This Undergraduate Research Internship (formerly UROPs) involved cataloguing and photographing wall-plaster fragments from an important Roman villa site; some paintings (especially those with Christian iconography) are on display but the bulk has been in storage since an almost decade-long effort in the 1970s by Frances Weatherfield to identify pieces belonging together in order to reconstruct decorative schemes. The project helped to record thousands of fragments for the BM’s Digital Asset Management system (ODIN) and Collection Management System (MI+).
Our student (Dominik Royle) gained important museums and collections management experience and essential
cataloguing work was progressed for the BM.
The placement identified a number of fragments with discernible motifs that were not published in the 1987 monograph and that could be published as a note.
We also discussed that there is scope for a paper on Frances Weatherfield, whose heroic work is barely acknowledged in the book. There are photos from the study room, notebooks, crayon drawings etc. which could lead to a useful publication on women in Roman Archaeology.
Richard Hobbs (Senior curator of Romano-British and late Roman Collections at the British Museum) is liaising with external scholars who have expressed an interest in research on this material, and the material is now in a better state for sharing with these scholars.
Skills gained include
Research skills in a museum setting: an appreciation of documentation history and paperwork from an ‘old’ excavation
Research environments in a National Museum: Introduction to other departments, including scientific research, to help build an understanding of how research works across a National Museum.
Accuracy and catalogue construction for analysis of archaeological assemblages and associated excavation archive.
Supervisory skills: team working and leading in a museum setting.
This project was undertaken by Dominik Royle from June to July 2024.