Hey Blog! Last Saturday I went up to Bradford to take part in an event that involved a forge, sheets of fake gold leaf, a timeline spanning a Neolithic flint scraper to some pieces of pot made in the last few centuries, and Bradford industrial museum. Yep, an archaeology project all about metals!
This event was run by the CBA (Council for British Archaeology) and was for my age group, so was ideal for me to go to! It was to give people a taster session of YAC, to get people interested, and give them an experience of archaeometallurgy (archaeologist’s code for the study of metals within the branch of archaeology). I am already a YAC member (See A Dig into the World of Archaeology) so I went for the excitement and experience. We had to get up early so we could drive the 80km to Bradford, which is near Leeds, before it started at 11am.
The name of Bradford Industrial Museum tells you exactly what it is. It’s in Bradford, it’s a museum, and it’s about the industry of Bradford, one of the big Northern industrial towns, along with Leeds and Sheffield, although these were not the only ones. However, although we who took part in the workshop didn’t go around it all as part of the event, the workshop took place in the upstairs rooms. After letting our parents loose in the world being dropped off we sat down in the Horse Emporium and received the rules for the day. Then we sere sorted out into two groups to take in turns doing the two activities. We went to the top floor in a proper old-fashioned lift with two doors to get in, no glass, and railings: you could see the walls going past! We then arrived at the fifth floor where there were two rooms in which the activities were to take place.
The first activity was a timeline one. There was a table, and on it had been placed a timeline and a large group of artefacts from various different periods. There were coins, a polished stone axe head, brooches, the flint scraper, and many more, and our job was to sort them into the different periods. This activity was run by two people from the Portable Antiquities Scheme, the bit you go and talk to when you find several coins or anything made of gold or silver that’s over three hundred years old: this constitutes as a hoard or treasure. One of these people who were teaching us about identification of artefacts by period was my local finds liaison officer (not that I’ve ever contacted her in the past – I’ve never found anything of value!). I have watched every available Time Team episode (Time Team is a programme from BBC 4 which was all about archaeology, it finished nearly ten years ago but came back this year to an awesome welcome) so I have some identification techniques. I managed to identify almost all of the items I picked, and date them accurately!
After going down to lunch, which was awesome – hats off to the caterers – and watching AncientCraft setting up their mini Bronze Age forge, we went back up the five floors. I took the stairs this time! We were now doing replica gilding. Gilding is an art form all of its own, though it would probably come under metalwork. We were replicating an Anglo-Saxon brooch, though not made with metal. The way you gild is by getting a base of metal, though we used clay, and then applying size to it. Size is gilder’s speak for glue (all these professions have secret codes for normal things, don’t they?!) and therefore means getting it nice and sticky so you can put gold leaf on top of it. In history, there have mainly been two types of leaf you can gild with – gold leaf, which is the more common sort, and silver leaf, which is rarer. Gold can be beaten out so thin you can see through it, but you don’t want to see through it with gilding. After applying size, you get a sheet of the chosen metal (we were using imitation gold) and drape it over the top. Then, with a brush, you tamp it down, and put more on in any bare places. Repeat until there are no bare places left, and you have gilded your object!
The last thing in the day was to go and see AncientCraft bronze casting. They were making two bronze axes, one socketed, one hafted. I’m not sure whether he had ever done the casting in a bronze mould (the type of mould he was using), and was saying that they could both break when he took them out, which is always a possibility… I will be seeing AncientCraft again next week so be here again next week to hear the latest news!
