Following on from Day 56’s image of one of the Roman graves excavated at Grange Road, Ramsgate, today’s image shows one of the grave assemblages from the same site.
This assemblage was found in the grave of an adult female who was buried wearing a copper alloy twisted wire bracelet and was wearing foot wear with hobnails. The assemblage you can see in this picture was found at the foot end of the grave and included a second copper alloy bracelet, a pottery dish, a flagon stoppered with a flint and a beaker. If you look carefully, you can also see a length of copper alloy wire, near the dish that may have been twisted around a fabric bag.
It was items like this that Hicks was recovering in the new developments in this area of the town in the 19th century.
Photograph of artefacts found in or near the Ramsgate area published by Robert Hicks MRCS in 1878
Following on from the image of a Roman burial at Ramsgate from VM_365 Day 56, today’s picture shows a collection of archaeological artefacts from private collections that were discovered in Ramsgate before the photograph was published in an article for Archaeologia Cantiana, the journal of the Kent Archaeological Society, in 1878.
Ramsgate was lucky to have one of Thanet’s most diligent and learned pioneering archaeologists in Robert Hicks, a surgeon who joined Ramsgate’s Seaman’s Infirmary & General Hospital in the middle of the 19th century and maintained a keen interest in the local archaeological discoveries that were being made as the town expanded. Hicks deserves to better known in the story of Ramsgate’s cultural heritage and it would serve the town well if more biographical details could be added to his own story by some local researcher.
Robert Hicks oversaw the collection and photographing of the artefacts and and wrote the article that it illustrated. To accompany the picture in the published article, reproduced in the image above, Hicks listed the location where each of these finds was made, giving a brief description and dates for each of them as current archaeological knowledge stood.
While his focus in the article was predominantly in the abundant finds of the Roman period, several of the artefacts shown in the picture published in the 1878 article are certainly from earlier periods in prehistory, including Mesolithic, Neolithic and Bronze Age axes and what seems to be a finely made Early Bronze Age flint dagger. Two Iron Age fibula brooches are present, along with several late Iron Age ‘Belgic’ pottery vessels.
Sadly none of these artefacts can be located today and Ramsgate’s heritage is poorer for the loss of a collection of artefacts that would grace any local museum and would contribute to telling a longer and more complex story of the area than is generally known to the town’s residents. Now only Hicks’s published photograph exists to help us understand what we have lost.
Reference
Hicks R. 1878. Roman Remains from Ramsgate. Archaeologia Cantiana Vol.12, p.14 – 18.
Our Image for VM_365 today is of a Roman burial found in Ramsgate, which gave us important evidence confirming the records of early archaeological discoveries in the town.
For much of the 19th century Ramsgate was spreading out from its early limits, clustered along the High Street and around the harbour. Suburbs with bungalows, large houses, terraces and squares began to spread out on the upper reaches of the East and West Cliffs, the town expanding into what had been open fields and parade grounds and camps during the Napoleonic Wars.
In the course of the development that took place, many archaeological sites were disturbed and important evidence of the long occupation of the area was revealed. Luckily Ramsgate in the 19th century was home to a lively community of local historians and pioneering archaeologists and many documentary and even photographic records were made and published.
Several Roman burials had been reported on the West Cliff, in the area of the southern end of Grange Road, London Road and West Cliff Road, suggesting that the West Cliffs were the site of groups of Roman burials if not a more extensive cemetery.
Unfortunately few of the artefacts or sites could be re-examined using modern archaeological methods and the interpretation and dating given by the early researchers could not be tested. Much of the evidence could only be regarded as ‘background’ information which could not be taken at face value until more data could be gathered. What was needed was archaeological evidence that could be analysed using modern methods and allow a more accurate assessment to be made of the early records.
In 2007 an excavation at a site in Grange Road provided the archaeological confirmation that was needed when a group of five intact graves were discovered, surviving remarkably just beneath the foundations of a demolished building that had been cleared from the site.
The five graves could be excavated using modern methods and the accompanying finds analysed in detail and accurately dated, showing that the group dated to the late 3rd or early 4th century. Without doubt more remains to be found of Roman Ramsgate. Records suggest that a Roman building once stood near the harbour and archaeological confirmation of the settlement where these Roman people lived would put Ramsgate firmly on the map of Roman Britain.
Personal name scratched into the surface of a Central Gaulish Samian dish from Broadstairs
Who were the people that lived in Thanet in ancient times?
We can never know anything about a large number of them, who have left neither written records or are represented by their remains. Occasionally some small remnant of their identity is asserted in some way through an archaeological find.
Our Image for VM_365 today shows one of those tiny echoes of a person who may have lived near Broadstairs in the Roman period in the 2nd century AD.
This fragment of a dish in Central Gaulish samian fabric (Drag. 18/31 R), dating from the early to Mid 2nd century, is marked with scratched letters reading TICI, probably part of the owners name. The sherd was found in the remains of a Roman building on the cliffs above Viking Bay in Broadstairs. Samian vessels could be large and these fine tablewares were probably expensive to replace and were often marked with names, scratched by hand into the glossy surface of the vessel.
Although we are lucky to have increasing numbers of written fragments dating from the Roman period in Britain, even sets of letters and accounts from one site, this small body of writing can only hint at the many ways that the skill of literacy might have been used in the Roman period.
In this case the writer used his skill to identify an object as his own and this act is preserved in a remarkable and rare survival into our own age.
Iron Age quern (150-50 BC) found at North Foreland, Broadstairs. Reconstructed from 11 pieces, c 320mm diameter.
While prehistoric periods are often separated by innovations in the technology of cutting tools, from flints through to copper, bronze and iron implements, one technology seems to link all these periods and to extend nearly to the limits of our own living memory.
For many thousands of years hand grinding of cereals and grains were essential to processing the fruits of agricultural labour into the the food that sustained life each day. In much of the developing world hand querns, mills and grindstones remain an essential part of daily life.
While much of society was devising new and innovative ways of chopping down trees, cutting raw materials and taking a swipe at each other with the latest materials, somebody somewhere was grinding out flour with a rubbing stone, a rotary quern or hand mill. The application of animal, water or steam power eventually scaled up the process, but somewhere in the mechanism remained the grinding surfaces between two stones.
On many sites, whatever the prevailing ‘… Age’ indicated by the pottery, grain processing and storage are the predominant finds, suggesting that what unites the developing history of Britain is one long Grain Age.
If you are out and about on Thanet’s beaches this coming Bank Holiday, or, come to that, any time of year, keep an eye out for features such as this appearing in our chalk cliffs or in the wave cut shelf on the beach.
This medieval well shaft was exposed at Cliffsend in 1985 following a chalk fall and recorded by the Isle of Thanet Archaeological Unit. Over the years Iron Age features, including pits and ditches, have been recorded at Dumpton Gap and prehistoric, Roman and Medieval features in the bays between Westgate and Birchington. The bases of Roman well shafts have also been recorded on the beach at Reculver.
So, keep your eyes peeled because you may spot a piece of Thanet’s Archaeological heritage on one of your seaside walks.
P.S. Please remember that cliffs can be dangerous and keep an eye on those tides while you are out and about.
Iron lock mechanism from an Anglo-Saxon site in Westgate, Thanet
Our image for VM_365 Day 51 is of a find from an excavation carried out on the site of a housing development close to the sea front at Westgate on Sea in 2006. This composite iron object was found among features that represent a phase of a settlement which seems to date to the 8th or 9th century AD. Another of the few Viking age sites known in Thanet.
This complex iron block which was recovered from the fill of one of the pits appears to have been a lock mechanism, perhaps originally attached to a box or chest. The mechanism has been reconstructed from the evidence of several X-ray photographs taken at varying intensities which revealed the hidden structure on the back of the plate.
The 2-3mm thick flat iron plate would have been mounted on the external surface of the chest with two rows of four iron rivets or nails arranged along each of the long axes. The front of the plate was pierced with an irregular key hole, centrally placed on the short axis but offset slightly on the long axis.
An iron spring with a right-angled bend was attached to the inside face of the plate. A sliding bolt rested on a rod that projected from the plate, held in place by the spring bearing down on the bolt where it pressed against the rod. The bar appears to have passed through a slot in the spring at a point above the attachment where the spring was fixed to the plate. The bolt would probably have projected a little further, fitting into a socket or staple fitted in the box.
The lock would have been operated by pushing a simple key through the hole in the plate. The key pushed against the bolt pin located on the underside of the sliding bolt at the end of the keyhole forcing the bolt away from the socket which held the box shut. In its present state the mechanism appears to be in the locked position and sliding the bar would need a little force to lift the spring where it was bearing down on the rod.
Lock fittings and keys are a common find on both Roman and Anglo-Saxon sites and the common discovery of bunches of keys in Anglo-Saxon female graves are interpreted as a symbols of female domestic authority, as holders of the keys to a household chest where the valuable items were kept.
Today’s image is of a late Neolithic polished flint axe found during fieldwalking at Woodchurch, Birchington in 2011.
This polished axe may originally have been intended as a status symbol or for ceremonial purposes and it would have taken many hours of polishing to achieve the beautifully smooth surface. On being broken, the ends have been reworked to become a useful hand tool.
Other examples of polished axes found on Thanet can be seen in the Neolithic gallery of the Virtual Musuem.
Early Iron Age pottery sherds from South Dumpton Down with rusticated surface treatment
The bizarre effects of a surface treatment that as applied to some pottery in the Early Iron Age (600 – 400BC) are illustrated in todays VM_365 image of a sherd from the Iron Age settlement at South Dumpton Down, Broadstairs.
Additional clay was added to the surface of the pots while they were being made, which was wet enough for the potters hands to raise these irrregular lumps and bumps on the outside of the vessels. Sometimes broad wiping marks or and other visble signs of the potters hands can be detected in the surface pattern.
It is not known why this process was applied to certain vessels, but it is thought it may have made the vessels easier to grip if they were perhaps used in activities that would otherwise have made the surfaces slippery. A suite of vessels has been identified in east Kent which have had this ‘rustication’ effect applied to their surfaces, examples are also known from the continent.
The method of roughening the surfaces of the vessels was commonly used in the early Iron Age period but the technique may have lasted in the potters repertiore into the later Iron Age, although used less frequently and without producing the exaggerated roughening that is commonly found on the earlier vessels.
Today’s image shows a fragment of a comb carved from a piece of ivory. The surface is inscribed with curving lines and a dot and circle pattern and was found in an 8th to 9th century refuse pit at Cliffsend in 1998.
Comparable combs have been associated with the Viking period of the 8th-9th centuries and although Thanet is mentioned in historical records of Viking raiding, we have few archaeological finds from the period.
In the same pit, along with pottery and other objects, was the skeleton of a Cod estimated to have weighed about 18 kilogrammes (40lb) which tells us something about the contemporary economy and ecology of the 8th-9th century.
