Find of the year?

I had already started a blog post which would have covered the first few days of our 2018 fieldwork season at Ancaster House. In truth I had not got that far with it but it will eventually appear - probably in a couple of days.

The reason I am pushing it to one side for the moment is that my good neighbour Jules Turner came round a few minutes ago bringing with him what, for me, might be the find of the year - and we are only in our first week or so.

He had been walking the dog in the meadow and had spotted something on the spoil heap from the trench containing the large late Iron Age/Early RB ditch which runs along the side of the Roman road.

To those who are not into Roman pottery it may not seem very much. But it is a rare insight into the Roman mind and the value they placed on their most precious possessions.

It is a small piece of high status pottery - Samian Ware - which will have been imported from central Gaul, probably sometime in the second half of the first century AD. We are fairly sure of this date because we have other pottery and brooches from the same context which helps to date the horizon.

This would have been a valuable piece of ceramic. So much so that when it got broken the owner didn't just throw it away as we would today. Of course there was no superglue, no means of sticking the vessel back together. But rather than just dumping it the owner decided to get it repaired - they either did it themselves or, more likely, got someone else - a craftsman - to do it.

They carefully drilled holes in the broken pot (at least 2 holes in this piece as you can see the remains of another hole on the other side of the sherd.) and they used lead to form a clasp or rivet to hold the pieces of pot together.

We have found at least one other piece of Samian on the site which had a rivet hole in it but I never thought we would find one which still had the lead clasp attached.

At some later date the vessel was broken for a second time and thrown away - indeed the break running through he second hole might indicate that that was the source of the later failure. We will never know.

But this is a very rare insight into how the Romans valued such pottery and the lengths to which they were willing to go to save such a valuable item.