News

During excavation of a Roman settlement-edge site in the Fens in Cambridgeshire, we discovered approximately 13 sheep skeletons in a ditch. The skeletons are currently cleaned and prepared for detailed photogrammetry recording and eventual lifting, following advice by PCA’s animal bone specialist Kevin Rielly and the Historic England Regional Science Advisor. Preliminary assessment on site estimates that most of the sheep were juveniles. The bones are articulated but not all body parts are present. There are few butchery marks so how the sheep came to be in the ditch is still open to interpretation! 

This year’s conference will be held on Saturday, 19th March 2022, 10.45am to 5pm via zoom.

The morning sessions are, as usual, dedicated to a series of papers covering recent major excavations. PCA’s Ireneo Grosso will be giving a talk at midday called ‘The Roman cemetery at Great Suffolk Street’. The afternoon sessions focus on excavations along the line of High Speed 2.

Click here for further details and a programme of the day’s talks.

Our excavation of a large basement at Suffolk House in Southwark revealed a Roman cemetery with 64 skeletons, including both adult and juvenile, men and women, and 5 cremations. This area of Londinium‘s southern cemetery lay near where two Roman roads, lined with funerary monuments, converged. The burials date from the 1st- to 4th-centuries and most of the graves had evidence of wooden coffins, with iron nails around the base of the graves. A broad range of burial rites was observed including a crouched burial, decapitated skeletons with the head placed next to the legs or beneath the torso, a grave lined with large sherds of a Dressel 20 amphora and skeletons with their hands tied behind their backs, as well as a number of disarticulated human remains.

The grave goods recovered included a spectacular complete 3rd-4th century glass bottle with decorative bands on the neck and body; its handles, applied at the shoulder and neck, form ‘dolphins’. Other complete vessels, some containing cremations, include an Alice Holt/Farnham ware ring-necked flagon with burnished decoration and a Nene Valley beaker with painted floral scrolls (pictured below). These wonderful finds feature on the front cover of the latest edition of London Archaeologist.

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We’re pleased to announce our latest publication, which is available as a free open-access download, with hard copies also available for sale on our publications page.

This booklet details the results of a built heritage survey of one of Hexham’s most important buildings: the former hydropathic hotel, known locally as the Hydro.

The iconic building has been occupied by Queen Elizabeth High School since 1974, and the decision to relocate Hexham Middle School to the campus, and to provide both schools with new buildings, offered us the opportunity for a detailed examination of the historic core of the site.

In this fully-illustrated booklet we depict the many social and architectural changes which have occurred since the first building, Westfield House (left in the picture above), was established on the site in the late 19th century. This lavishly-decorated villa, surrounded by acres of landscaped grounds with a walled garden, was occupied by the successful Earthenware Manufacturer CT Maling, who updated and extended the property. His additions included a fernery and conservatory; at the time of their construction in the late 1850s glasshouses such as these were the height of fashion.

The presence of a chalybete spring in the grounds of Westfield House, along with Victorian enthusiasm for ‘taking the waters’, led to the construction of the Hexham Hydropathic Hotel in 1879. This magnificent building was designed with a central tower and many exotic features, including Turkish baths, a ballroom and elaborate stained glass windows, some of which survive today. The hotel continued trading until the Second World War, when it was repurposed as a hospital for sick children before being purchased by Northumberland County Council as an education establishment.

Our booklet, illustrated with historic images and details of the features recorded during the built heritage survey, also includes photographs of the idyllic walled garden, which had become overgrown and neglected before being rediscovered by a new generation who restored it to its former glory. The state-of-the-art development reflects and respects what went before, with the courtyard at its heart using the footprint of the original walled garden, thus providing an element of continuity during the evolution of the complex.

‘From Healing Waters to a Font of Knowledge’ – click here to read, download or purchase.

This conference will be held from 18-20 November in Groningen as a hybrid event, where participants can attend in person or online; click here for more details.

Meagan Mangum, one of our newer staff members, will be giving a talk on 18th November:

‘Identity and Oisyme: Greco-Thracian Cult in the Archaic North Aegean’

On the south side of Eleutheres Bay in Northern Greece, stands a small hill crowned with boulders. In the Archaic and Classical Periods, it was the acropolis of Oisyme, a sub-colony of the Thasos, itself colonised from Paros in the late 7th century BC. Identified as the Homeric Aisyme home of Casteniera, wife of Priam and mother of Gorgythion, the site was occupied from the Early Iron Age (EIA) on. We have no concrete name for the specific tribe, people or settlement of this era, just the vague appellation ‘Thracian’. The Archaic/Classical era deity worshiped there is also uncertain, although dedications and spatial organisation suggest a female deity with kotouphoric, chthonic attributes. Excavators suggested the deity may Athena Poliochos based on parallels to her Sanctuary at Thasos. Recent research at Thasos, however, offers an alternative interpretation based on pre-colonial Thracian practices, such as those seen at the urban Temples of Heracles and Artemis. A similar practice may have occurred at nearby Neapolis where the Parthenos, identified as a Hellenized version of the Thracian Artemis or Bendis, was the primary deity. The use and preservation of pre-colonial structures at Oisyme through the Roman era tied the settlement to its fictional and physical past and suggests a similar blending of Greek and Thracian practice. Locally such a merger could have aided the populations to construct a single, coherent polis identity, the Oisymians of ‘deep-soiled Thrace’ (Iliad 11.222). Seen from a micro-regional level, this activity may provide evidence of a shared religious practice that bound the members of the Thasian Peraia into a supra-civic community. This paper argues that the Oisymian acropolis, when viewed diachronically, demonstrates a complex semiotics that communicated shaped their self-perception as citizens and worshippers.

A wonderful find from one of our sites yesterday!

This complete German Frechen stoneware Bartmann (or Bellarmine) jug has a benign face and a medallion with an unknown coat of arms. It dates from c. 1580-90 and was used for serving alcohol (probably ale).

Complete examples of these jugs are more frequent finds than other post-medieval pots because they are a robust stoneware and were often used as witch bottles buried whole, containing nails, hair, urine and other items. Witch bottles were usually buried on the threshold of homes and used to trap and stop evil spirits entering the home. Examination of the contents will reveal whether this is the case with this example!

The faces on Bartmann (which is German for ‘bearded man’) jugs may be a derivation of the green man motif.

Dr James Gerrard will be giving a talk in the Ballroom at Bedale Hall, on Friday 29th October 2021 at 7pm, on the results of our excavations ahead of the Bedale, Aiskew and Leeming Bar bypass in North Yorkshire. A selection of artefacts will be on display.