Silchester objects in focus

With Hampshire Cultural Trust Conservator, Claire Woodhead

Fresh from the last season of the University of Reading Silchester bathhouse excavations, the latest batch of copper alloy, shale and iron objects hit my conservation lab at Hampshire Cultural Trust's Chilcomb House headquarters shortly before lockdown. With excavations currently suspended and our sites remaining closed, conservation work to clean and conserve some of these finds can still begin and continue, courtesy of a relatively portable microscope, a new picnic table and some reshuffling in the spare room.

Join me in a timelapse journey down the microscope, as the soil is cleaned away from one of the copper alloy objects, a Roman ‘fibula’ brooch.

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