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Morning Ellen
I believe you're going to give us an update on some of the work you've been doing?
Yes - last time I did a blog I'd just began treatment on this beautiful lentoid
and now I've actually finished it.
And I've updated the housing for the object
and now you can see all the beautiful features that are present.
One thing I wanted to point out before we take a closer look at the object
is that we actually take a number of samples
of everything that we remove from each object
and that includes the soil from the cells
and it also includes things like corrosion products
possible organic materials
and if we do happen to find any tiny garnet fragments in the soil.
So all those things are saved
and I constructed this little housing so they don't rattle around.
Just as an example
this is the soil from the bottom and the left cloisonné cells in the object.
Okay, can you just turn that round for us
so we can just see the soil moving in there?
Okay, so that's an example of all the soil that you've kept.
And you were saying other things that you might of kept are just small fragments?
Any tiny fragments that I discovered that are unusual or notable in any way
so for an example this is sort of a green black lump
that's a compressed possible corrosion product that I found in the cells.
This is an interesting feature that I thought I would point out
this is one thing that I found through excavating one of the central cells here
and that's a remaining rivet.
There are actually several rivet holes present
and you can see those on the back of the object
But this is the only rivet that we found
between this lentoid and the previous lentoid that was cleaned.
And you can see that the rivet is resting on top
of a small silver divider
and that's something that is a feature that is also present on the previous lentoid.
And I am right in thinking - you were telling me
at the other side you can actually see the holes
where these pins may have been?
You can. So if I pan over the central gold foil...
You can see that there are two large rivet holes present on this side as well.
And one small rivet hole sort of tucked in the corner
looks like maybe they made a mistake!
So what are we looking at here Ellen?
You can see here the clean garnets
and some of them are quite lovely
and you can still see the inter play of light
with the backing foils showing through.
And I'm presently working on writing up a little blog
for the website about this treatment
so that you can see the before and after of images.