I may have taken things a bit too far with my next bag but it helped so I stuck with it. I thought about the Bone Church from my previous post, if the bone becomes part of something else, the emotive quality it has is lessened for me.
If I could see past the bone and look at the structure, think of the beauty of the piece it might help. If it was made of wood or pottery we would all be clamouring over it. I looked at it and realised this bit was actually really beautiful, its structure and shape.
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The question of how to get past my uneasiness came to me when I pulled this bit of vertebrae out of the bag. So after a quick coffee I pulled myself together. I can tell you it’s not a cat Big bone (yeah!) There were scary looking skulls and hefty looking chunks of some animal or other (I think you can tell my interest wandered a bit at this stage). Man’s best friend in bone formĪ near complete dog skeleton engaged them in a game of rebuilding. They certainly had some interesting finds I could appreciate from a far. So while I sat there and gingerly packed a few bones in boxes, my colleagues were getting stuck in with unashamed glee and abandon. I know it is silly, bones are bones at the end of the day, but it is an instinctive feeling, one I can’t seem to reason myself out of so I am going to go with it for all its idiosyncrasy. Maybe I am not cut out for this type of work after all.
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I have thought about this a lot over the last few days and I think if it was my baby buried in some field in Keston I don’t care if I was dead and all my ancestors were dead and it all happened 2,000 years ago, the thought that the bones would end up in a plastic bag in a box on a shelf in an archive kind of left me feeling a little bereft. Suddenly all Alan’s talk and my bravado went out the window. Unfortunately the first bag I pulled out of the box said “baby burial” which kind of threw me a bit as I thought we were dealing with animal bone. It was a great start to the day and armed with this knowledge surely a few bones from the Keston – Warbank site would now pose me no problems. Alan made us realise when you don’t have structures to look at or pots to dig up, how the bones have been butchered, the marks left by humans are crucial signposts to who has inhabited a site, how many settled there, what type of activities they were carrying out. How many left legs and how many right legs? Believe me it all makes a difference in terms of animal numbers.Ĭontext popped up once again as a crucial aid to dating a site. We got to play bone jigsaw by trying to work out how the bone fuses together and what this means in terms of identifying the age of an animal. We looked at the shape and contours the morphology of the bone. We looked at animal bones, how to decide what part of a skeleton you have in your hand regardless of species. How complex ostracods, a type of crustacean, are to identify.
What you look for from the smallest single cell organism – foraminifera. Alan – Zoologist from MOLAĪlan, a Zoologist from MOLA gave us a great overview of what it means to find animal remains.
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But as ever, this project is full of surprising little gems and this week we were treated to a fascinating and (in my case) enlightening talk on the archaeology of not just bones, but all sorts of organisms. I knew what week 4 of my Museum of London volunteer project at the London Archaeological Archive and Research Centre (LAARC) would be about and the thought of getting stuck into bones did not appeal. I know it’s silly, I am not a vegetarian, I am not particularly squeamish, but I don’t enjoy packing up bits of animal. I have come to the conclusion that piles of bone just don’t excite me, in fact they actively make me feel uncomfortable. Can I be honest? I have been stalling on writing this post.
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