As part of the fieldwork programme, Society members have been helping reorder the stores at the Hampshire Museum Service stores at Chilcomb House, near Winchester.

Chilcomb House is the Head Quarters of the Hampshire Museums Service and holds archives and parts of its collection that are not on display or are undergoing restoration.

Chilcomb House was the place where most of the exhibits now on display at Basingstoke’s Milestones Museum were stored. Once the social history part of this vast collection was moved out of Chilcomb House there was space in what is known as store 7 for the archaeological archives that the various county  archaeology units had been storing around the county. Kay Ainsworth organised two students to organise store 7 and to get the collections into good order, but it was becoming evident that something needed to be done with the other  archaeological stores that had fallen into disorder.

In late 2002 our chairperson, Marjolein Mussellwhite, heard about the problem and suggested  that the society might like to help out, and so on one very cold Saturday in  January 2003 a team of volunteers assembled at Chilcomb to start work. I think we all thought that this was going to need a couple of weekends to get  everything sorted, but by the end of the first weekend the scale of the problem  had become apparent and we agreed to turn up one Sunday a month.

Store 2, formerly a stable block, houses the Danebury  collection. This is a grand term, in actual fact, store 2 contained nearly 2000 boxes of finds from 15 years of excavations at Danebury but they were scattered randomly in the former stalls all over the store. Supervised by Dave Allen, our  task was to figure out the sequence of the boxes, work out how they matched the official archive, get them in the right order and then catalogue their location.  This took nearly a year to do, but as a result anyone wanting to do research  with the Danebury material can be confident that the box containing the finds they are looking for can be found quickly.

Over in Store 12, another team of volunteers, supervised by Kay  Ainsworth, has gradually consolidated the Silchester and Basing House collections. They have moved the boxes into the right order, re-labelled the  boxes, or re-packed them to save space, and then catalogued their location. Once  these collections took shape, they went on to consolidate some of the older  museum collections such as those belonging to the Willis and Red House Museums.

Another team of volunteers has worked on entering the catalogue  information into a computer database, this team has been able to work offsite (at home) and then sometimes onsite to upload data.

One thing that this activity has taught us is to question the  value of what we find. For instance, the store contains a large number of boxes from field walks that contain nothing more than a random assortment of flints. With more and more digs taking place, space is at a premium, so we need to think  carefully about what finds we archive.

The volunteers continue to meet on the second Sunday of each month, and work from 10:00 am to 5:00 pm. Anyone who can spare some time is welcome to come along. Kay Ainsworth, who is in charge of the stores at Chilcomb House usually makes sure that there is a good supply of chocolate biscuits.

Hampshire Museums Service: http://www.hants.gov.uk/museums/