SummaryThe excavations were undertaken by the Silchester Excavation Committee supported by donations from public and private bodies and from individuals and by permission of the Duke of Wellington, K.G., F.S.A. Their purpose was the investigation of (a) a previously unsuspected polygonal enclosure of about 85 acres, here named the Inner Earthwork, which lay partly inside and partly outside the line of the familiar Roman town wall; and (b) a western extension to the known line of the Outer Earthwork, which increased the size of this enclosure from about 213 to 233 acres. With the assistance of the Ordnance Survey, the aerial traces of these earthworks, first observed and recorded by Dr. J. K. St. Joseph, F.S.A., were confirmed and extended by field-work and excavation, and have been planned as appears on pl. I.The excavations showed that the Inner Earthwork was a defence of Gaulish ‘Fécamp’ type, and that it was erected, on the south, over an area of late pre-Roman occupation, the first clearly identified at Calleva Atrebatum, but one with strong ‘Catuvellaunian’ influences in its pottery-series. It is claimed that the Inner Earthwork was constructed by the client King Cogidubnus in or shortly after A.D. 43–4, as the defence of this, the most important settlement in the north-west of his dominions. It is further suggested that the Inner Earthwork was replaced by the Outer Earthwork also during the reign of Cogidubnus.The excursus attempts to collate with the results of excavation the earlier discoveries of pre-Conquest material. The total evidence is finally related to the Belgico-Roman topography of Silchester and its neighbourhood, within the historical framework of the century and a half which separated the arrival of the earliest Belgic immigrants in the region from the death of Cogidubnus and the consequent emergence of the Roman Civitas Atrebatum.
By GEORGE C. BOON S OME years ago, with the encouragement of Dr D. B. Harden, I began the pursuit of a type of segmented bead apparently rare in Romano-British contexts, but curiously frequent in the graves of Meroitic Faras. A preliminary note appeared in 1966; 1 now, there is much to add, including (by the generosity of Dr Maria Dekowna and Mme Hanna Pawtowska of the Institute of the History of Material Culture, Polish Academy of Sciences) analyses which in two cases hint at a common origin. But Faras and Britain are only the extremities of a distribution which proved, even when the Far East was excluded, 2 to cover an immense area and a wide range of time. A particularly interesting thread is traceable for Roman times, suggestive of a link with the Mediterranean via eastern rather than western Europe.
The Chesters villa is situated midway between Chepstow and Lydney on the right bank of the Severn Estuary (FIG. 1). The residential quarters (centred on ST 59709870) lie on the shoulder of the Kidderminster Terrace (sands, gravels), about 250 m from the modern shore between the 11 and 16 m contours, and face south across the estuary. Between 1932 and 1935 C. Scott Garrett carried out a series of excavations, mostly in the field known as Lower Chesters south of the railway line. These revealed, on the eastern side, a residential range with a bath-block at its southern end. From this a courtyard wall was defined on three sides, with traces of structures along the south, and a subdivided, rectangular building at the northern end of the western wall. No evidence was found of a northern range, although rubble spreads on the surface of the field, and now aerial photography, make it clear that such a range existed. Indeed, its size, coupled with the incidence of mosaic tesserae in the ploughsoil, suggest that it was the most elaborate quarter of the villa. The cropmark evidence for this range is plotted on FIG. 1. Apart from one reference to iron slag as a ‘material which can be found almost anywhere on the site', the excavations provided no evidence of the role that iron-making might have played in the economy of the villa.
SummaryThe site was first occupied in the Bronze Age by a small agricultural settlement, consisting of two circular timber houses with ancillary structures and ditches. One house was eventually replaced by a stone structure. A single radiocarbon determination suggests that the settlement is to be dated within the period 1700–1300 B.C. The Iron Age settlement of Trevisker Round was probably established in the second century B.C., if not earlier. An original inner enclosure, half an acre in area, housing a single defended farmstead, was later superseded by a larger defended enclosure, 3 acres in area, also with circular timber houses and occupation areas. This occupation was followed at the end of the first century A.D., by a Romano-British phase of occupation, which lasted until the middle of the second century.
ALAIN VERNHET has published in Gallia a summary of one of the most important discoveries made at La Graufesenque for many years ; x a mass of waste asso-• dated with a large kiln contained the work of about forty potters, some familiar in the last stages of the export-trade to Britain. Among the decorated bowls were some with the potter's stamp L.COSI, conventionally dated to the late Flavian period. Several of them bore reliefs which prove that the style continued down towards 120: thus, on one bowl, which is illustrated, we see figures of a seated warrior turning his sword on himself, labelled DECIBALV, and of a prisoner condemned ad bestias, 2 identified as PARTV. AS M. Vernhet remarks, reference is to the suicide of the Dacian king, Decebalus, in 106 and to the Parthian triumph, which Trajan did not live to experience, in 117. The design thus epitomizes the great conquests of the reign, and in all its provincial crudity speaks to us directly of facts, away from which the noble commemorative monuments in Rome and at Benevento all too readily, perhaps, beguile us. The utility of M. Vernhet's report, with its intrinsic proof of activity by L. Cosius in the earliest years of Hadrian, is enhanced by its excellent drawings, which include 33 representative stamps on plain ware. It is on the last of these, unique in the deposit, that the rest of my remarks depend. M. Vernhet read a two-line stamp-a highly unusual form outside the primitive period of South Gaul-thus:. . .]IVL.SENIS.CR./[.. .JCODAD.ASPRITV, valiantly deriving from it the name of a freedman, his trade cr(etarius), and his place of work, hitherto known only from the Peutinger Table, Co(n)dad(omagus) for Condatomagus; but in all candour he admitted that the last word was on this basis 'more difficult to explain.' COLLYRIUM-STAMPS ON SAMIAN WARE It so happens that another impression of the die is recorded on a Dr. 18 plate from Mainz, lost in the war, where an o is shown instead of a stop at the end of the top line: the relation of the lettering otherwise proves identity, and it seems that the corresponding o on Vernhet's piece was imperfectly reproduced. The Mainz impression also preserved the initial of the cognomen, thus L.IVL.SENIS.CRO/CODAD ASPRITV. 3 It so happens, also, that there are no fewer than six impressions of another die with the same wording. Two are from London, on a Dr.
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