Ancient pots repaired

The restoration project will take five years

The first results of a project to conserve dozens of pieces of prehistoric pottery have gone on display in Devizes.

An exhibition at the Wiltshire Heritage Museum shows how restorers have painstakingly removed cement from the pots which were excavated in the 19th Century.

Pioneering archaeologists naively applied cement to try to preserve the pottery dug up from barrows in Wiltshire.

In the last two-and-a-half years, staff at Wiltshire County Council's conservation laboratory in Salisbury have restored 60 of the 105 pots.

They have been put back on display at the museum, together with illustrations charting the progress of the conservation.

Some of the artifacts date back 4,500 years and are highly decorated.

The restoration work is part of a five-year project funded by the National Lottery Heritage Fund.