Category: Romans in Britain

Massive Roman Coin Find from Wiltshire

~ David Meadows ~ rogueclassicist ~ Leave a comment

What will likely be a pile of coverage just starting on this one … here’s  the incipit what the Telegraph says:

David Crisp, a 63-year-old hospital chef, located the 52,503 coins in a single earthenware pot in a field near Frome, Somerset.

Mr Crisp, from Devizes in Wiltshire, said his detector gave a “funny signal” prompting him to dig down and have a look.

What he found was an astonishing collection of coins from the 3rd century AD, a period barely touched in most history books on Roman Britain.

“The joy of metal detecting is that you never know what you will find,” said Mr Crisp, who has been sweeping the fields for 20 years.

“I always live in hope but didn’t expect to find something like this.”

All the coins had been left in a single two-foot-high pot. At 160kg – just over 25 stone – the haul weighs as much as two fully grown men.

It is slightly smaller than the largest ever British Roman coin hoard, of 54,912 pieces, found in two pots near Marlborough, Wilts, in 1978.

A selection of the Frome coins, found in April, is to go on display at the British Museum from July 22 until mid-August.

Roger Bland, its head of portable antiquities and treasure, said 766 coins were from the reign of the “lost” British emperor Carausius, who ruled the province from 286 to 293 without the authority of Rome.

Carausius fell out of favour with the Roman Emperor Maximian after he used his Channel fleet to amass enormous wealth by capturing pirate ships.

Maximian ordered his execution but the rebel refused to submit and ruled Britain and northern Gaul in defiance of Rome.

He became the first emperor to strike coins in Britain, which he did to affirm his legitimacy. Five of the Carausius coins are solid silver, the first such pure coins minted anywhere in the Roman empire in over 150 years.

Despite the Frome haul’s quantity, most are a relatively common denomination known as ‘radiates’, made of debased silver and bronze. The haul is likely to be worth around £250,000, given prices for individual coins. […]

The BBC has a nice little video interview with the finder, which includes some good shots of what was found and which also causes one to think that we really need to start using a word other than ‘hoard’ to describe these things ….

Daniel Pett (of Portable Antiquities fame) has an excellent/extensive photoset of coins from the hoard at Flickr …

Other coverage:

Buckinghamshire’s Earliest ‘Recorded’ Resident

~ David Meadows ~ rogueclassicist ~ 1 Comment

Here’s an incredibly interesting followup to that purported brothel/infanticide story from t’other day which likely isn’t going to make it beyond the local press:

A ROMAN woman living around 150-200 AD has become the earliest named Buckinghamshire resident ever to be recorded, Archaeologists say.

Siitomina, who is thought to have lived at the Yewden Villa in Hambleden, carved her name into a pot.

It was found at the same site as a mass infant burial – which archaeologists believe housed a Roman brothel.

Dr Eyers said the fact she was able to write was surprising because the Romans “didn’t like the local population getting too clever by being literate”.

She added it was even more unlikely considering she was a rural woman.

There were 70 styluses – an early form of pen – found on site.

Okay … is it just me or have the folks telling the press about this site totally misinterpreted it? Seventy styluses? Have styluses ever been found in such quantities at one site before ? I honestly don’t know, but surely that would suggest something other than ‘brotheling’ was going on at the site. We should also highlight this little paragraph from the Independent coverage we excerpted the other day (I didn’t include this paragraph in my excerpt):

In 1912, archaeologists found 60 iron styluses (Roman writing utensils) in the complex – a discovery which suggests that many of the inhabitants were scribes involved with some sort of record-keeping activity, potentially governmental or commercial administration. The early archaeologists also found 16 corn-drying kilns, suggesting that the complex was involved in large-scale agricultural processing. Historians know that at the time, food supplies including grain were being shipped from Britain by the Roman authorities to supply the Roman army on the Rhine.

And where this opinion about the Romans not liking the locals becoming literate claim comes from is beyond me. Previous coverage from the Bucks Free Press on the brothel thing includes the following:

Dr Eyers, who began her career as a geologist before switching to archaeology, said the findings are “hugely significant” for learning about Roman life in Britain.

She said: “We do need to do some more tests but if we are spot on this is the first. This is why everyone is so excited.

“This is the sort of information and data set that the Roman archaeologists have been looking for for years.”

Dr Eyers said she only expected it to be a small project when it began and was amazed by the flurry of media interest since Friday.

After interviews with television, radio and newspapers across the country, Dr Eyers is also set to appear on American news channel CNN.

“I feel like a celebrity and I’m a bit overwhelmed,” she said.

…. hmmm … I’ll let y’all form your own conclusions.

Another Gladiator Grave Claim — This Time Female?

~ David Meadows ~ rogueclassicist ~ 1 Comment

The BBC seems to be first off the mark with this one, and it will likely be picked up:

Archaeologists in Herefordshire have uncovered the remains of what could possibly be a female gladiator.

Amongst the evidence of a Roman suburb in Credenhill, they have found the grave of a massive, muscular woman.

She was found in an elaborate wooden coffin, reinforced with iron straps and copper strips, which indicate her importance.

Her remains were found in a crouched position, in what could be a suburb of the nearby Roman town of Kenchester.

The archaeological Project Manager, Robin Jackson, said: “When we first looked at the leg and arm bones, the muscle attachments suggested it was quite a strapping big bloke, but the pelvis and head, and all the indicators of gender, say it’s a woman.”

“The coffin would have been made of wood – we haven’t got any of the wood left, but we’ve got the nails around the outside then three huge giant straps that run all the way around the coffin, and also bronze strips on the corners which would have probably strengthened it, but probably decorated it.

“It’s quite an elaborate and probably a very expensive coffin, and yet the person in it looked like they had a hard working life, and so there’s an anomaly there.”

An offering of beef and a fired pot were also found in the grave, and she was buried on top of a base of gravel.

Also unusual was the place where she was buried – in the suburb, instead of in a cemetery on the edge of the settlement, which was the law in Roman times.

Excavations

This archaeological find is as a result of excavations in advance of the construction of the Yazor Brook Flood Alleviation Scheme, which will protect homes and businesses in Hereford.

The road east from Kenchester was constructed by the Roman army in the mid 1st century AD, as they pushed westwards into Wales.

Very little was known previously about the suburb which grew up beside this road, however, preliminary results suggest that the main period of development for the suburb was the 2nd and 3rd centuries AD, and that it was much more extensive and densely occupied than had previously been thought.

Trial work, undertaken in 2009, showed that the area contains the well-preserved remains of Roman buildings, yards and rubbish pits situated to either side of a major Roman road, which ran east out of the town.

These form part of an important Roman suburb, which developed alongside the road, but now lies buried, along with the rest of the town, beneath fields and a footpath.

A team of archaeologists from Worcestershire Historic Environment and Archaeology Service, working in close co-operation with Amey Consulting and Herefordshire Council’s archaeology team, are carefully excavating a 10-metre wide corridor, to allow the flood culvert to be built across this area.

A huge amount of information has already been gleaned, and this is beginning to allow the archaeologists to gain an understanding of this part of the town.

It is hoped that by the time the excavation is completed, at the end of July 2010, the archaeological team will have built up a detailed understanding of the development and nature of this Roman suburb.

The original report also includes a brief audio interview with the archaeologist (Robin Jackson) … much of it is transcribed in the above interview, of course, but something extremely important has been left out. We seem to start in medias res with:

It’s an outside possibility, but we have a very interesting female body on the site …

… so we wonder what that ‘outside possibility’ might be, then later we hear from the journalist after the ‘there’s an anomaly there’ bit in the written piece:

Because if it was somebody that was working in the fields, the strength came from that they would have been buried in a shroud out of the way of the way of the settlement. This is why we’re thinking she’s a fighting lady …

The response:

Well that’s one theory that can be pursued; I can’t say that I can come up with any better … [I omit bits about the burial, the joint of beef, the pot, etc. as evidence of ‘elaboration’ which doesn’t “sit happily”] … so maybe the warrior idea is one that you can pursue, but I’ll leave that to peoples’ imaginations rather than what I formally write down.

So clearly we’re just dealing with some ‘thinking out loud’ rather than a formal theory at this point. I highly doubt we’re dealing with a female gladiator in these environs (someone like that would have surely been sent to Rome). The burial in the ‘crouched position’ would also suggest that she’s probably buried in a coffin that wasn’t made specifically for her … I wonder what other burials in the area are like.

UPDATE (A few hours later):

The incipit of a brief item from the Hereford Times:

EXPERTS at an archaelogical dig near Hereford say reports they have found an ancient gladiator are inaccurate.

A local radio station has this morning stated that a female warrior had been unearthed during the dig at Credenhill.

But Robin Jackson, of the Worcestershire Historic Environment and Archaeology Service, said the body was merely of a woman of “considerable stature” representing a lifetime of hard work.

Infanticide at Buckinghamshire Brothel? I Doubt It …

~ David Meadows ~ rogueclassicist ~ 1 Comment

As is typical, when life is most hectic comes the time when the most interesting bloggables start flashing past me on Twitter, Facebook, and in email. I can’t get to them all today, but I do want to quickly comment an item from the Telegraph regarding possible evidence of infanticide associated with remains of a Roman ‘brothel’ in Buckinghamshire:

An extensive study of a mass burial at a Roman villa in the Thames Valley suggests that the 97 children all died at 40 weeks gestation, or very soon after birth.

The archaeologists believe that locals may have been killing and burying unwanted babies on the site in Hambleden, Buckinghamshire.

Unwanted pregnancies were common in Roman brothels due to little contraception and Romans also considered infanticide less shocking than it is today.

Infants were not considered to be human beings until about the age of two and were not buried in cemeteries if they were younger than that.

Consequently, infant burials tended to be at domestic sites in the Roman era.

“The only explanation you keep coming back to is that it’s got to be a brothel,” Dr Jill Eyers, of Chiltern Archaeology, told the BBC.
Experts say that the number of children killed at Yewden villa in Hambleden is unusually large.

“There is no other site that would yield anything like the 97 infant burials,” said Dr Simon Mays, a skeletal biologist at English Heritage’s Centre for Archaeology, who has been investigating the finds.

There is possibly some compression of thought going on here, either by the archaeologist or the journalist or both. The brothel suggestion is likely connected to a similar sort of find at Ashkelon over a decade ago, although in that situation the remains were found in the drainage system beneath a bathing complex. But there seems to be a bit of circularity going on here, no? A pile of dead babies suggest a brothel nearby. A brothel nearby suggests the babies must have been unwanted, and so killed on purpose. What I don’t understand is why if these babies were unwanted ‘ab initio’ as it were, why they wouldn’t simply have been aborted. It’s not as if the ancient Greeks and Romans weren’t aware of abortion.

The babies were all found to be of roughly the same size, suggesting systematic infanticide at birth rather than death from natural causes, which would have struck infants at different ages, Dr Mays added.

… which is not really the Roman practice; not sure about native Briton-types. As far as we can tell from our sources, unwanted Roman infants were “exposed” and wouldn’t likely have been buried at all if they died.

The Hambleden site, close to the River Thames, was excavated 100 years ago and identified as a high status Roman villa.
Alfred Heneage Cocks, an archaeologist, reported the findings in 1921. His report, along with photographs, and hundreds of artefacts, pottery and bones were recently rediscovered at Buckinghamshire County Museum.

The records gave precise locations for the infant bodies, which were hidden under walls or buried under courtyards close to each other.

The remains are now being tested for the first time by English Heritage.

The team plans to carry out DNA tests on the skeletons in a bid to establish their sex and possible relationship to each other.

The Hambleden investigation features in a new BBC TV archaeology series, Digging for Britain presented by Dr Alice Roberts, to be broadcast on BBC Two in July and August.

An important detail which is left out of all this is the date of the Hambledon site … presumably this is the Yewden Roman Villa, as the Mill End Villa doesn’t seem to have been excavated. A page on the site tells us the date: the site was used from the first to the fourth centuries A.D.. Hopefully there is enough information in the notes from the original excavation (1912) or datable organic materic material to establish some dates for the remains. 97 infant burials sounds like a lot, but when you spread it over three centuries it isn’t so sensational. As such, while an epidemic seems unlikely,depending on how the remains are dated, one could speculate that these are all stillborn remains …

via: Romans killed babies at brothel | Telegraph

UPDATE (06/27/10): David Keys in the Independent provides a good summary of the possible explanations:

Some argue that the Hambleden complex might have been a Roman imperial agricultural administrative and processing centre serving a relatively large area. The dead infants could represent a mixture of still births, natural perinatal deaths and infanticide victims, born to women employed at the centre. Some of the infants may have been born with deformities – a fact that would have made them particularly vulnerable to infanticide.

Some archaeologists have suggested the infants were children of prostitutes serving the potentially large staff at the complex, although it would be archeologically unprecedented to find a brothel in a non-urban context.

Alternatively, the site could have had a partly religious function with the infants being the subjects of illegal rituals or even human sacrifice. Certainly newborn infants were sometimes buried as ritual foundation deposits in Roman Britain – though never in such large numbers.

… and a tip o’ the pileus to Terrence Lockyer for drawing our attention to the excellent blog post on the subject over at Ancient Bodies, Ancient Lives (Rosemary Joyce), which delves into the claims about lack of contraception and the identity of the site as a brothel:

For some background on prostitution in the ancient world:

More coverage:

Roman Fort in Cornwall?

~ David Meadows ~ rogueclassicist ~ Leave a comment
Roman Roads in Britain around 150 AD/CE.
Image via Wikipedia

From the Telegraph:

Pottery and other evidence suggesting the presence of an ironworks have been found at the undisclosed location near St Austell, Cornwall.

Experts say the discovery challenges the belief that Romans did not settle in the county and stopped in neighbouring Devon.

The site had previously been regarded as an Iron Age settlement but the recent discovery of pottery and glass was found to be of Roman origin.

John Smith, from Cornwall Historic Environment Service, said: ”This is a major discovery, no question about it.

”For Roman Britain it’s an important and quite crucial discovery because it tells us a lot about Roman occupation in Britain that was hitherto completely unexpected.

”In finding the pottery and glass, it’s saying the occupation goes to about 250AD, which turns the whole thing on its head.”

Archaeological Jonathan Clemes discovered various artefacts by studying the earth after it had been ploughed.
He said: ”You’ve got to know your pottery. If you come across a bit of pottery and you know what it is, it can tell you a great deal about the activity that went on in that area.”

Following the discovery of the artefacts a geophysical survey uncovered a fort and a marching camp.

Prior to the discovery it was believed that Roman forts had only been positioned close to the Devon border before the Roman’s left the region for south Wales.

It will now be considered whether to excavate the area or to leave it for a future excavation when techniques have advanced.

The map shows the ‘current view’ of Roman settlement (generally) in Britain; if the St Austell thing proves true, perhaps there will be more evidence further west as well …

via Romans ‘may have settled as far south-west as Cornwall’ | Telegraph.