Cataloguing ceramic sherds from Mount Caburn, Sussex

The Excavating Pitt-Rivers team is now working on the material from Sussex, starting with the excavated artefacts from Mount Caburn.  Pitt-Rivers conducted a large-scale excavation at Mount Caburn - an Iron Age hillfort on the South Downs near Lewes - during the summers of 1877 and 1878. We estimate that the PRM holds c. 1,546 ceramic sherds from the excavation of this site by General Pitt-Rivers - representing one of the earliest assemblages from a modern scientific open-area excavation ever created.

The pottery has never been documented at this level of detail, so we are working bag by bag, laying out the contents and labelling each sherd with its own unique museum accession number.

The next step is to catalogue the material on the PRM database, enhancing the records with measurements, weight, object descriptions and information from old labels.

Once all the material has been catalogued, each object is photographed then bagged up individually along with the old documentation, before returning to storage.

This will be keeping us busy for the next few weeks at least!