Magna Fort for our work experience. We have been led through the workings of the museum and seen and taken part in some of the methods used by the archaeologists in processing and categorising finds on the nearby site: we have done this for the purpose of building our own knowledge for the creation and presentation of ‘Mud to Museum’ our public engagement project.

To start the Monday, we met the wonderful Sophie Westlake, the Activities and Diversity officer, who planned and put together our whole work experience week. We then had a look round the museum to show us where we will be spending most our week and to familiarise ourselves with the displays. After this we met the Curator, Barbara, who gave us an insight into how the display, storage and archival process of the finds, at both Vindolanda and Magna, works. We found this really informative and enlightening, particularly in regard to the amount of work needed. After this we began to put together our initial plans for the project and decided we wanted to give focus on the behind-the-scenes processing of artifacts and finds.

The next day the group took part in dry and wet sieving, some of the post-excavational processes used at the site. This was led by Franki, the geoarchaeologist at the site, who afterwards gave us a presentation on the effects of climate change on archaeology which we all found quite thought provoking, especially in the interplay of science. For example we didn’t know bones could turn to ‘jelly’ from a change in pH. This led us to give more of focus on the processes and importance of preserving the finds for our public engagement project.

On the Wednesday we did some training, led by Sophie, on making our project accessible for as many people as possible and worked quite a lot of the project finalising some ideas and planning out what we would all be doing. We also did some object handling, one of the highlights of the week, and decided to incorporate this into our project as the Museum part of Mud to Museum.

We spent Thursday morning cleaning bulk find pottery with Cristina, the Trust’s pottery expert, who taught us about the different types common in Roman Britain. After this we then were led on a tour of the excavations going on at Magna with a focus on how to work around bad weather. I personally found it really interesting seeing the excavations at work first hand. The group then went on to work further our project finalising some of the details and preparing for showing it off on the Friday.

Finally, the day of the project arrived. We finalised our stands into the interactive ‘dig’, first hand pottery cleaning, objects handling and showing off the online archives. Mud to Museum went off perfectly. We all found it was really rewarding presenting everything we had learnt over the week to the general public and displaying all our work.

Thank you to all the staff at the Museum, in particular Sophie, for the work experience opportunity.