Heritage Victoria’s Conservator Susanna Collis explains the archaeological and conservation processes involved in conserving the dinnerware unearthed at Viewbank Homestead.

Click Here to listen to Dr Sarah Hayes, an archaeologist talk about the dinnerware found at Viewbank.

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TRANSCRIPT

SUSANNA COLLIS: The dining ware, that we have a lot of from Viewbank, was first treated in the field by the archaeologists, who clean fragments as they're found. And they're air dried on drying frames.

After that, they all arrive at the lab. The many, many fragments of diningware and ceramic. And the team of archaeologists and students, and some conservators, spent over three months trying to sort some of those fragments by pattern into whole artefacts.

So for example, you'd have someone perhaps working on one pattern at a time, looking through the drying racks of fragments to find matching pieces, much like a jigsaw. So after perhaps finding enough fragments in order to make nearly a whole plate, or tureen, or cup, or saucer, the work is usually then given over to a conservator to finish. And what the conservator will do is to further clean the pieces, if necessary, and assess the breakages of each fragment to make sure that they do actually go together.

And then the jigsaw puzzle, and the adhering of the fragments, begins. And that can be a fairly quick process, if you have all the materials and space at your disposal. In some cases, if you're joining a plate and you've got 18 pieces, someone might find the other three after you've joined the plate. That can happen too. But certainly, for the Viewbank material, we were able to reconstruct quite a number of serviceware.