Today’s VM_365 image shows two artefacts from Iron Age sites in Thanet. One is a large stone with a flat grinding surface, found at a large Iron Age settlement site at South Dumpton Down near Broadstairs. The second object is a spherical rubbing or grinding stone, which fits comfortably into the hand, which comes from a contemporary site at North Foreland, Broadstairs.
The two objects demonstrate how local materials, in this case flints from seams within the chalk that underlies both sites, were adapted for tools associated with daily activities. Both objects were transformed by regular working into something quite different to their irregular natural state.
The surface of the larger flint was pecked and ground to a horizontal surface by the rubbing and grinding action that may have taken place every day. The smaller flint was chipped and ground into a sphere through a similar regular striking action, possibly while it was used as a rubbing stone used on a similar flattened surface. Rotating the object in the hand for comfort probably created the spherical shape over time.
The combination of the two objects, under the power of a human hand, created an abrasive process, which was possibly used to rub grains between the stone to make flour, or to grind other foodstuff into powders or pastes.
Today’s image is from the Roman cellared building described previously in our VM365 Day 44 post. The picture above shows the remains of an oven constructed from clay and tile. Elsewhere, in the floor, we found several ovens or kilns, one of which was constructed from fragments of millstones and on one of the corners of the building there was a quern stone set in the floor used for grinding grain. From the soot collected in the clay and tile oven shown above charred Spelt, Emmer, Barley and Oat grains were recovered suggesting that this structure is likely to have been used as a bakers oven.
It would be interesting to know what type of bread can be made from grains like this.
3rd century Roman millstone fragment from Upton, Broadstairs
Todays VM_365 image comes from the excavation of a Roman period cellar at Upton, near Broadstairs, one of the three areas where the Trust has established the presence of Roman building remains in Broadstairs in the last decade. Like the sites at Stone Road and Fort Hill, nothing remained of the structures that would have been above ground level at the Upton site.
To undertand what the cellared buildings we have located might have been we need to look closely at the finds that are associated with them, to gain some context and to be able interpret the uses they were put to. In both the building at Upton and at Stone Road large pieces of finely dressed millstones were found. The one in the image above was around 50mm thick, the upper surface had been dressed with an even pecking all over, the lower face had a series of teeth cut into the surface radiating from the 100mm diameter central hole. The whole millstone had a diameter of approximately 0.83m. Stones like this would have been large and heavy and while it is possible they were worked by hand, it would have taken considerable effort and perhaps animal power might have been used to drive them.
In the future perhaps research and observation of communities that still use similar millstone as well as experimental archaeological methods could give a greater insight into the quantity and quality of the flour that could be produced and perhaps the food that could be made with it.
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.
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 is of a stone archer’s wristguard accompanying a Beaker vessel found in an Early Bronze Age round barrow at St Peters, Broadstairs.
The wristguard, made from non local mudstone, and Beaker were found in excavations at the St Peter’s Refuse tip site between 1969-1971 where an important Anglo Saxon cemetery was also excavated.
This very attractive historic little corner situated just off Broadstairs High Street is Serene Place and the buildings within it date from the 17th to the early to mid 19th century.
The Serene House, the second building from the left is the earliest in the group and seems to have originally been constructed around 1603, probably as a timber framed building. It was refronted in the 18th century when it was faced with flint with red brick dressings. The building has a beamed interior and an inglenook fireplace.
Bradstow House, the building on the corner of Serene Place and the High Street, is early 18th century and was originally constructed as a single house but is now a house and the Old Bake House and cafe. The shop front that you can see was constructed in the 19th century.
Castle House, first from the left, and Lancaster House, third from the left are both Georgian. Castle House, built in the early 19th century is a three storey brick building with a basement. Lancaster House, a 2 storey townhouse faced in flint, was built in 1824 for Samuel Lancaster after whom it was named.
The tithe map of Saint Peter published in 1842 shows these houses facing onto an open area of land. After 1842 this was infilled with a terrace of houses facing Serene Place named Raglan Place. Only 3-5 Raglan Place survive of this early 19th century terrace.
The flint lined cellar cut into chalk hillside overlooking Viking Bay
Before the building at Stone Road that featured in yesterday’s VM 365 post was discovered, there were few confirmed archaeological sites of Roman date in the Broadstairs area. Only a few years later, in 2009, a second building was discovered, on the south facing slope of the chalk ridge that forms the northern side of Viking Bay. The site was adjacent to the historic Fort House, which stands on the crest of the promontory overlooking the sea to the east. In the mid 19th century Charles Dickens and his family rented Fort House on several occasions for extended stays, from where it derives its current name of Bleak House.
On the site of a new house which was to be partly terraced into the chalk slope, a number of large soil filled features were found cutting into the surface of the solid chalk geology. The whole site had been heavily truncated by terracing to form platforms for gardens and at one time an orchard.
Excavation revealed that the the pits were in fact large cellars which had been excavated below buildings that once stood on the surface of the chalk, although nothing of these surface structure remained to be recorded. Although two of the cellars seem probably to have been lined with timbers, one had a flat ledge cut around two sides which supported several surviving courses of large water rolled flints, occasionally interspersed with thick flat sherds of Roman amphora.
The wall shown on left side of the image was divided into two sections by a huge nodular flint, which may have supported a post of the structure above. The upper levels of the wall had been destroyed and robbed of its stone, part of the wall had been removed by an engineering test trench excavated before the archaeological investigation began.
Although there had been a great deal of damage to whatever Roman building once stood here, some complex sequences of deposits survived to show that the history of the building was complex and once again hinted at a more complicated story that may not be possible to reconstruct in detail. Almost all the finds associated with the structure were found in the fill of a ditch that had been cut through a gritty sand deposit which had filled the void of the cellar.
Some of these finds will be explored in later VM 365 posts.
Basement room, almost all that survived of a Roman Villa at Stone Road, Broadstairs.
The North Foreland promontory is separated from the downland slopes further to the south by a dry valley, which falls to the cliff line near Stone Bay. In recent time a cutting was made through the cliffs, forming steps and a steep ramp to reach the present shore. In the Roman period there may have been a more gentle slope through the base of the valley, leading to a natural bay located further to the east, which has since been destroyed by coastal erosion.
In the 1920’s O.G.S, Crawford, the great pioneer of British archaeological survey, noted that earthworks and Roman pottery had been found on patch of open downland at Stone Gap , to the north of Broadstairs. No further investigation of the site seems to have taken place before the growing suburbs of Broadstairs eventually enclosed the location within the garden of a bungalow. No attention was drawn to the record of the Roman finds made by Crawford again.
In 2004, the large garden of the bungalow was divided and part was sold to be the location of a new house, to fronting Bishop’s Avenue near its junction with Stone Road. In an archaeological evaluation trench on the site a few scraps of painted plaster were found, with a few Roman and late Iron Age pottery sherds, along with a row of rounded flint cobbles which appeared to be part of a wall. A larger area excavation had to be carried out, which was not an easy task in the very limited space.
Below the deep layer of garden soil that had been distributed over the site to level it, the remains of the basement of a Roman building, an overview of which is shown in today’s image, were uncovered.
The basement had been cut into deep drifts of plough soil which had accumulated on the sloping valley side. The pottery sherds within this soil were almost exclusively of Iron Age date, probably debris from the extensive North Foreland settlement which lies only a short distance to the north of the site. The sides of the rectangular cutting into the soil were lined with large water rolled flint cobbles, bonded with a chalky clay paste.
Many more small painted wall plaster fragments were found in the thin layer of demolition deposits that had been trapped within the rectangular area enclosed by the rounded cobble walls. The lower layers of flooring were revealed to be thick spreads of beaten chalk of variable depth, which sealed two infant burials in one area. The floors seem to have been repaired a number of times in association with the construction and then abandonment of a series of small kilns, which had been fuelled by burning chaff, the fibrous husks separated from harvested grain.
In the latest floor surfaces two more substantial kilns or ovens had been built, the soot from the latest was spread over the clay of the last floor surface. Within the soot a military belt buckle and other small metal items including a spoon, were found, suggesting that clothes or timbers with fittings still attached had been used to fuel the oven.
The Stone Road building provides an intriguing glimpse of a moment in history which can not be fully narrated, but nevertheless generates many associations and speculations. With the limited access to the space in the area of the building and the heavy toll of erosion and damage from subsequent construction work, further archaeological investigation in the future may never be able to answer the many questions raised by this remarkable discovery.
Burial of a woman in the fill of an Iron Age grain storage pit at North Foreland, Broadstairs
The VM_365 image from our archive today is of a burial found in Broadstairs in 2003 in excavations that were carried out before a new housing estate was built in the grounds of the former St Stephens College, which is located on the crest of the high chalk promontory of the North Foreland, north of Broadstairs.
Broadstairs has a particularly high concentration of archaeological sites dating to the middle and later Iron Age, most located mainly on the slopes of the undulating downland that surrounds the present town and Viking Bay. In the Iron Age the coastlines would have been very different as coastal erosion has caused the cliffs to advance to the west. The line of cliffs and the bays that were formed between them would have been located much further to the east than they are today.
Several sites have produced evidence for timber structures, reconstructed from the truncated remains of post holes that have survived in the chalk geology. On the long North Foreland promontory ditched enclosures, buildings and even a significant late Iron Age coin hoard suggest that the area was densely settled and relatively prosperous.
Large round pits, sometimes with undercutting edges are typical of the Iron Age settlement sites excavated in the chalk lands of Kent and the South of England and several have been found in the Broadstairs area. They are commonly interpreted as storage pits, where grain could be sealed away underground and kept for later use. The burial pictured in the image today was found in the fill of one these large pits. At the base a thick deposit of charred cereal grains including barley, oats and spelt and emmer wheat was found among large lumps of chalk plaster, strengthened with timber stakes, which appears to have been part of a lining for the pit.
Once the pit had served its original purpose it was filled up with soil containing pottery and other settlement debris. The burial seems to have been laid on its back, on the surface of a pit made by cutting down the original fills of the pit to about half its original depth. Analysis of the skeleton showed it to have been an adult female and at her neck were three blue beads made of a from of early glass called faience , objects made of faience were traded throughout Europe as a luxury item.
Several similar burials have been found on archaeological sites at South Dumpton Down and the Seven Stones estate on the southern side of Broadstairs. The significance of the use of the former storage pits is a matter of debate, perhaps there was a symbolic association around the idea of storage below ground, or perhaps the pits were mistaken for earlier burial mounds and the association was with earlier cultures or ancestors. No one can be sure as we have no written evidence that records the ideas and beliefs of the people who lived at this time.
