Roman, Mediaeval and Post-Mediaeval Metalworking Debris at RAMM: A Specialist Assessment

Introduction

Gerry’s assessment aims to rank RAMM’s metalworking debris according to the following criteria.

• Provenance and history (resulting in ranking of importance in terms of international, national, local, regional, community/group).
• Representativeness and best examples of type (locally, regionally, internationally, community/group)
• Importance to the study or development of archaeology and history in the UK, internationally, and in particular in Exeter and Devon
• Identify material which offers a high research potential
• Identify material which is unlikely to yield much useful information.

The museum holds 367 boxes of material that could be considered to contain metalworking debris.  Some boxes only contained metalworking debris, whilst other boxes contained a variety of material types, in some cases with only one small bag of slag. The museum identified a proportion of the archive to be assessed, but due to the help provided it was possible to make an assessment of all the material in the archive, with the proviso that not all the boxes of copper alloy casting mould were examined.  In addition an extensive programme of non-destructive X-ray Fluorescence  (XRF) analysis was undertaken.

Conclusions:

The metalworking archive of the Royal Albert Memorial Museum contains material of regional and national importance.  It provides evidence for many metalworking activities of Devon’s industrial heritage.

Full report:

Roman, Mediaeval and Post-Mediaeval Metalworking Debris: Specialist Collections Assessment 2012