On 10 June, Historic England is reopening our flagship science facility at Fort Cumberland, Portsmouth, after a year-long refit with new equipment and facilities that will enable improved study of our historic environment. This marks 75 years of specialist work that plays a vital role in telling the stories of England’s past.
00:00I'm Ian Morrison. I'm Director of Policy and Evidence at Historic England. I'm responsible for all of our policy work and all of our investigative science facilities both here in Portsmouth and across the country.
00:11Yeah well today is a milestone for many many reasons. So we're celebrating a number of anniversaries which I'll come on to but crucially we're also celebrating the reopening of our laboratory here in Fort Cumberland in Portsmouth after a very extensive refurbishment programme which has involved both improving the facilities, the building but also bringing in new equipment to allow us to continue our pioneering work in heritage science.
00:41The anniversary is actually there are three anniversaries so the first one we're celebrating 75 years since the what was called the Ancient Monuments Laboratory so the laboratory that you're standing in now was first established in 1950 and it was established to for the first time to really understand how our historic sites are how they're made and particularly to understand how they decay and then to find ways to stop that
01:11decaying process in ways that caused as least damage as possible to our sites and collections. So a really pioneering event that was established in 1950. We're also celebrating 25 years as the laboratory moving here to Fort Cumberland from our small offices in London where
01:34they'd outgrown our office space and of course it made complete sense to move it here where it came together with our central excavation unit which was established 50 years ago which is another anniversary and then finally 25 years ago alongside with moving our laboratories here we also created our regional heritage science offer and that is recruiting heritage scientists in each of the nine regions as was then across England
02:04and that is recruiting those who are the way to understand what we are the way to understand what they were what they were discovering how important it was and how it could be looked after.
02:11So my name is Angela Middleton I work as a senior archaeological conservator for historic England and here we are in the conservation facilities where we look after the artifacts that get excavated either from marine side or from terrestrial sites and when artifacts first arrive with us they often are in a state where we can't easily recognize them and where they are unstable.
02:36So we would normally start off with a program of x-radiography to understand what we are dealing with a bit better and then we are using various different tools techniques and processes to clean these artifacts to bring out the best sites and to stabilize them and this work really helps the archaeologists find specialists but also a whole load of other specialists to undertake their work in their own rights and eventually these artifacts will get deposited with the museum so that they are in the same way.
03:06So the wider public can also enjoy them.
03:08So the artifacts you see here are sabers from a protected wreck.
03:13The name of the wreck.
03:14The name of the wreck is the Rosweig.
03:15It can be found on the Goodwin Sands just off Kent and this was a trade ship that sank in 1740 and it was absolutely jam-packed full with trade goods.
03:27So you have to imagine wooden chests just packed with goods that the Dutch East India Company wanted to trade mainly with Indonesia.
03:37And the objects you can see here are saber blades.
03:41We have in total four chests were excavated from the wreck and they are all full of sabers and we've worked on one so far and this one chest had 100 sabers in.
03:53These are not finished products.
03:55They haven't got the hilt attached to them so all we have is the blade and the tang and the blades are decorated on both sides with etchings where you have different motifs of the moon, the sun and the snake.
04:10And these etchings would have been inlaid with brass so you would have quite a striking object.
04:17So a silvery shiny steel surface with beautiful very intricate sort of gold.
04:25It looks like gold leaf decoration but it is in fact brass.
04:28So our colleagues from material sciences did the analysis.
04:32Having had this recent investment is really opens up a whole load of new opportunities for us.
04:38Our capabilities of undertaking research and analysis has increased.
04:43Our facilities are more accessible to others and we can just undertake the work that we've done in the past already and just can take it to the next level.
04:53Hi, I'm Faye Worley, Senior Zoo Archaeologist at Fort Cumberland Historic England in Portsmouth and you are, well I'm in the zoo archaeology lab.
05:03This is where we study animal bones from archaeological sites.
05:08On the display next to me I've got a red deer skull along with some prehistoric antitals from Silbury Hill in Wiltshire,
05:16which is a late Neolithic monumental mound about 2500 BC.
05:21And these antler tools you can see on the desk would have been used to excavate the chalk to build the mound and the ditches around it.
05:29So not just for me?
05:31No, no, not just for me. Very, very important tools.
05:34This was a time where they didn't have metal tools.
05:36So the antler, the red deer antler is really what they had to construct these huge monumental sites.
05:42The investment is going to be incredibly useful. It's going to allow us to improve our facilities that we've got here.
05:47It's going to allow us to better care for our very important reference collections and to welcome more people in to use them.
05:56It's a really important reference collection that we have that's used internationally.
06:00People will come to look at the animal bones we hold here and it's just going to improve that.
06:05If you just want to understand that, why don't you use these events?
