Roman Finds Group

The main site Chris described was the excavation of the Holbrook Engineering Works. It was a large site with limited time and manpower. The then curator, Stuart Edgington Mead, devised a trenching policy and recruited volunteers. The result was a series of deep trenches, evidence for 4 masonry buildings, tessellated flooring and many finds but little or no paperwork. Unfortunately, the curator died the following year in a car crash but is to be congratulated for the amount that was achieved.

Harlow Museum therefore has a good selection of material, (really nicely displayed in their new museum) but lacking contextual information. The collections include local pottery (Hadham ware), evidence for metal and leather working and 550 coins. The settlement was originally Iron Age and the Roman settlement pre-dated the temple, a site thought to have been closely associated with the nearby settlement.

Martin Dearne: Roman Enfield, 30 years of finds from gardens
Martin introduced us to a different type of archaeology, that of small-scale excavations in back gardens. Enfield is a 100% built-up residential area and much of the work has been done by Enfield Archaeology Society. The society conducts back-garden archaeology which plugs the gaps in PPG16. They investigate holes dug for fish ponds, garden landscaping and footings for extensions. Finds have been recorded since the early 19th century when quarrying for brickearth and gravel in the valley of the River Lea and the construction of the railway led to finds. Enfield is 81/2 miles north of Roman London with the line of Ermine Street running north through the area.

Evidence for a settlement lies to the east of the A10 and to the west of Ermine Street. Boundary ditches, grain driers but few structures have been found, although there is pot and coin evidence. But was it military, a roadside settlement with a mansio or a simpler settlement?

Occupation began in the Flavian period and there was continuous occupation until the end of the Roman period with coins of the House of Theodosius. There have been three coin hoards found as well as a late sub-Roman buckle. The occupants seem to have been both moderately literate and wealthy with samian, amphorae and glassware. Was there a mansio or mutatio with tiled buildings, flue tiles and brick? In additon, there were several scattered cremation burials, two stone sarcophagi and a lead coffin lid with scallop shells. These burials may relate to further villas and it may be that there was a landscape of villas with a small town, a regional centre, leading from Ermine Street and serving a villa community.

Jake Weekes: Relative dating of Roman cremation burials in Essex
Jake has been researching cremations in East Kent, East Essex and London. He is looking at the archaeology of ritual and is keen to have RFG members mail him with information. His e-mail address is jrw@ukc.ac.uk.

As part of his research he is looking at the relative chronology of cremations; the role of the finds specialist in the interpretation process and practical ways that the archaeological community can change the excavation to publication process. He is also looking at the ritual style of cremations; the selection of materials; cremation types and whether goods used were defective and burial rites. The combination of all these factors have to be viewed in an anthropological way. In Roman Essex, inhumation replaced cremation as the predominate rite but there is a discernible pattern of late-Roman cremations. For example, at Kelvedon, eighteen cremations date to the late 4th century, and 22 cremations at Colchester to the 4th century. There is, therefore, a growing body of evidence for cremations continuing throughout the Roman period.

Jake argued for an inclusive interpretation process with finds specialists brought in at the excavation stage. As to the publication, there should be joint editing of reports by all specialists involved. This could make it a more expensive process but Jake urged archaeological specialists to present a united front to increase communication rather than be ruled by the cheapest service.

Alison Taylor: Grave goods from Cambridgeshire
Alison described how an élite native tradition was carried on in Cambridgeshire. Cremation was already the pre-Roman tradition., confined to the éite and middling Romanised population. The native poor were inhumed.

At Bartlow Hills, six burial mounds were sited in two parallel lines. Excavations in the mid 19th century only looked at the centre of the mounds to find the central burials. Single cremations in square glass bottles and oak chests were found with rich grave goods. There was a folding chair - a symbol of rank and strigils - symbols of Romanisation. Each burial had a lamp with blackened wicks and food and drink. There were no weapons or personal objects, making sex identification difficult. One had a fine miniature enamelled cauldron.

The burial of food and symbols follows an Iron Age tradition. At Littlington in south Cambridgeshire, a cemetery associated with a rich villa was excavated in the 19th century. A long-lived walled family cemetery had over 200 cremations and 200 inhumations. The grave groups were recorded in paintings by the Vicar's wife.

Each cremation was buried with a standardised selection of objects - a storage vessel, a samian bowl and a wine flagon. All the large jars had cracks or chips on the rim, appearing to be deliberate 'ritual' killings. The occupants must have been the Romanised elite as crouched burials in field ditches without grave goods were the local native rite.

At the Girton cemetery outside Cambridge, 19th-century excavations found funerary monuments, glassware and rich grave goods. At a small villa in Godmanchester, 70 simple one-pot cremations were found.

A recent excavation at Milton revealed a large wooden box with a storage jar and two flagons, both with small holes drilled in the sides. Thios showed that the ritual killing aspect was more important than the drink to accompany the deceased.

At Guilden Morden cemetery, later cremations cut into earlier inhumations. The cemetery, associated with a villa, had a mix of burial rites including crouched burials. A most interesting discovery was made of a 2nd-century inhumation in a lead coffin at Arrington. The coffin contained the skeleton of a baby with hydrocephalus. It had been wrapped in a red/blue wool shawl and eight miniatures were placed, possibly in myrrh, around the face. There was a thorn-puller figurine, a Germanic-style mother goddess, figurines of both a baby and an older child, a bullock, two sheep and a nature god with a Phrygian hood. All the figurines originated from northern Gaul. The publicity from Arrington led to another find from Godmanchester. A young girl's cremation in a samian jar had pipe-clay northern Gaulish figurines of a horse and a bull.

In Cambridgeshire, the rich were not buried with grave goods and in the organised cemeteries, there may be evidence for Christian burials as all the burials were in some form of coffin to protect the body and wore shrouds. Glass phials, for dressing the bodies were usually left outside the coffin.

Nina Crummy: Small objects, the Catuvellauni and the Dobunni
Nina began with a plea for research on small finds beyond that required by commercially-driven reports. Much work is needed to produce data-sets in order to reach global conclusions. She suggested that RFG members look at particular types of material.

Pottery research is more advanced with a higher level of research and knowledge - they can identify the form and its function, the fabric (fineware/coarseware) and whether the vessel is an import or locally-produced. Known kiln sites far outnumber known centres of production for metal, stone, and bone artefacts. This kind of information enables pottery specialists to produce trade patterns for settlements, as well as providing major input into feature and site dating.

Together with Hella Eckardt she has been looking at nail-cleaners for regional patterns and they have produced an interim report which has been submitted to Archaeological Journal. It examines the evidence presented by three types of nail-cleaner.

Double-pointed nail-cleaners, the usual form in Roman Britain, are not common on the Continent, where a single-pointed tool is used instead. The use of nail-cleaners was inherited from the La Tène period when toilet instruments were used only by the élite, but they became very more widely used in Roman Britain.

The Baldock type is a simple one-piece form with the suspension loop at right angles to the blade. Tweezers with similar decoration can be similarly dated by association. The 'bone disc' type has a copper-alloy shaft with a bone bead on the top, or, very rarely, a bone shaft with glass bead. The third type has a grooved collar.

The Baldock type is concentrated in Hertfordshire and Essex, the area of the Catuvellauni and the Trinovantes. In contrast the bone disc and grooved collar types are well-represented in the area of the Dobunni, especially around Cirencester. This strong east v west distribution pattern is evidence for regional manufacture and marketing. On Akeman Street, the road from Cirencester to Verulamium, a series of roadside temples marked the liminal territory between the Dobunni and the Catuvellauni, and nail-cleaners of both eastern and western forms types were deposited at these sites as votive offerings.

An examination of the social distribution of all types of nail-cleaners (of which there are many) shows that they are more 'British' than 'Roman'. Very few have been found along Hadrian's Wall or in Wales, and the overall pattern shows they come mainly from civilian areas, especially small settlements. Many are deposited as votive offerings at temple sites.

Several of Hilary Cool's hairpin groups show a regional distribution pattern, as do many brooch types, and also mortar and pestle cosmetic grinders. Some object types are wholly restricted to their regions; strainer bowls, for example, occur only in the east.

Similar work on other object types will begin to build up dated regional 'artefact suites', so that trade patterns for imported or local objects can be defined.

Hilary Major: Roman querns from Essex
Hilary has been researching Roman querns, their form, chronology and stone type.

Essex has no hard stone so stone has to be brought in. There is little evidence for pre-Roman rotary querns and Saxon lava querns. The bulk are Roman and over 400 are of a millstone grit that came from the Pennines.

Puddingstone querns are an Iron Age form that continued in use into the Roman period. Roman lava querns were lightweight by comparison and soon became popular. Over 800 have been found from Essex but they are difficult to date more closely. They originally came from quarries near Cologne and were common in the eastern part of Roman Britain.

Late-Saxon querns have a collar around the hopper while medieval querns tend to be larger than Roman examples, being flatter and thinner. This style remained in use from the 11th to 16th centuries. The pot quern, where the flat upper stone sits within the bottom stone, was introduced in the 13th century. In the 17th and 18th centuries, Cologne lava querns were introduced with small-scale versions used for grinding mustard.

At the Iron Age and Romano-British site at Elms Farm, Heybridge, framents of 264 puddingstone querns were excavated. A high proportion remained in use for about 25 years and context evidence suggests puddingstone continued in use for the manufacture of querns into the 2nd century.

Val Rigby: Gallo-Belgic Pottery Stamps
Gallo-Belgic ware was an early import found on sites like the King Harry Lane cemetery, Verulamium, the Stanway cemetery outside Colchester and Piddington villa.

At King Harry Lane there was evidence of native pottery that were wheel-thrown, not kiln fired and made in earthy colours. The Gallo-Belgic range varied from white to scarlet and pink and grey to black. Some even had mica-dusted surface decoration. Gallo-Belgic ware consists of Terra Rubra and Terra Nigra. The cups were stamped centrally and platters multi-stamped radially. At King Harry Lane, there was a standardisation of size and style. The most common were carinated cups and platters in Terra Nigra and pedastalled cups and beakers in Terra Rubra.

Hawkes and Hull's Camulodunum report (1947) designated the forms and fabric. These earliest forms and functions introduced a new Romanised view of food and drink. The main areas in which they are found are concentrated around Colchester, Canterbury and Chichester. The pottery was made around Rheims and copied Arretine ware. Some potters feature on both samian and Terra Rubra.

Terra Rubra began to be made c 10 BC and there are Colchester and Skeleton Green parallels with Haltern dies. Terra Rubra vessels are concentrated in the eastern region of Roman Britain and are based around tribal areas.

In the Tibero-Neronian period supply was spreading towards the Humber and are found mostly in burials. Breaks in supply came with the invasion and Boudican revolt and there is a change in distribution after AD 60. Colchester set up copies of Gallo-Belgic pottery at an early date. Its significance is in the standardisation of pot production, being kiln-fired and supplied in larger quantities than Arretine. The question still remains as to who used it and for what purpose.

Ralph Jackson: The Stanway Healer's grave and artefacts of Roman medicine
High-status graves in enclosures were excavated in the late 1980s and 1990s at Stanway, outside Colchester. Enclosure 5 included a doctor's burial containing the first complete set of medical implements in Roman Britain, pieces of Gallo-Belgic ware and a board game. Dating to c AD 50, the Stanway medical set is one of the earliest known, as most are from eruption levels at Pompeii, or later than that date.

The Stanway set, being largely iron, is in fairly poor condition so a replica set has been reconstructed (by RFG member Nodge Nolan). The composition of the set has both similarities and differences to other Roman sets. It is not a 'specialist' set.

There are over 20 big sets from the Empire and tombstones show medical sets stored in folding wooden boxes. Each basic surgical kit had from six to fifteen implements, including scalpels, forceps, sharp hooks, needles and probes. These all feature in the Stanway set which consists of two scalpels, a saw, knife, forceps, handled needles, and a scoop-probe. The use of iron is unusual; Roman implements are usually made of copper alloy. Apart from the scoop-probe, the Stanway implements also differ in style from Roman ones. The iron scalpels, for example, have leaf-shaped dissectors with curved blades. Pre-Roman graves from Germany and elsewhere in the empire have iron implements. Stanway is similar to the north-western European tradition and is the first British Iron Age set to be found.

Jenny Hall,
Museum of London,
London Wall,
London EC2Y 5HN

17th March 2003