During the last week, I have been able to continue many of the tasks which I started at the beginning of my time at Wessex. It feels very satisfying to see the mammoth list on my desk become a bit smaller. On Tuesday I travelled to the Dorchester museum archive in Dorset, to both drop off a number of sorted archaeological finds and pick up further boxes which needed to be looked at. There were boxes and boxes and boxes. Luckily I had the help of a number of other people who were much stronger than me. As they leapt past me up the stairs whilst I was heaving in a pool of my own sweat and tears, I couldn’t help but feel slightly ashamed.
The Dorchester museum archive is an incredible building; it is an old church which was converted during the 1970s when the museum’s own storage space became too full. Although the boxes of archaeological finds and records take up a lot of the space, in areas it was possible to glimpse a part of the old stained glass windows behind the shelves. My favourite part about the space was that, whilst it is home to multiple archaeological archives, the building is a sort of archive-at-large. By considering both the current use of the space and the historical structure of the church, you can perceive a double-time, an historical place which transforms historical objects.
By Hannah Lamarque