Approximately 400 years ago in this spot a well was excavated to provide the people of James Fort
with potable water. After a few short years of use that water went bad, forcing them to excavate
another well elsewhere. They filled in this well and in doing so they filled in several objects
14 feet below the surface of where i'm standing now. One of those objects, a Roman Lock Pistol,
would prove to be one of the most challenging and interesting objects in my conservation career.
The pistol was complete with a wood stock, copper alloy barrel, iron lock plates,
and lead shot. In this Dig Deeper episode we're going to cover the conservation of that pistol.
Sixteen years ago archaeologists excavating in the spot recovered that Roman Lock Pistol.
That started my long journey in the conservation and preservation of that pistol to actual public
display. What started as a muddy wet mass, became the center of a new exhibit in the Archaearium.
Let me take you now from the side of recovery to the side of conservation.
So we're in the archaeology conservation lab at Jamestown where a lot of the magic actually took
place with the pistol. The first time that I saw the pistol I was working at Colonial Williamsburg
as an archaeological conservator and the pistol was recently excavated and brought into the lab
and I saw it sitting on the counter and I thought, wow, that thing is incredible. The
first thing I did was I took my camera out and took this image. This is the earliest image that
I have of this pistol, thinking that is probably the last time I will actually see this pistol.
So two years later Emily Williams, my supervisor, presented me with the pistol and says okay
you're going to be working on this now. The excitement that came over me for working on this
really incredibly interesting and significant object it was just absolutely incredible, but then
the fear set in. What am I going to do to conserve this pistol? It's made of wood, it's made of iron,
it's made of lead the shot, and the barrel itself is copper alloy. I had to come up with a plan to
treat these objects in a way that would mitigate damage to the other components of the pistol.
That's because some of the steps required to conserve the pistol
will help some parts of it, but will actually damage other parts of it. For instance,
the polyethylene glycol which is great for the wood and bulking of the wood will actually
corrode the iron components of it. I had to make a decision. What was the most important component
of this pistol? I decided it was the wood, because that is so rare to find an archaeological context.
The first step that I took was the removal of the iron corrosion product overlying the wood.
There were certain treatment choices that you have and you have to make a decision based on
how much damage you're doing versus how much good you're doing. Conservation is often a
fine line between that. In this case I decided to go with an air scribe that's like a little micro
pneumatic hammer. And using this air scribe I was able to bust up a lot of the corrosion
on top of this wood and a lot of it that was also on top of the iron lock plate. Because the pistol
came out of a well and was water logged, perhaps the most challenging aspect of the conservation
treatment was keeping the pistol wet while getting the work done. Every two minutes we had to dip the
pistol back into deionizing water to ensure that the wood wouldn't dry out, but also to
mitigate a potential corrosion of the metal as more oxygen was reaching the metal surface.
So once we removed the iron corrosion crust from around the wood stock,
we had to remove the iron corrosion crust from the actual iron lock plate. Here I had to make a
choice. My go-to method is air abrasion. Now this is using really small particles aluminum oxide to
basically sand blast the the iron corrosion off, but realize that that powder gets everywhere and
this wood in a waterlogged state would eventually be dried and when it was dried it would probably
shrink, and some of those iron oxide particles would be trapped in there. So I decided this
is not the method to take. So I went back to the air scribe and we worked several hours on on the
lock plate to reveal the various components the machinery the working parts of the lock plate,
but over time we started to hear a little bit of rattling from within the barrel.
Now earlier x-rays showed that there were two lead shot in the barrel of the pistol, meaning it
was double loaded. We knew that that was what we were hearing those two lead shot rolling around.
In order to remove them we had to take that air scribe to the muzzle of the pistol to remove a
little bit of the copper corrosion and a little bit of iron corrosion on the muzzle thereby
opening a passageway for the two shot to roll out. It was as simple as that. While using the
air scribe on the iron lock plate we noticed that around the flash pan the magnetite was very thin
and friable and we felt that we needed to preserve that aspect of the pistol that component. And so
we used epoxy resin to fill up the small voids in the flash pan to secure that magnetite surface.
After tens of hours are working on this object other priorities popped up and we knew we had
to store this object in a stabilized way. We put the object back into the deionized water and put
that tub of water into the refrigerator to keep it cool to slow down chemical reaction rates.
I thought I was actually never going to see the pistol again, because shortly thereafter
I actually went off to school. After graduating I was asked to come back and
to continue my conservation work on the pistol. So I came in, this is 2020.
I came in and started making mylar drawings. Now mylar is a thin plastic.
I was tracing the various fragments of the pistol, mainly focusing on the wood though. In this way
I was able to record the dimensions of each of those wood fragments prior to a future treatment
process where I'm going to dry the wood and in that drying process the wood is expected to shrink
and this is the only way that I could make or show the amount of shrinkage that had happened.
Very shortly after that Covid struck and the lab closed down for a better part of a year. I
found myself coming back in towards the end of the year and the first thing that I did,
pulled out the pistol again and having removed that corrosion crust from the pistol you could
see where the corrosion crust used to be. The wood the waterlogged wood was stained
an orangish color. That's telling me that there are iron oxides still within the wood and if I
was to dry the wood in that state, those iron oxides would certainly cause damage
to that wood as it dried, but could also cause future problems. So it was my duty to remove as
much of that staining as possible, plus it's just more aesthetically pleasing to the eye.
And to do this I used a chelating agent, but i'm not going to go into chemistry here. I think
it'll suffice to say that i used EDTA to remove this iron staining. And the results of that,
when I used this poultice, you can look at the poultice and see this bright blue color on it.
That didn't quite make sense to me at first, because I was trying to remove the iron staining.
What I realized is that of course the copper alloy barrel there are a lot of copper ions in
that solution and i'm pulling the copper ions out of that, not the iron ions. So I went to another
chelating agent, a much more stronger one, sodium dithionite and ammonium citrate
and the results of that actually saw a lot more of that red color coming through in the poultice,
which was excellent because that meant I was actually removing the iron staining. And that,
was such a sense of elation oh my goodness we're avoiding a future issue here by removing this
material. So knowing that the pistol was double loaded I knew that there was still probably
black powder a black powder charge in the barrel. A little bit of it we were able to recover, a
little bit of it a decade prior, but I knew there must be much more there. We were able to retrieve
four vials of the black powder. Showing three here because one's actually on display right now.
Having removed the black powder I then made a social media post which you can go to,
where I'm actually sending an endoscope, a little tiny camera down the barrel
of the pistol. It's really cool you should check it out. But then we had a happy little accident
not so much with the iron lock plate, but with the copper alloy barrel. After having worked with it
for quite a while I started to notice that it was actually becoming loose when i was handling it.
Yeah at first I was like, oh, what have I done? But then I realized,
no this this will actually serve a better this will actually serve the pistol in a better way.
With a tiny bit of work I was actually able to remove that barrel. Which meant the barrel I could
treat separately I could dry it separately and I could start work on it immediately.
So having removed the barrel I could now see the underside of that barrel and there was one little
spot of corrosion near the breech. Taking the air scribe to that corrosion and popping it off,
revealed a nice brassy sheen to the pistol. And reminded me even though I wasn't there for the
initial excavation of the pistol I had seen the videos and the barrel was shiny at that time.
Then looking back at my photograph my personal photograph that I took of the pistol,
I saw that the barrel in that photograph also so showed some very shiny areas to it.
Now when you look at this photograph, this is shortly after the barrel was removed, you can see
how the barrel has corroded. Now that's something that we see a lot in archaeological conservation,
when objects are in the ground they reach a state of equilibrium with their environment.
Most of the time that means that they corrode much more slowly or in some instances
stop corroding completely. The most damage that happens to archaeological objects is right after
they come out of the ground. They're suddenly exposed to a lot more oxygen in the air and that
accelerates the corrosion process. So this barrel, that was almost completely shiny when excavated,
within three years was a copper green color. I conferred with some of my colleagues at the
Mariners Museum and they suggested this concoction again it's an EDTA poultice,
but the poultice itself looked kind of like shaving cream. In fact they call it shaving cream.
And so on this part of the barrel that the public will never see, the part that actually seats
sits inside the pistol body itself, I put a bunch of dollops of this poultice on there,
for experimental testing to make sure that I wasn't over cleaning the object, to make sure that
it was going to work with the barrel. When I found a time period and the right consistency of the
shaving cream poultice, I applied it to the barrel as a whole, actually two sections at a time. And
that along with a little bit of light brushing with a glass bristle brush really brought out the
brassy sheen to the barrel again. Well I hope you're enjoying this,
but you've only heard half the story,
so stay tuned for our next episode where we cover the remainder of the conservation of this pistol