When I started volunteering at the museum Holly Morgenroth, RAMM’s Natural Sciences curator, took me into the ‘wet store’ at The Ark. This is the room where all the specimens preserved in some kind of fluid – usually alcohol or formalin – are stored. Most are starfish, reptiles, fish and amphibians. Many of the preservative […]
The sitter in ‘Portrait of an African’ plays a key role in the exhibition ‘In Plain Sight’. He is a visible— if silent—witness from the age of Trans-Atlantic slavery. But beyond the obvious fact of his ancestry, visitors might wonder what this clean-cut figure in European dress had to do with the organised cruelty of […]
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In February 2021 Jamie Wildman, a postgraduate researcher in Environmental Science at the University of Northampton, put out a call for information. He sought English records of the chequered skipper butterfly (Carterocephalus palaemon). This species became extinct in England around 1976. Reintroduction trials began 1990. Jamie is studying the species’ reintroduction in collaboration with Butterfly […]
This chamber pot was made in the potteries in South Somerset and is decorated with a decoration of wavy lines scratched through the slip. It was excavated from a rubbish...
Cooking pots like this are the most common type of pottery from early medieval Exeter. The outside of this pot is blackened from being placed in the hearth for cooking...
This pottery beaker was discovered in many pieces in a stone-lined burial pit at the centre of a stone ring or cairn at Farway, Devon. Two fossilised sea urchins were...
Complete pots like this are not common archaeological finds as most vessels were thrown away after they were broken. Although it is complete it had been discarded into a rubbish...
This was excavated from a post-medieval rubbish pit in Exeter. Jugs like these were mass-produced in Germany, and are common finds in cities like Exeter....