Category Archives: Roman

VM_365 Day 312 Roman pottery from pits on foreshore at Minnis Bay

Archaeology, Birchington, From the Archives, Roman, Roman pottery, Thanet's Heritage Pioneers, Uncategorised, VM_365 Project
VM 312
After P. H. G. Powell-Cotton and G. F. Pinfold, 1939, Plate III.

Today’s image for Day 312 of the VM_365 project shows three Roman pottery vessels found and excavated by James Beck and Antoinette Powell-Cotton in pits on the foreshore of Minnis Bay, Birchington in 1938.

The vessel on the left hand side of the image was found in a square shaped pit and is described as a ‘grey Belgic vase’ by Major Powell-Cotton and G. F. Pinfold in their report and catalogue of the site in 1939. This late Iron Age/Early Roman vessel was found along with the base of a 1st century rough cast pottery beaker and a fragment of Quern stone.

The vessel shown in the centre of the picture is described  as a two handled wine jar of New Forest type.  A wide range of wheel thrown fine wares were produced in the New Forest  in the 3rd and 4th century,  sometimes decorated as is the case with this vessel, and are generally found distributed across southern Britain. The vessel was found complete, in a pit along with some other pottery and a fragment of the upper part of a quernstone.

The vessel on the right was found in a pit beneath the millstone that featured in yesterday’s, Day 311 post for VM_365. The vessel was described as a fine red ware pot with the remains of decoration with white slip.

Some of the pits may be the remains of the bottoms of well as three contained springs. The pottery found in the pits dates from the early 1st century to the 3rd or 4th century indicating that this area had been a focus of activity by the Romans for at least 300 years.

VM_ 365 Day 311 Roman millstone from a pit at Minnis Bay.

Archaeology, Birchington, Bronze Hoards, From the Archives, Roman, Thanet's Heritage Pioneers, Uncategorised, VM_365 Project
VM 311
After P.H.G Powell-Cotton and G. F. Pinfold, 1939.

Today’s image for Day 311 of the VM_365 project shows a large Roman Millstone found on the foreshore at Minnis Bay in 1938 by a 14 year old schoolboy named James Beck. The picture of the millstone was taken at the Powell-Cotton Museum where the millstone now resides.

James Beck identified and excavated a group of eight pits of Roman date assisted by Antoinette Powell-Cotton. The millstone, measuring nearly a metre in diameter and almost 12 centimetres thick, was found covering one of the pits, an irregular shaped cut which measured about 73 centimetres deep. A fragment of millstone of a similar date found at Broadstairs previously featured on Day 59 of the VM_365 project. Below the millstone, the pit also contained a fine red ware vessel, two fragments of samian pottery, horses teeth and fragments of wood.

James Beck also identified a Bronze Age site in the same area as the group of Roman pits and excavated and recorded a Bronze Age hoard that was previously featured on Day 202 of the VM_365 project.

 

VM_365 Day 304 Tiny ceramic tazza, Roman temple near Margate?

Archaeology, Margate, Roman, Roman pottery, Thanet archaeology, Uncategorised, VM_365 Project
VM 304The image for Day 304 of the VM_365 project shows two images of a group of small ceramic vessels of a type  that have been called tazza, a term derived from the Italian word for a cup. The image on the left shows the upper surface of the vessels, the right hand image shows the bases of three of them.

The term Tazza occurs in archaeological literature mainly in reference to elegant Late Iron Age and Early Roman pedestalled cups or goblets of Gallo-Belgic origin. The vessel design is ultimately stimulated by Roman originals and their British counterparts in Late Iron Age grog-tempered ‘Belgic’ style. The term tazzeti occurs less frequently but has been used in reference to the cluster of little saucer-like vessels shown in the images.

Seven of these small tazzetti, complete or broken, were recovered from an excavation in the 1980s near the Sunken Gardens at Westbrook, which was led by David Perkins. The vessels are wheel-made. The image on the right shows the characteristic whorl, typical of many wheel made pots, on the upturned bases of three of the pots that show the whorls most clearly.
The tiny cups are made in a sandy fabric, very similar to the products of many Roman pottery kilns in Canterbury made between c.75-175 AD.  They fact that they are not very hard-fired suggests a likely manufacturing date between c.75 or 100-150 AD.
But what were they used for? There is no certain answer.
The small cups are a rare vessel type and nothing quite like these has been found in Thanet or the East Kent region before. The only clues may lie among the finds associated with the cups which include several fragments of pseudo-marble wall facing and a small rounded quartz pebble. Perhaps the quartz pebble could is no more than an object picked up by a child from the  beach nearby, but the rounded and semi-translucent nature of the pebble might have been considered ‘special’ by an adult.
The occurrence of both the unusual little dishes and the pseudo marble  seems altogether different and  ‘special’. The ‘marble’ is not true marble, but is composed of broken fragments of genuine red and green marble deliberately added to a fine white mortar, which is polished so that the whole mix of small inclusions shines like genuine colour-flecked marble. A similar technique called Terazzo is still used to create wall and floor finishes.
The marble finish suggests the presence of a building with a pretension to opulence,  although the community was not rich enough to afford the real thing but had enough resources to have a reasonable facsimile created. In turn this suggests that the ‘marble’ fragments could come from the wall of a domestic shrine belonging to a fairly well-to-do family, or just possibly a public shrine or temple.
Whatever the context of discovery, a reasonable explanation for the use of these little vessels in the Roman period is as little offering dishes

VM_365 Day 301 Dumpton archive confirms Roman building

Archaeology, Broadstairs, Coy Archive, From the Archives, In the Store, Iron Age, Landscape, Ramsgate, Roman, Roman pottery, Thanet, Thanet archaeology, Uncategorised, VM_365 Project

VM 301

The image for Day 301 of the VM_365 project is taken from a digitised colour slide that was taken at the site at Dumpton near Broadstairs which was excavated by Joe Coy in the 1960’s. The archive from this excavation has been featured in a series of VM_365 posts, which have been looking at the detail of the finds to try to understand the significance of this unpublished site. Although the archive box for this site is labelled 1965, it appears that the dig began in 1961, when the slide archive indicates that this image was taken. The labelling of individual pottery sherds in the archive also indicates that some were recovered in a dig on the site in 1961. The picture is very important because it proves that one of the major features investigated on the site was a Roman structure, partly built in a distinctive local type of building stone used extensively in the Roman period.

Several strands of evidence have led to previous suggestions that a structure  from the Roman period was present on the site. The earliest evidence was given in Reverend John Lewis’s History of the Isle of Thanet, where it was noted that Roman coins had been found in the Dumpton area. At the time of writing in 1736, Lewis reported that a Roman wall had relatively recently been observed, but had fallen into the sea following a cliff fall. An excavation carried out by Howard Hurd on the cliff tops when new roads were being laid out on the sea front also recorded ditches and enclosures, which were predominantly of Iron Age date. A dig by the Trust for Thanet Archaeology at site near to Joe Coy’s excavation that re-examined part of Hurd’s published site, recognised that the period of occupation on the site extended well into the Roman period, much later than Hurd had suggested. One significant find in the Trust’s excavation was of a small number of fragments of distinctive Roman roof tile forms, including both Tegula and Imbrex. this evidence all pointed to the previously unrecognised presence of a building on the southern slopes of the dry valley at Dumpton gap.

Recent evidence from excavations on major Roman buildings in Thanet have suggested that all were founded on substantial Iron Age settlement sites. It is likely that prosperous Iron Age farming communities in Thanet quite quickly adopted Roman building methods and began to use imported Roman pottery alongside vessels that continued to be made in traditional pre-Roman forms and in local fabrics exhibiting various degrees of influence from the material imported from the Romanised continent.

Sadly many of Thanet’s Roman buildings have been so heavily damaged by ploughing and stone robbing that little remains of their structure but the lowest courses of walls or those lining deep recessed parts of the structures like cellars and sunken floor levels. However the presence of structured remnant of walls, built of the distinctive rounded flint cobbles is paralleled on so many sites that their presence in this image, taken with the range of finds that were associated with the excavation site, are strong evidence that another Roman building was present on the southern side of the dry valley that leads to Dumpton Gap. The topographic location of the structure is also similar to the buildings excavated at Stone Road, Broadstairs and the Abbey Farm Villa at Minster.

In today’s VM_365 image, the presence of a building is confirmed by the presence of the  line of rounded flint cobble wall which is visible running from left to right in the foreground of the image. Although the pictures have not yet been reconciled fully with the plan that was contained in the archive, it appears that the wall is part of the southern side of a rectangular  flint lined cellar, which once formed part of the structure of a building. There are striking parallels with the image and the pictures of the surviving structures found further to the north at Stone Road and on the cliff top on the northern side of Viking Bay at Fort House, Broadstairs, which have appeared in previous VM_365 posts.

It is likely that further research on the archive and re-examination of the results of the other digs in the area will bring more evidence confirming the importance of this site which spans the Iron Age and earlier part of the Roman period.

 

 

VM_365 Day 300 Beads from 1964 Dumpton Gap site

Archaeology, Broadstairs, Coy Archive, From the Archives, Iron Age, Roman, Uncategorised, VM_365 Project

VM 300Today’s image for Day 300 of the VM_365 project shows two Late Iron Age/Roman beads from the box of archive from the 1964 Dumpton Gap excavation that we have been investigating. The beads have been made from materials that would have been readily available around the site, perhaps even picked from the nearby beach.

The bead on the right of the image is made from a light brown flint pebble that has been shaped to form a roughly round bead that has been flattened on each face. This bead appears to be unfinished; a large hole has been drilled partway through one side, while an attempt has been made to join the large hole with a much smaller hole on the other side but has not been completed. Other examples of unfinished objects found in archaeological excavations of a similar date nearby include a bone weaving comb and two spindle whorls.

The second bead on the left is made of chalk and is roughly spherical. Instead of having a hole pierced through the centre, it has been pierced off centre in a ‘V’ shape in a similar manner to the Beaker period jet button featured on Day 160 of the VM_365 project, to allow the bead to sit forward when strung on a cord and fastened around the neck.

Other VM_365 posts exploring the contents of this archive box have been posted on Day 293, Day 294, Day 295, Day 296, Day 297, Day 298 and Day 299.

VM_365 Day 297 Samian from the 1964 Dumpton Gap site

Archaeology, Broadstairs, Coy Archive, From the Archives, Roman, Roman pottery, Uncategorised, VM_365 Project

VM 297

The image for today, for Day 297 of the VM_365 project, is of eight sherds of Roman samian pottery , which were present in the collection of paper bags storing finds from a site archive from 1964.  There are lots of  types of pottery present in the archive box dating from the Iron Age and Roman periods and these will give us clues as to the nature of the site  that was excavated there. Yesterday’s post showed three sherds of Roman Mortaria, a distinct type of kitchen ware, from three different vessels.

The imported high quality samian pottery above represents foot rings, rims and body sherds, mainly from plain cups and bowls although there is also one small decorated sherd. One of the sherds has a makers stamp reading ‘ERICIM’ impressed in the base (image right). Although re-analysis by a modern pottery specialist might bring to light up to date information discovered through research since the dig,  the excavator was knowledgeable and had done some research identifying the potter as Ericus I, possibly from the Lezoux area of central Gaul and dating the sherd to between 80-120 AD.

Examples of rare decorated samian sherds from the same region have featured on Day 175 and Day 179 of the VM_365 project.

VM_365 Day 296 Mortaria from the 1964 Dumpton Gap site

Archaeology, Broadstairs, Coy Archive, From the Archives, In the Store, Roman, Roman pottery, Thanet archaeology, Uncategorised, VM_365 Project

VM 296The image today, for Day 296 of the VM_365 project, is of three sherds of Roman Mortaria, giving a closer look at the types of pottery that were present in the collection of paper bags storing finds from a site archive from 1964.

Mortaria were a distinctive  type of Roman kitchen ware  made in fine light brown and buff fabrics. Mortaria were made by several Roman pottery manufacturers, many based in the region around the Roman town of Verulamium. The steep sided bowls had flat bases and a broad outcropping rim, incorporating a finely  moulded pouring spout. The interior of the bowl was roughened with the addition of sharp grits in the clay fabric.

A well established typology and dating series has been developed for these vessels, often based on the makers stamps that were pressed into the rims. The size of the vessels and the moulding of the rim vary between manufactures and can be used to identify individual vessels. At the Dumpton site the sherds of Mortaria contained in the archive box, and shown in the image here,  represent three separate vessels.

The presence of Mortaria sherds in the pottery assemblage from the site helps to identify what type of site or settlement the material may have come from and  tells us something about its status. Similar Mortaria have been found at both the Abbey Farm Villa at Minster and from a Roman building at Broadstairs, where a well preserved Mortairium was present among many vessels apparently representing the dumped contents of a kitchen.

VM_365 Day 294 Iron Age and Roman pottery sherds from 1964 Dumpton excavation Archive

Archaeology, Coy Archive, From the Archives, In the Store, Iron Age, Ramsgate, Roman, Roman pottery, Thanet, Thanet archaeology, Uncategorised, VM_365 Project

VM 294

The image for today’s post on Day 294 of the VM_365 project shows the contents of some of the paper bags, stored in an archive box from an excavation carried out by Joe Coy with the Thanet Excavation Group at Dumpton, between Broadstairs and Ramsgate in 1964.

To understand how important the information contained in the archive is, we need to carefully examine how and why each item has been stored and labelled. In the image above the sherds are laid out on the paper shop bags they were stored in so that they can be assessed in more detail. Later they will need to be catalogued and put into plastic bags which will help to ensure their safe storage in the long term

All but two of the bags in the 1964 excavation box contain pottery sherds. The sherds have generally been marked with a site code and feature number, which we now know corresponds with feature numbers on the sketch plan in the box.

There seems to be no corresponding finds list, description of the pottery or dating for the items in the archive box, so each pottery sherd  may have to be re-examined to understand the date range of the features fully.

However even a casual examination of the material reveals the span of the dates covered by the sherds, apparently a classic assemblage spanning the Late Iron Age and Early Roman period. Many of the pottery sherds are comparable with typical vessel types from other sites the local area, which have featured in earlier VM_365 posts.

The site excavated by Joe Coy and the Thanet Excavation Group in 1964 is very close to a large site excavated at Dumpton Gap by Howard Hurd, one of Thanet’s archaeological pioneers. Although Hurd emphasised the Iron Age aspects of his site, described by him as the remains of ‘a Late Celtic Village’, later excavations suggested that there was a more significant Roman element to the settlement than was previously thought. As we start to understand the 1964 archive, it looks likely that this will make a significant contribution to understanding that Roman settlement phase here.

The analysis will continue in subsequent posts.

VM_365 Day 281 Roman Spoon-Probe

Archaeology, In the Store, Minster, Roman, Uncategorised, VM_365 Project

VM 281The image for Day 281 of the VM_365 project shows a copper alloy cast Roman Spoon-Probe  found during the 1999 excavation season of the Roman villa at Minster.
This alarmingly named object would originally have been double ended, with a spoon at one end and a probe at the other. The spoon end of this example has broken off. The shaft of the instrument has been cast with barley sugar twisting.
These instruments were multi-purpose, the spoon end would have been used to extract cosmetics from containers and the probe end used to apply them to the face, possibly also to mix them too. The probe could have been used rather like a cotton wool bud if wrapped in wool or cloth to remove the cosmetics from the face. These instruments were also used medically for the application of medicines to the ears and eyes as well as being used to excise and clean wounds.

VM_365 Day 280 Roman Brooch from Monkton

Archaeology, Iron Age, Minster, Monkton, Roman, Uncategorised, VM_365 Project

VM 280The image for Day 280 of the VM_365 project shows a Bow Brooch or Fibula of late Iron Age or Early Roman date, which was found in 1992 when trial trenching was carried out between Monkton and Minster in advance of the expansion of the old single lane road into a dual carriageway.

The Bow Brooch is made from copper alloy and has a perforated catch plate to cover and secure the pin. Classified as an early Colchester type, it dates to the period between 25 BC and 50-75 AD.

Like many clothes fastenings and small personal items, Bow Brooches like this formed part of the Late Iron Age costume and continued to be worn into the Early Roman period, despite the many material changes the Roman invasion brought to the country. Because of the continuing influence of indigenous costume and the fastenings and ornaments that were associated with them, a distinctive Romano-British hybrid culture eventually emerged, drawing on elements from both cultures.