Verulamium and the Beginning of my Adventures in Archaeology by our expert guide Tony O'Connor

Growing up and going to school in St. Albans in the 1970’s is where my adventure in archaeology began. My first museum visit as a child was to the Verulamium Museum; The first excavations I worked on were the Roman bath house on Branch Rd and the Gorhambury Villa, which lay just outside of the Roman town. Later, I spent time working first as a volunteer and then as a member of the curatorial team at the Verulamium Museum. Here, I gained a fabulous introduction to museum work which has been the main focus of my career for the last 35 years. Although in the years since I have worked on and visited sites all across the Roman empire, returning to Ver and its fantastic site museum still feels like coming home to me.

The excavations at Gorhambury (1972 – 1982) were directed by the then Historic Monuments Inspector and mosaic expert David Neal. My time at Gorhambury introduced me to archaeological fieldwork and recording techniques. One of the most focussed periods in any season was getting ready for the site record photographs, for which the exposed stratigraphy would have to be meticulously cleaned. One year the bath house posed a bit of a problem as the chalk used in the construction had badly discoloured. Who would know looking at the site photograph that the solution would be to paint the chalk with whitewash? Volunteering at the Verulamium museum led to me becoming part of the curatorial team. One of my first jobs was to catalogue the coin collection from the site, which would form part of the (then) new computerised collections databases being created in the UK’s museums. The experience gave me a fascination with Roman coinage; what we can tell from the coins of the changes in the fortunes of the empire; how the empire presented itself to the world and how a monetary economy functioned in Roman Britain.

One of my most vivid memories of working at Verulamium was the first time I was allowed to handle the Verulamium Venus, on of the key finds from the site. The responsibility of handling such an important survival from the Roman period was initially terrifying, but I was soon put at ease by colleagues. The privilege of handling and working with wonderful objects from the past is still something I am very conscious of even today.

As well as revealing the story of one of the most important towns in pre-Roman and Roman Britain, a visit to Verulamium also reveals  the story of the development of archaeology in Britain from studies by antiquarians, through the campaigns of Mortimer Wheeler and Sheppard Frere to present day research.