Wiltshire Heritage Museum has no more room for storage.

[BAJR]

[h=3]Devizes centre has no more room to display discoveries[/h] 8:09am Wednesday 13th February 2013 in News By Lewis Cowen


Curator Lisa Brown with assistant curator Heather Ault and tons of artefacts in boxes



Wiltshire Heritage Museum in Devizes says it has no more room for the archaeological
discoveries that are being made during excavations at proposed housing developments.

Developers are required to arrange archaeological investigations on land where they intend to build and investigators come up with boxes full of artefacts dating from prehistoric to relatively modern times.
But David Dawson, of the museum in Long Street, Devizes, says neither it nor Salisbury Museum have room for more.

http://www.wiltshiretimes.co.uk/news/10223704._/ read on..

[Dinosaur]

Getting shot of archives is an increasing problem all over, we've got a few tons here we can't shift

[CARTOON REALITY]

I have a friend (already this is beginning to sound like an urban legend) who excavated a very small site (this was back in dee olden days before computers,) they had the whole site in the back of her van (context sheets, plans, finds.)

The van (and cargo) was purloined! No archiving problem there . . . Perhaps this is the way forward. The more you need to offload the archive the more expensive the vehicle?

[barkingdigger]

Opens up a whole new issue of fly-tipping dumps that come pre-recorded! Better yet, the culpret has signed all the litter...

[gwyl]

I have heard that wooden sheds can be a very good place to store those tricky archives, particularly during those cold winters when you might need to keep warm

[Dinosaur]

We managed to sell an entire archive once, a musuem got a grant to buy a couple of brooches I'd found from the landowner but ended up with a few boxes of accompanying tat as part of the package...maybe that's the way to go - FIND MORE TREASURE!

-actually double value, the developer didn't have to pay for archiving and got cash for the loot, presumably made paying us lot less painfull... :face-approve:

[CARTOON REALITY]

Has anyone tried ebay?

[Dinosaur]

Incomplete smashed crockery that's been graffitied and has hardened globs of HMG round the edges might be tricky to shift? - 'creative' photography might help, or maybe those suspiciously 'complete' pot drawings we love to tease illustrators about? Does ebay take ink drawings of the goods by the way?

[Antipesto]

Or just sometimes the client wants to keep the finds 'to display when they entertain guests'... They want the nice stuff, they can keep the less-nice stuff.

[Martin Locock]

Archives should be the responsibility of the client. I hope that any briefs for archaeological work in Wiltshire make it clear that the developer will end up having to arrange storage of the records and finds, and I hope that contractors do actually consider deposition when they are scoping a project, like they are always supposed to.