Today’s Day 148 VM_365 image shows part of a medieval jug excavated from a pit at East Northdown, Margate in 2003.
The upper part of this later 14th century globular bodied jug was found in 17 pieces within the fill of a pit, much of it is missing, including part of the handle, but enough was present to reconstruct the upper part of its profile. The jug was manufactured in Canterbury and is made of Canterbury Tyler Hill sandyware with a date range of c.1350-1400/1425 AD.
For Day 143 of VM_365we have an image of a Roman personal grooming set excavated from the villa at Minster in 1997.
This set, all made from copper alloy, comprises (left to right) an instrument for cleaning fingernails, tweezers and an ear scoop or cosmetic spoon. The three items would have been suspended together with an iron loop, traces of which you can see adhering to the end of the ear scoop and inside the end of the tweezers. The end of the nail cleaner has broken but you can just make out the curve where the hole for the ring was.
Personal grooming sets such as these would probably have been used by both men and women and are commonly found on both settlement sites and within graves.
The image for Day 142 of VM_365 is of a bronze handle, which may have been attached to a casket placed in a grave at the Anglo-Saxon cemetery at Sarre. The small amount of intact bone that remained in the grave (G. 286) suggested that it contained an adult. Other finds associated with the burial were small muticoloured glass beads in a range of sizes that probably once formed a necklace.
The handle shown in the image is made from a bar which is rectangular in section along most of its length, but at either end has been bent, beaten and filed to form hooks with a more rounded section. The hooks terminate with blunt points at the end of each of the sinuous loops. The hooked ends would have passed under two loops fixed to whatever object it was attached to, allowing it to be carried by the main bar of the handle.
The handle was found along with Iron objects and other copper alloy items including the bronze key that was shown in VM_365 Day 35, leading the excavator Dr. David Perkins to suggest that the various objects might have been fittings associated with a casket. The handle would have been mounted on the top, with a lock plate like the one shown in VM_365 Day 51 mounted on the side, perhaps operated with the key that was in the grave.
The image below shows a reproduction of a Viking Era casket which may be similar to the one in the grave at Sarre:
Day 139’s VM_365 image shows a Roman lock fastener from the villa at Minster.
This lock fastener is made of copper alloy, cast around an iron shank and was used to hold the lock plate to the front of a chest or door. A number of these decorative lock fasteners would have been used around the edges of the lock plate to hold it to the wood.
The cast bronze knob was visible on the front of the lock and was probably highly polished, while the iron shank passed through the lock plate and the wooden casket or door and was held in place at the rear by a pin inserted through the hole in the shank at the end. In our example the shank has broken across the hole that the pin would have passed through.
Our example was probably used to hold the lockplate to a chest as the measurement between the knob and the hole in the shank suggests a total depth of lockplate and wood to be 15mm, too shallow for a door.
Today’s Day 138 VM 365 image shows our largest fragment of Roman window glass from the villa at Minster dating to around the 1st to 2nd century.
This fragment of clear glass is a pale olive brown, growing pinkish in colour toward the broken edge. You can see many tiny air bubbles throughout the fragment. The glass appears to have been poured as a single sheet into a mould, onto a flat, slightly rough surface, possibly compacted sand, as the underside is also slightly rough in texture. The upper side is shiny and wavy rather like the surface of poured toffee and is thicker along the rounded edge which would have been formed against the edge of the mould.
Today’s Image for VM_365 is of a small scrap of Late Neolithic pottery from 1976 excavation of the ring ditch of one of the ceremonial enclosures at Lord of the Manor, Ramsgate.
The sherd is a rim fragment from a tub-shaped vessel with a small-diameter. The exterior of the rim is decorated with incised grooves, the inner edge of the rim has a distinctive bevel, similar to the rims of other examples of this type of pottery. The typical decoration of the sherd with a pattern of grooves in the surface, provides the name that has been given to this ceramic tradition; Grooved Ware.
Before flat based grooved ware vessels began to manufactured, all Early and Middle Neolithic pottery in this country was made with round bases. Grooved Ware is believed to have been first used in the Orkneys, spreading southward across Britain and seems to represent the only truly ‘homegrown’ tradition in the entire history of British ceramics.
The style of decoration on this sherd, coupled with the beveled rim, places the sherd into the Durrington Walls style, which was current during the main building phases at Stonehenge and is dated to c.2800-2300 BC
To date the tiny sherd pictured here seems to the best example of Grooved Ware archaeologists have recovered on the Isle of Thanet. Although it is small, the sherd is a valuable hint that there may be more evidence of this important period of settlement to discover in the future.
The image and information for today’s VM_365 post were kindly provided by a guest curator, ceramic specialist Mr Nigel Macpherson-Grant
In 2007 a group of potters experimented with manufacturing Grooved Ware vessels, follow this link to the Prehistoric Ceramics Research Group website article on the process.
Day 135’s VM 365 image shows the two sides of an unfinished spindle whorl of Late Iron Age or Early Roman date, which was found at in 2005 at Dumpton Gap, Broadstairs .
This particular object is interesting because it shows the different stages that the maker went through to carve the spindle whorl from Chalk. The first stage would have been the selection of a suitable sized piece of hard chalk, probably picked up from the beach nearby, and carve it roughly into shape. It seems likely that the outline was then scored in the chalk using a pair of compasses, marking the location of the central hole at the same time. The central hole would then have been drilled through the chalk and the finished object was shaped and finished more carefully using the scored circles as a guide.
We do not know why this object was abandoned part way through the manufacturing process, it may have been because the fragment was damaged, a large chip that had been removed from one side (left image) may have been the cause.
Although many of the objects archaeologists examine have been broken after use, it is rare to see one that gives such an insight into the manufacturing methods, because it has been abandoned while it was being made.
Day 134’s VM_365 image is of a flint knife, a prehistoric flint tool, that had been re-deposited in the fill of a chalk quarry pit dating to the medieval period and sectioned in excavations carried out in 2013.
The knife has been carefully flaked on both sides, it is slightly thinner and curved on the cutting edge. It is comfortable to hold in the hand and could have been used without being set in a wooden or bone handle or haft. The manufacture and use of this type of flint tool spans the Late Neolithic to Early Bronze Age c.2800-1700 BC.
The knife would have been used for everyday meat processing tasks, although it is definitely not a skinning knife, which are usually thin and often polished for the careful task of smoothly separating hide from flesh. Because it is a thick and heavy tool, it would have been ideal for butchering tasks; cutting joints; separating limbs and other heavy tasks.
VM 365 Day 133’s image shows two fragments of decorative stone from the lost medieval parish church of All Saint’s, Shuart, which was excavated between 1978 and 1979 by the Isle of Thanet Archaeological Unit.
The image shows the fragments of delicately carved Caen stone dating from the 12th century. The carvings represent fragments of a piece of carved foliage, used to decorate the interior of the church. The pieces were found along with other contemporary fragments of decorative stone in deposits associated with the much later demolition of the church building.
The image for day 132 of VM_365 is a selection of the fine glass fragments that were found in the excavations at the Roman Villa at Minster in Thanet.
No complete vessels were recovered from the site, but the fragments of sheet glass and the small pieces of vessel glass, including body sherds bases and rims, tell us that glass was as common on this site as it was on any other Roman building, where glass is sometimes better represented more completely in the archaeological record.
The glass sherds are in a range of colours, most commonly blues, greens and clear. One rare sherd is made from canes of glass in different colours welded into a muti-coloured pattern on the body of a vessel.
Typically for glass of this period the sherds are hard and clear, demonstrating the Roman’s mastery of glass making and the frequency with which glassware was used on the table and windows were used in their buildings.
Large sheets of glass were difficult to make and the windows in a building like the Minster Villa would have been composite structures with the glass held in place with a metal framework, like the one from the Tivoli Villa which was shown in VM_365 Day 78.
The small sample of glass vessel sherds shown here represent one of the most important pieces of evidence of the Roman way of life in Thanet from the 1st to the 3rd century AD.