King Edwards Buildings wooden bowls

Authors: Liz Barham and Liz Goodman

Site supervisor:

The remains of up to twenty eight lathe-turned wooden vessels (bowls, dishes, platters) were recovered from the medieval fills of the City ditch on King Edwards Buildings (excavated in 1999). Thirteen of these were identified as bowls and were prioritised for conservation. The bowls were then sampled for wood species identification; six were ash and one alder.

If waterlogged wood is allowed to air dry in an uncontrolled way the artefact is likely to crack and warp. To prevent this, the bowls were immersed in polyethylene glycol (PEG) after the removal of any soil, and then freeze-dried to remove the water. PEG is a water soluble wax which bonds to remaining cell structures of the wood and acts to physically support the wood. Now that the freeze drying process has been completed it has been possible to reconstruct the bowls. The conservation process has also enabled the bowls to be studied more closely. It was found that six of the bowls have surviving applied marks, one of which resembles a footprint, another an X. Some of these are burnt into the surface of the wood, the others were scratched into the surface.

This site report is extracted from MoLAS 2005: annual review