Archaeologist 🔎⚒☠👸🏽👷🏽‍♀️

You’d be surprised to learn that my favourite “finds” as a museum #curator aren’t actually the artefacts themselves but the materials that past curators used to store them.
Most of these discoveries happen while reassessing historic collections: taking inventory, rehousing material with modern #conservation methods, & digitising collections for public access. Along the way, you quickly realise that past archaeologists & curators were incredibly resourceful & sometimes a little chaotic. Opening a box that has been on the shelf for decades & not knowing what to expect is the most exciting part!
From newspapers documenting major historical events to tea jars & even cigarette cartons, it’s amazing to see how people improvised with whatever they had. Sometimes the packaging, labels, and handwritten notes become part of the collection’s story in their own right.
1. A 1956 newspaper featuring Marilyn Monroe & Judy Garland was used to cushion fossil invertebrates.
2. Nestea jars used to store cremated remains. The curators in the 1970s must have drunk A LOT of tea.
3. A Margaret Thatcher newspaper was used to cushion a human skull. Ironically, the newspaper was in mint condition, the skull was not. Over the years, I’ve learned that many earlier curators (and, occasionally, even today) simply didn’t have access to the specialist training, conservation knowledge, or materials needed for the long-term care of human remains. I’ve quite literally found #skeletons in closets! Reassessing this collection, which was excavated over the course of three decades, was both fascinating &, at times, shocking.
4. Some of my favourite finds are the handwritten notes & conversations between #archaeologists in the field & museum staff. (“Lava”😂) Deciphering nearly illegible handwriting is an essential curator skill! I’ve actually had to decipher notes in interviews!
5. Fragmented skull packed in cotton wool. Yes, that meant sitting with tweezers and carefully removing every tiny bone fragment that had become tangled in the fibres.
Sometimes the most interesting stories in #museum collections aren’t the artefacts themselves, they’re hidden in the packaging they arrived in.