Fisbourne Roman Palace – quick review

As PrimTech finished by lunch time on the Sunday, I thought I would spend the afternoon at Fishbourne Roman Palace. The weather was beautiful, which was an advantage as part of the Palace attraction is listed as the formal gardens.

Fisbourne's most famous mosaic. Photograph copyright Fred Dawson.

The site is situated just around the corner from a big main road, near to Chichester, and I realised pretty quickly that the palace on show at the actually museum is about a quarter of what was actually once present on the site. At least part of that palace and its surrounding gardens and buildings lies under the main road, with another chunk under the 1960s housing that backs onto the palace garden.

The site itself was discovered when a utilities pipe was being put across a field prior to plots of land going on sale. Despite uncovering some stunning stuff, the lack of proper protection laws in place means that the owner of the land was able to keep selling off large chunks of land. This means that one whole wing of the palace is underneath houses and gardens that were only built recently, and could have been saved. This is exactly the kind of situation I foresee returning if the government gets to go ahead with its current bonfire of planning protection.

Luckily enough a local man who was interested in archaeology and happened to be the inheritor of a large fortune managed to secure the remains of the land, saving the north wing of the palace from destruction. Excavations uncovered a sequence of rooms with some really stunning mosaics, both in terms of number and skill. It is these mosaics that form the body of the museum, preserved in situ under a long low building which also houses a small gallery describing the history of the site and some of the finds. Recent additions include a very nice cafe and a large storage building for all of the objects recovered from this, and nearby, sites.

Model of Fisbourne Palace - today only the remains of the left-hand-side are preserved at the museum. Photograph copyright David Highbury.

The museum itself is run by the Sussex Archaeological Society, who have guardianship of a small number of properties in this area. Considering that they lack access to everything English Heritage or the National Trust have, they do a really good job here. The buildings are a little dated in appearance, and the gallery is in need of a modernisation, but that’s nothing that a Heritage Lottery Grant couldn’t fix. The people who work there are clearly very dedicated and very knowledgable.

If you visit, make sure you take advantage of one of the talks run by a volunteer, as these people seem to be fonts of knowledge and really make the context of the building come alive. In addition you will need to buy the guidebook to get much benefit from the site, but it is very reasonably priced. The extended information on each of the mosaics and interpretation boards is great, but the guidebook’s more intensive discussions of the site are rather hard to make sense of, and I found it very difficult to relate the previous buildings it discusses to the current palace.

Much is made of the fact that this palace is very early, and very luxurious, and that can’t be denied. However if you visit the audio-visual display as well as speaking to a guide and reading the book (as I did) this point is a little laboured. At least half the site is covered with an imitation of the formal gardens that they say there is archaeological evidence for, which are okay but not exactly exciting. A small side garden designed to contain Roman period plants and interpretation boards was a little lack-lustre when I visited and is symptomatic of the general lack of updating at this museum.

Formal gardens at Fisbourne, with museum in top left corner. Photograph by David Spender.

If you don’t make the most of the site, the admission price of £7.90 for an adult (a rather measly 90p reduction for students) will seem like mediocre value as you’ll be round the gallery and mosaics in an hour or less. Add in the guide’s talk, the audio-visual, the gardens and buying and reading the guidebook brings up the price to almost £10, but will extend your visit to two or three hours. Go a little bit further and enjoy the very reasonably priced cream tea in the lovely cafe next door, and you’re there for a long Sunday afternoon.

All in all, the museum and site is well worth a visit, but only if you’re interested in the Romans or mosaics. For a general visitor it lacks something, particularly when compared to the big sites run by English Heritage. In particular you can’t help but get the impression that the hey-day of the site was the 1970s-1980s, and that the gallery and museum buildings have changed little since. I don’t believe that’s any fault of the Trust necessarily, and particularly not of the staff and volunteers. If this was a site run by a national charity or government I would be much more critical, but with the limited resources available to small archaeological societies, and the massive importance and fragile nature of this site no doubt limiting what they can do, I can’t be too harsh.

pXRF of the Crosby Garrett Roman parade helmet

I posted previously that I would update after I had seen what is now being called the Crosby Garrett helmet.

In the end, I was asked not to by the Portable Antiquities Scheme with whom I was working, because of all of the uproar surrounding the helmet. On the day I travelled to see the helmet, I spent some time in the office of one of the PAS staff as they fielded calls regarding the helmet, and it was clearly politically sensitive, so I was happy not to make things any more difficult. However, it’s been over a year so I think I can now blog about the subject without any difficulty.

The analysis itself went well, although I only had thirty minutes with the object. The technique I used, x-ray fluorescence spectrometry, is non-invasive, so no samples were taken and the object was not damaged in any way. The downside of this is that the technique only examines the surface of the object, to a depth that (depending on material) may be as little as the width of a red blood cell.

As the surface of the helmet is covered in a grey-green-blue patina, probably a compact layer of copper oxides/sulphides etc., it is likely that the analyses I did would have been affected by this. That is to say, the numbers that the analytical machine generated are unlikely to accurately reflect the composition of the metal used to make the helmet. I’ve worked on similar objects with patinas/corrosion products before, and unfortunately its very difficult to judge how inaccurate the analyses are, as the conditions vary between objects.

I was able to confirm that the helmet is a copper alloy, as is the griffin finial, though this is probably no surprise to anyone. Despite the limitations of this analysis, I do believe that I can demonstrate that the griffin finial is of a slightly different alloy composition than the helmet. It’s not a large difference, but I suspect it relates to the different techniques used to manufacture the finial. The finial looks like it was cast and then worked by hand, which would call for an alloy tailored to casting, whereas the helmet would have required more complex manufacturing techniques that are outside my experience.

I hope at some point to publish the analyses, complete with a proper discussion of why the data is difficult to interpret and particularly why the numbers cannot be taken at face value. However my data were used by a number of publications during and after the sale of the helmet, so it remains to be seen whether I will be able to publish it myself in a more scientific format.

HLF bursary in Roman pottery research

The IFA is currently advertising a Heritage Lottery Fund Workplace Learning Bursary in Roman pottery!

This is great news, particularly as it position will be hosted by an archaeological unit – Archaeology South-East. Incidentally this unit used to be the UCL Institute of Archaeology’s unit, but they’ve seperated off and are now based down on the south-coast (though there is still links between the two).

They are interested in getting students or recent graduates who are keen on developing a career in ceramics and may ahve already undertaken ceramic studies at under/post-grad level, or who are researchers in the early stages of their careers who may benefit from ‘structured training’.

The link is: http://www.archaeologists.net/learning/hlfbursaries

It is a 12 month post on £15,054, so well worth a look! Closing date 20th December.

Also take a look at the Information Management, Public Archaeology, Environmental Archaeology, Aerial discovery and reconnaissance, Outreach and Education, Heritage at Risk, and Development Archaeology posts.

To Huttenberg, and beyond!

Well it’s been a busy couple of days here!

Things have been a little stressful with the analysis of the Crosby Garret Roman cavalry parade/sports helmet. Not allowed to say much about that unfortunately, but will hopefully update at some point in the distant future after the sale and everything has settled down. The analysis went well though, and although we were pushed for time I managed a good number of analyses over a wide selection of areas, so I’m pleased with that.

Here’s a selection of the internet pieces on the helmet:

M&H on the Tullie House appeal
BBC news piece with Georgie from Christies
Wikipedia entry (not convinced it’s correct though)
Tullie House appeal
Guardian newspaper
PAS news statement
Harry Mount at the Telegraph opinion piece
Telegraph news piece

On a more personal note, I’m flying to Austria on the 28th of this month! I know, a surprise for me too. My supervisor had been talking about some material from the Huttenberg area for some time, but it’s only in the last week that things have come together. Which is great, as this is the Ferrum Noricum area that I’ve mentioned before, but a little inconvenient as I have to travel there to sample before the 3rd October!

This has necessitated two rather rushed ‘emergency’ funding applications to the department and the Graduate awards scheme, in the hope that I can get money for the cost of such an activity. Inconveniently the trip falls between a change in funding structures so I can’t access the money that would normally be put aside for this from my funding body, the AHRC.

But we are pressing on, and I booked plane tickets with the vile and detestable Ryanair today, along with travel insurance from someone a little less enraging. Words cannot express how much I dislike Ryanair, but they were £100+ clearly the cheaper (even after their devious little additions), so I shall be flying with them. I’m at the end of my quarterly scholarship and paying for the flights out of my own pocket means that I shall be reverting back to raman noodles for the rest of the month. But such is the price of academic progress!

Of course, there’s just one tiny problem. I don’t speak a word of German. What can go wrong!

CFP Land and natural resources in the Roman World Conference

I’ve just seen a conference that I really, really want to go to.

Land and natural resources in the Roman World, Brussels, 2011, May Thu. 26^th – Sat. 28^th. Roman Society Research Center (VUB/UGent).

The topics under discussion are:

• The availability of natural resources

• Ownership and Control

• Organisation and modes of exploitation

• Exploitation and processing of natural resources

Gosh!

Call for papers is up now, due 21st September. The conference is part of a wider project, which I think is really really interesting, which focusses on Factors of Production in the Roman World. This Land & Natural Resources conference is the first in three, the other two focussing on Labour and finally Capital. The intention is to produce collaborative monographs for each topic.

Sampling Blooms from Austria

Today I sampled some bloom pieces that make up part of a small set of debris sent to me by Brigitte Cech, an independant archaeological researcher working on the Ferrum Noricum sites.

Brigitte was pretty sure this was likely to be a Roman site, so she had a look using a metal detector and a little bit of sampling excavation, and pulled out some ore, three blooms, slag fragments and furnace lining (amongst other stuff!). I’ve mentioned this stuff before, as I was pretty excited about working on it.

Today I cut off some small pieces from the three blooms. Blooms are the accumulated iron that is produced in the furance – they’re called blooms due to their ‘spongy’ appearance and the way they build up over time. Essentially they look like nasty pieces of corroded rock. They’re heavier than rock though, but that’s a bit hard to spot if they’re not too big and not too small. However if you cut them open, you get to see something a lot more exciting. Basically the whole nasty lump is made of shining bright iron!

To put that in perspective, that iron was smelted sixteen hundred to two thousand years ago. It’s lain in the ground for all that time, and look how little rust there is! I’m told that it’s pretty rare for an archaeological bloom to look like that – most are just massive lumps of rust with a core of metal surviving. My friendly lab technician asked me if it was material from a modern experimental smelt! But Brigitte tells me that they have pottery and brooches from the site that date it securely to the Roman period, so the lack of corrossion is very notable.

It makes me think that there’s something else in the iron here that’s inhibiting the corrosion. Unfortunately the analyses are going to have to wait until the mid-end of May, but I’m sure I read something somewhere about something special in the Ferrum Noricum ores. I’m currently waiting for Brigitte’s book (see below)- it’s still being catalogued by the library – but I suspect there’ll be something like that going on.

Reference:

Die Produktion von Ferrum Noricum am Hüttenberger Erzberg : die Ergebnisse der interdisziplinären Forschungen auf der Fundstelle Semlach/Eisner in den Jahren 2003-2005 = The production of Ferrum Noricum at the Hüttenberger Erzberg : the results of interdisciplinary research at Semlach/Eisner between 2003-2005
Brigitte Cech (Hrsg.) Wien : Österreichische Gesellschaft für Archäologie, 2008.

Why do I study iron?

I’ve been doing some reading in an attempt to wrap up my piece on iron smelting chemistry and processes, and I was thinking about why iron is such an interesting subject to study.

I think it probably comes down to the juxtaposition between incredible utility and practicality of the metal, and the sheer difficulty and technical sophistication needed to produce the metal and really develop the best of its properties.It’s simultaneously extremely functional and actually quite expensive and in some cases status bearing.

Iron itself is a strong, hard, flexible and above all workable metal that can be given an extremely sharp edge. As a material it had no comparison during the pre-medieval period. In general it hits western Europe by 1000 BC at its earliest, often becoming practically common place for objects such as swords by around 400 BC and then extremely common for use in a dizzying array of uses by the Roman period (around 100 BC into AD 100).

Without iron, there would be no large buildings, either. Cathedrals and castles are all held together using iron clamps, so were many of the ancient buildings like the Parthenon and the Pantheon. Even smaller buildings and wooden fortifications would hardly have been possible without iron nails. As soon as we could, we used iron to make almost any conceivable thing, because it was harder and sharper and just plain better.

But one of the most intriguing things is that all the complex processes necessary to produce iron, select or control for additives like carbon or phosphorous, and then work the iron at various extremes of heat and cold to change and alter the internal crystal structures and hence achieve the desired properties, all of these were done by practitioners with no actual knowledge of these unseen things.

They didn’t know how much carbon or phosphorous was in the iron – they knew what ores and processes they were using and how these effected the working properties of the iron. They couldn’t see the crystal structures of the metal bar and note how they were changing them during smithing, they could only judge by colour and deformation, practice and experience.

Ancient practitioners had to rely on empirical evidence, rather than any theoretical structures. They couldn’t explain why things changed they way they did, but they had to understand them through physical experience. Some of the processes they undertook had very narrow limits within which they had to keep, or the process would fail. So narrow that I wonder how they could have judged them at all sometimes. How amazing is that?

Another interesting fact about iron, is that the ores are available almost anywhere. No one could control iron production, once knowledge of how to do it was readily available. The knowledge of copper smelting appears to have been reasonably widespread, and the basic processes are the same.

Although most iron was first introduced as an import, once people got the knowledge of how to smelt it, it spreads all over the place. It’s really a rather democratic activity in western Europe, something that doesn’t seem to have been controlled in most countries.

I can find slag from production or smithing on almost any Roman site in Britain. How cool is that? People were making or working this incredibly useful metal all over the place, in their homes, in villas, in cities and towns and legionary camps. I suspect that all kinds of people from all over the world and in all kinds of contexts had the knowledge to either produce or work iron, and I think that makes it a really exciting thing to study, particularly in the Roman period.

Post-graduate papers at RAC/TRAC 2010

I just wanted to say I’m sorry about the appearance of the blog at the moment – WordPress appears not to be displaying colours correctly. I’d sort it out, or swap themes around, but I’ve just got back from RAC/TRAC and I’m exhausted.

In other news, RAC/TRAC was okay. As I guess is the norm for conferences, I found the papers either very useful and interesting or essentially uninteresting.  The two post graduate student papers I saw were clearly from researchers just starting out and reflected some of the problems I imagine many early career researchers come across.

The first one was Benjamin Luley from the University of Chicago, talking about economic transformation under the Roman Empire and the rise of elites in Southern Gaul. It was rather destroyed by the audience, which wasn’t very pleasant to watch. To be honest I didn’t think what the audience said was fair on Benjamin. They were extremely critical over issues that I think may have arisen out of either a lack of understanding of the archaeology or a miscommunication. I also felt he suffered a little from a culture clash, with the British Romanist approach being quite different from the North American or indeed the Continental, and I did wonder whether someone might have warned him that the British are a grumpy lot!

I am not entirely familiar with the crowd at RAC/TRAC, but I got the distinct impression that there was an accepted way of doing things, or an accepted knowledge surrounding certain things, and they were pretty unhappy that Benjamin was challenging that. I am not a scholar in this area, but I got the impression Benjamin had some interesting and paradigm-shifting evidence and it would have been better to see the audience critically engage with that, rather than exhibit what seemed to be a defensive over-reaction. But I would judge that this is the sort of problem any graduate is going to come up against if they do challenge the established orthodoxy.

The second one was Melissa Ratliff talking about iron and ‘bronze’ consumption in Pompeii. She appeared to be a first-year student who hadn’t done a lot of work and who had some rather massive and apparently uncritiqued assumptions underpinning her work. I was really surprised that whilst Benjamin’s essentially solid work got an undue level of criticism, Melissa’s methodology passed without comment.

I was unimpressed with her work, possibly because it’s my area so I’m better equipped to critique this paper than the others I listened to. I couldn’t believe she was just counting objects in rooms, with no differentiation between the objects value – so that a copper bowl counted as much as an iron nail. Surely a basic calculation of ‘work hours’ for each object is necessary or what use will the data be to discuss social differentiation or stratification?

In addition she stated that “mass production lead to many objects being made of these metals [bronze and iron]” as if mass production was the driver to mass consumption – as if we could even use the world ‘mass‘ without some kind of discussion on whether it’s applicable to the Roman world! Just one example of a number of problems I had with her terminology that I though showed a lack of engagement with current understanding of metal and object production.

 

Thinking reflexively, the negative response to the papers was interesting for a number of reasons not related to individual content. I think it is worth considering whether all post-graduates will come across the same problems that I noted at RAC/TRAC and other conferences, and whether these are standard for post-graduates:

1. Presenting at too early a stage and having nothing really to say
2. Ugly, misleading and essentially useless graphics (3D pie-charts, oh the horror!)
3. Lack of in-depth understanding of the background of the issue/object type/period
4. Unexamined suppositions/assumptions in basis of work
5. Not having any theoretical structure to the work
6. Shoe-horning in of only tentatively related theoretical structures at the interpretation stage
7. Essential conclusions ‘going against the grain’ of current understanding (that doesn’t mean it was wrong, just that no one present agreed with it).

I hope not to fall into any of these traps in the future, but I don’t think they are completely escapable. But then that is presumably the learning process of presenting in the early career stage. At least, I hope it gets better as you progress!

Having seen the papers given at RAC/TRAC I’m wondering if I could try to get a paper accepted to 2011′s sessions. Hopefully by then I’ll have a case study, and something exciting to say. But I’m only going to do it if I’ve actually worked out my paradigm and firmed up the more theoretical aspects of my work. I don’t want to present too early, that’s for certain, and thinking about the negative or uninterested response of the small section of TRAC/RAC I witnessed, I’m not sure I want to present at all!

New projects and anticipation!

Not my image, but very awesome!

So here at Finds and Features life’s been pretty hectic. Not only do I have a bunch of deadlines, but I’ve just moved house! On the up side, I now have a large room in a lovely flat with lovely people, and even some shelves of my own. On the down side, all my photocopies are now in seemingly random boxes and I’ve no idea where half my stuff is.

However today has been particularly exciting as I’ve suddenly got two more projects in the pipeline. Unfortunately it looks like both will have to wait until May before I can actually give them the time they deserve, but that’ll come round soon enough I suspect!

For the first project I’ve received a small but perfectly formed package of smelting debris from a site associated with the Hüttenberger Erzberg in Kärnten, Austria. That’s where the famous Roman ferrum Noricum steel/iron is thought to have been produced. From what I understand the site is a smaller satellite furnace and slag heap situated very close to the mines, Roman in period and probably in use from the first century BC through to the fourth century AD.

The material I have was collected as part of a brief sample scrape of the slag heap. However due to the skill of the excavator I’ve got slags of varying type, ore samples, furnace lining, and even fragments of iron bloom. That was a real surprise! It’s pretty rare to get bloom pieces, as that’s what the smelters were interested in producing, after all. But I’ve got a bit of everything! An analysts dream!

This of course is great, as it actually syncs with my PhD topic and will be great comparative data. However the other project I’m hoping to take on is looking at some more Roman brooches (I know, my pet subject!).  I’m particularly interested in a wasp brooch, which has weird metal bits seemingly embedded in it, and a slightly creepy looking fly with massive weird eyes that looks both copper alloy and silver. Oh, and there’s also  the potential of looking at a votive deposit which includes a religious headdress, votive leaves, and what look like possible mini eagle standard-things! I’ll post pictures as soon as I get the go-ahead.

In other news, tomorrow I’m off to the 2010 Roman Archaeology Conference/Theoretical Roman Archaeology Conference (RAC/TRAC) in Oxford. Really looking forwards to see what’s going on in Roman archaeology at the moment. It’s rather easy to feel a bit isolated at my university, what with there being more Mayan archaeologists than there are Romanists and Anglo-Saxon scholars combined!

Although I’m only attending Friday I’ll post my thoughts online when I get a chance – though that may not be until Monday as I’m helping out and note-taking at a European Early Iron Workshop on Saturday and Sunday. If I don’t pass-out with exhaustion somewhere along the line!

Iron ore reduction in a bloomery furnace – part 2

I’ve spent a lot of hours over the last couple of days trying to express every variable of bloomery iron smelting and their complex and dependent relations. At the moment, I can’t seem to do it in any way that doesn’t look like a spider covered in multi-coloured ink had a seizure on my page.

The best I can do is below – and although I think it looks pretty it only covers the general shape of smelting, it isn’t as awesome as I was planning. Anyway, I thought I’d share the first draft with you for two reasons. I hope that if anyone has any better ideas, comments, corrections or other reading they will comment or get in touch, and I may be able to improve the diagram. I also hope that anyone trawling the web for information on this topic will find the diagram to be of some use.

Iron smelting is a much more complicated process than copper smelting, despite that fact that both could be conducted in essentially the same structure and using much the same techniques and materials.

During copper smelting liquid copper can be produced, because copper has a melting point of 1084 C and furnaces can conceivably get up to or above that temperature. However iron melts at around 1536C, a temperature which is incredibly difficult to reach without modern machinery, and at which the ceramics of pre-modern furnaces are likely to melt and collapse.

As a result, iron is very rarely liquid during the smelting process. When it is produced, it is generally thought to remains solid. Luckily when iron oxide and silica are present they can melt together, and this forms the slag that is the most common archaeological evidence for smelting. I like to think of the slag as having a similar beneficent effect to  ’primordial soup’ – it allows the transport of the tiny fragments of iron metal so that they can conglomerate as a solid mass, and it covers it from the strong oxidising effect of the air being pumped into the furnace.

For good slag formation we need enough carbon monoxide to be circulating inside the furnace system, and high enough temperatures, so all three of these components effect the outcome of the smelt and are inextricably linked. But of course, you can’t just throw in more CO if its not working. What you can do is fiddle with the proportions of fuel to ore you put in, the size of these pieces, the amount of air you force into the furnace, and you can patch the furnace so that the CO doesn’t escape through the furnace walls.

The diagram below is a summary of this. Oh, except for the fact that you can also add ‘flux’ to ease the formation of slag, and I haven’t put that in. But you can imagine it in the bottom pile of variables if you like. Enjoy!

The full reference is:

Tylecote, R.F., Austin, J.N. & Wraith, A.E., 1971. The mechanism of the bloomery process in shaft furnaces. Journal of the Iron and Steel Institute, 209, 342-363.

It’s a rather full-on and large report of a campaign of experimental work undertaken by Tylecote and his colleagues, but it’s essentially invaluable. Most of what we know of how the various parts of the process contribute to the final product (the bloom) and how they interact comes from experimental work, of which Tylecote is the dominant contributor.