Issue 62

December 2001

Contents

news

Detectorists report thousands of new finds to archaeologists

Neolithic farmhouse found in Scotland

Lost Roman town abandoned 2,000 years ago found in Kent

Roman water-lifting machinery unearthed in London

Excavating a Scottish rebel’s luxurious stronghold

In Brief

features

Citadel of the Scots
Alan Lane on recent excavations at Dunadd hillfort

Reading the land
Peter Fowler on the antiquity of the British landscape

Great sites: Meols
David Griffiths on a once-great port now lost to the sea

letters

On black and brown rats, medieval crafts and cannibalism

issues

George Lambrick on Government policy on the heritage

Peter Ellis

Regular column

books

Prehistory in the Peak by Mark Edmonds and Tim Seaborne

Shadows in the Soil by Tony Waldron

Europe’s First Farmers edited by T Douglas Price

Landscapes of Lordship by Robert Liddiard

CBA update

favourite finds

Once lost, twice excavated. Richard Brewer’s came from a museum sub-basement.

ISSN 1357-4442

Editor Simon Denison

favourite finds

Once lost, twice excavated

Richard Brewer recalls finding a discarded Roman seal-box lid packed away in a gloomy museum sub-basement.

My favourite find is of no great archaeological significance, but it brings back many memories. It is an object from the Roman fortress of Caerleon that had lain out of sight in the National Museum of Wales in Cardiff for almost 50 years.

When I started work at the museum - straight out of university in 1976 - one of my first tasks was to sort out the huge quantity of excavation material in the museum's sub-basement. Most of it had come from excavations undertaken in the 1920s and 30s at Caerleon, where Mortimer Wheeler and his wife Tessa had excavated the amphitheatre and Victor Nash-Williams the Prysg Field barracks and other buildings.

The material was still in old tea-chests and packing cases. The excavations were done on a huge scale, mainly by labourers (typical of the time), and produced large quantities of finds. When the dig was over it was generally the personal responsibility of the excavator, with little assistance, to sort out all the material and write it up for publication. So a lot of the finds were undoubtedly given only a very cursory glance and then packed away.

To get into the museum's sub-basement you had to open a wooden hatch and climb down a vertical iron ladder. There were just two 40-watt lightbulbs in the ceiling to work under. It was also quite dusty and not infrequently used to flood, as the museum was built over a couple of underground streams.

The packing cases were marked with chalk or a label identifying where the contents had come from, but there was no record of what was in the boxes and you had no idea what you'd find inside. Much of the material was wrapped in old newspaper, or was contained in tobacco tins, biscuit tins, pill boxes and the like. Apart from everything else we ended up with a fascinating collection of old boxes and tins.

It was an incredibly exciting experience - just like an excavation. It was a process of rediscovery even though these finds had already come out of the ground. Many of the objects had not been touched since being packed up on site and brought back to the museum half a century before.

What was stored in the sub-basement was, in a way, what had been discarded as being unimportant in understanding the site. But that didn't lessen the excitement of rediscovery. One memorable object was a fine rusticated 2nd century beaker wrapped in a 1927 newspaper. When I unwrapped it, I saw it was complete.

But my favourite find lay in an upturned lid of an old cardboard box on top of one of the packing cases, buried under a number of other objects of more recent date. It was a small shiny object, a 'roundel', which caught my eye because its surface was silvered or tinned. On closer examination it turned out to be the lid of a Roman seal-box decorated with a crouching animal, possibly a panther, that had been found at Caerleon in 1928.

The seal-box would have been used to secure either an official document or a personal letter like those that have been found at Vindolanda. Wax would have been poured in and impressed with a seal (probably on a finger ring). The lid would then have been closed and the seal thereby protected in transit. A similar seal-box lid, adorned with a boar, had previously been found at the nearby early Roman fortress at Usk. Elsewhere in Britain and on the Continent, seal-box lids have been found decorated with animals such as eagles, frogs, cockerels, hares and bees.

Several years later I led the redevelopment of Caerleon's Roman Legionary Museum (which reopened in 1987) and some of the objects I found in the Cardiff sub-basement - including the seal-box lid and the rusticated beaker - are now on display there.

Richard Brewer is Keeper of Archaeology & Numismatics at the National Museums & Galleries of Wales

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