Prescot Dig

Ruth excavating the cremation containing the famous dish.

So the millefirori dish from cremation Context: 1801 has become famous! The bowl which has now been stuck together at the Museum is on display at the Museum of London in Docklands. The museum organised a press release about the bowl and this morning it is all over the press and web media!

Sadly the journalists mostly talk about the museum and don’t mention either L – P who ran the dig or Ruth who actually dug it up.

It is very exciting to see such media interest in your work and actually it all seems a little surreal. Yesterday morning I attended the press conference and chatted to the journalists, by evening the dish was in the Evening Standard. This morning the story has appeared on the BBC and most of the broadsheet papers. The news agency Reuters have syndicated the story around the world, so far it has been on CNN, but hopefully it will get good coverage in North America too.

Hilarious puns and images in London Lite’s tacky coverage of the dish.

So, what does it all mean. Well it is interesting to see thousands of hours of work reduced to a single image. By and large the coverage is (unsurprisingly) extremely concise with a single image of a single artefact and a short explanatory text. In general, the print media seem a little old fashioned, there is no link out to wider coverage of the story, there is limited explanation and little trust that the reader might want to know more. In most articles the dish is mentioned in the context of something you could eat off. Bearing in mind that this object came from a grave and was almost certainly never associated with food, this is a bit of an odd invention!

On the other hand, Twitter and the blogosphere are providing a more interactive and to a certain extent critical coverage of the event… go on check your hash tags!

Perhaps the best article from my point of view is in today’s Guardian. Maeve Kennedy wrote a really nice piece about the find, which is factual but quite fun to read. The prize for most hilarious reporting goes to London Lite who managed to work a picture of Frankie Howerd in ‘Up Pompei’ into their article!