Conservation with the Team

Conservator Sonia O'Connor, from the Department of Archaeological Sciences at the University of Bradford, was brought in to help Time Team's conservator Ceinwen Paynton because so many rivets needed to be handled from the boat burial. So what does the on-site conservator do? Sonia explains:

Keeping out of the way
'The definition of my role is to be as much out of the way of the archaeologists as possible,' she says. 'There are occasions when you can't be fast and just get in and lift an artefact because it's so delicate, and that's when you have to get everybody to stop – but generally my job involves trying not to disturb the flow of work. Sometimes it's possible to take a find away by just lifting it from the soil and at other times you have to lift a delicate find in a block of soil so that it can be excavated carefully on a laboratory bench afterwards. Quite often finds don't need the conservator's attention until they are off the site, but when you work closely with an excavation it's more a question of first aid. It's all about consolidating finds to keep them safe from further decay. Finds that need to be kept wet should be kept wet and those that need to be dry should be kept dry.'

Hands full with rivets
Sonia and Ceinwen had their hands full with all the rivets from the boat burial. 'The case with the nails that we're finding here is that the original iron has completely corroded away. All we are left with is the shell of corrosion,' says Sonia. 'There are plus sides and minus sides to this. The minus side is that we have no metal left at all, but the plus is that the decaying metal has preserved the organic wood. The organic remains are very friable and crumbly. As a conservator I'm letting the nails dry out very slowly and then removing the remnants of soil mechanically with a dentist's tool. The wood around the nails is essentially preserved by the corrosion, so after cleaning I can see which way the grain of the wood flowed. Cleaning the artefacts like this enables the other people working on the programme to have a really clear picture of what they've excavated.'

Proddy pokey things
'The tools I use are proddy pokey things from all sorts of backgrounds: dentist's tools, clay sculpting tools, surgeon's tools and even a few that I've picked up from a hardware stall at a market, anything and everything that's useful for conserving artefacts,' explains Sonia. 'I have a proddy pokey thing for almost any situation. Apart from the tools you also need to know about the period you're working on so that you know what to expect to find. On top of this you need to know about the different environments that can be found so that you understand the conditions that artefacts have survived in. Here on the Shetlands the soil and weather are very aggressive and much of the decay we have on our artefacts would certainly have happened in the first few years after they were deposited in the soil.'

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