Cleaning up
Museum hosting event to clean artifacts
Prepare to get dirty this weekend.
The Museum of Industry is hosting an artifact cleaning workshop Saturday from 10 a.m. to 3 p.m. using artifacts retrieved from an archeological dig this past September at the museum’s foundry site.
Museum curator Debra McNabb said the cleaning workshop is another step in a plan to learn more about the foundry that operated in the early 1800s.
“We want to identify them,” she said. “Some are fragments or pieces of something that could be pieces of metal used in the foundry to make things, parts of a machine in the foundry that was getting new parts, something the foundry made, or more modern things.”
She said every piece is a mystery that will be cleaned with brushes under the guidance of professional archeologists from Industrial Heritage Nova Scotia and the Nova Scotia Archeology Society.
“It is part of the bigger project to understand what was going on at foundry. The foundry was started in late 1820s by the General Mining Association. They were a British company that came here and brought the technology of the industrial revolution, skilled miners and money to actually establish the coal mining industry in Nova Scotia.”
The September 2016 dig was a success, with more than 100 people of all ages showing up to take part in the weekend event, she said.
“A very fun weekend for everyone involved and it was a very good way for people to get hands on about archaeology, because not every time do you take the grass off and there is stuff sitting on the ground. People can have digs all day and find nothing. We were finding bits of metal from the beginning. What we are doing now is looking at those pieces and cleaning them up,” she said.
She said the best pieces recovered from the September dig will be kept and photographed, and unwanted pieces will be reburied at the site.
“It is the archeological practice to not throw things away,” said McNabb. “You don’t need a zillion things you dig up, you keep your best example.”
In the 1980s, a dig took place at the foundry site that exposed some of its walls. The museum hopes to host another dig in the fall in the same area.
She said no drawings or photos exist of the foundry and the original records of business were destroyed in a wartime bombing.
“We know the general area where we dug in 1980s and we dug beside that last year. Now we know where we want to go next, “he said.
The artifact cleaning workshop is free of charge and open to anyone over the age of five.