Monthly Archives: November 2014

VM_365 Day 144 Anglo Saxon bone pin beater from Westgate

Anglo Saxon, Archaeology, Uncategorised, VM_365 Project, Westgate

VM 144

The image for Day 144 of VM_365 is of a bone double ended pin beater found in the fill of a pit at a small middle Saxon site excavated near St Mildred’s Bay,  Westgate in 2006.

Pin beaters were used to beat down threads while using a warp weighted loom.

The pin beater  is made of bone or ivory and measures 121 mm long, 3mm at its narrowest point at the end and 8mm at its widest point at the centre. It has an ovoid, slightly flattened profile and has been polished through use to a very smooth and glossy finish. Both ends have been carved to form a point.

This pin beater was found in the fill of a rectangular pit along with fragments of burnt daub, animal bone and marine shell, as well as a single pottery sherd from a jar dating between 450-700 AD.

Other finds from the same site included large fragments of burnt daub with rod and sail impressions and an iron lock mechanism possibly from a chest or casket.

 

VM_365 Day 143 Roman Personal Grooming set from Minster

Archaeology, In the Store, Minster, Roman, Uncategorised, VM_365 Project

VM 143

For Day 143 of  VM_365we have an image of a Roman personal grooming set excavated from the villa at Minster in 1997.

This set, all made from copper alloy, comprises (left to right) an instrument for cleaning fingernails, tweezers and an ear scoop or cosmetic spoon. The three items would have been suspended together with an iron loop, traces of which you can see adhering to the end of the ear scoop and inside the end of the tweezers. The end of the nail cleaner has broken but you can just make out the curve where the hole for the ring was.

Personal grooming sets such as these would probably have been used by both men and women and are commonly found on both settlement sites and within graves.

VM_365 Day 142 Anglo Saxon bronze casket handle from Sarre

Anglo Saxon, Archaeology, In the Store, Sarre, Thanet archaeology, Uncategorised, VM_365 Project
Bronze casket handle from Anglo-Saxon grave at Sarre
Bronze casket handle from Anglo-Saxon grave at Sarre

The image for Day 142 of VM_365 is of a bronze handle, which may have been attached to a casket placed in a grave at the Anglo-Saxon cemetery at Sarre. The small amount of intact bone that remained in the grave (G. 286) suggested that it contained an adult. Other finds associated with the burial were small muticoloured glass beads  in a range of sizes that probably once formed a necklace.

The handle shown in the image is made from a bar which is rectangular in section along most of its length, but at either end has been bent, beaten and filed to form hooks with a more rounded section. The hooks terminate with blunt points at the end of each of the sinuous loops. The hooked ends  would have passed under two loops fixed to whatever object it was attached to, allowing it to be carried by the main bar of the handle.

 

The handle was found  along with Iron objects and other copper alloy items including the bronze key that was shown in VM_365 Day 35, leading the excavator Dr. David Perkins to suggest that the various objects might have been fittings associated with a casket.  The handle would have been mounted on the top, with a lock plate like the one shown in VM_365 Day 51 mounted on the side, perhaps operated with the key that was in the grave.

The image below shows a reproduction of a Viking Era casket which may be similar to the one in the grave at Sarre:

https://jorvikingi.files.wordpress.com/2014/08/dsc_0021.jpg
Reproduction (Viking era) casket with similar handle structure. Source: https://jorvikingi.files.wordpress.com/2014/08/dsc_0021.jpg

VM_365 Day 141Barbed and Tanged Arrowhead from Ramsgate

Bronze Age, Ramsgate, Uncategorised, Uncategorized, VM_365 Project

VM 141

Today’s VM-365 Day 141 image is of an  Early Bronze Age, flint, barbed and tanged arrowhead found during excavations by Thanet Archaeological Society at Lord of the Manor, Ramsgate in 2012.

This example is almost as pristine as the day it was made, is unpatinated and has a date range of c. 2300-1600 BC. It is missing its left hand barb which may have been broken whilst it was being made.

The arrowhead was found within the topsoil while cleaning the stripped surface of the site prior to excavation.

With thanks to Nigel Macpherson-Grant for supplying the information and photo.

 

VM_365 Day 140 Clench Bolts from an Anglo-Saxon Boat Burial?

Anglo Saxon, Archaeology, Minster, Uncategorised, VM_365 Project
Iron clench bolts and roves from a structure covering an Anglo-Saxon grave
Iron clench bolts and roves from a structure covering an Anglo-Saxon grave

The image for Day 140 of  VM_365 is of a group of iron clench bolts, found in the excavation of an Anglo Saxon grave near Thorne Farm, Minster between 1983 and 1984. Each bolt has a domed head at one end and at the other end the shank passes through a flat lozenge shaped plate, called a rove. The plate held in place by bending and flattening the shank to cover the hole, preventing it from sliding off the shank. Bolts of this type were used as fixings in early  planked ships of clinker construction where the covering boards overlap. Perhaps the most important and well known archaeological discovery of an Anglo-Saxon ship  built in this way is the Sutton Hoo ship.   The bolt and rove act as a clamping rivet, holding two overlapping planks tightly between the domed head and the tightly clamped plate. Eighteen bolts of this type were distributed throughout the fill of the grave and in the soil in the wider area around the grave.

The gaps between the bolt heads and the roves from the grave measure approximately 60mm and appear to have been used to fasten wooden planks together in some form of structure that was used to cover the grave, impressions of wood  were visible in the corroding iron of the bolts.

It is difficult to reconstruct what form the grave covering took, whatever covered the grave was bigger than the cut containing the burial. It has been suggested that because these bolts were commonly used in shipbuilding, the covering structure could possibly have been a small wooden boat, or a piece of a larger boat.  Another possibility is that a sort of sea-chest, which a sailor may have kept his personal equipment in, might have been constructed with clench bolts in the same way as ships were. Perhaps old sailors were finally laid to rest with under the weathered and worn fragments of shipwrecks, small boats and even the sea-chests that would have formed such an important part of their lives.

Reference

Perkins, D. R. J. 1985. TheMonkton Gas Pipeline: Phases III and IV, 1983-84. Archaeologia Cantiana Volume CII, 43-69.

Brookes S. 2007. Boat-rivets in Graves in pre-Viking Kent: Reassessing Anglo-Saxon Boat-burial Traditions, Medieval Archaeology, 51

You can read the PDF report of Stuart Brookes’ article here

VM_365 Day 139 Roman lock fastener from Minster

Archaeology, In the Store, Minster, Roman, Uncategorised, VM_365 Project

VM 139-1Day 139’s VM_365 image shows a Roman lock fastener from the villa at Minster.

This lock fastener is made of copper alloy, cast around an iron shank and was used to hold the lock plate to the front of a chest or door. A number of these decorative lock fasteners would have been used around the edges of the lock plate to hold it to the wood.

The cast bronze knob was visible on the front of the lock and was probably highly polished, while the iron shank passed through the lock plate and the wooden casket or door and was held in place at the rear by a pin inserted through the hole in the shank at the end.  In our example the shank has broken across the hole that the pin would have passed through.

Our example was probably used to hold the lockplate to a chest as the measurement between the knob and the hole in the shank suggests a total depth of lockplate and wood to be 15mm, too shallow for a door.

 

VM_365 Day 138 Roman Window Glass from Minster

Archaeology, In the Store, Minster, Roman, Uncategorised, VM_365 Project

VM 138

Today’s Day 138 VM 365 image shows our largest fragment of Roman window glass from the villa at Minster dating to around the 1st to 2nd century.

This fragment of clear glass is a pale olive brown, growing pinkish in colour toward the broken edge. You can see many tiny air bubbles throughout the fragment. The glass appears to have been poured as a single sheet into a mould, onto a flat, slightly rough surface, possibly compacted sand, as the underside is also slightly rough in texture. The upper side is shiny and wavy rather like the surface of poured toffee and is thicker along the rounded edge which would have been formed against the edge of the mould.

VM_365 Day 137 Two Beaker sherds from Lord of the Manor Ramsgate

Archaeology, Beaker, Lord of the Manor, Ramsgate, Thanet archaeology, Uncategorised, VM_365 Project
Two Beaker sherds from Lord of the Manor, Ramsgate.
Two Beaker sherds from Lord of the Manor, Ramsgate.

Toady’s image for VM_365 Day 137 is of two admittedly small, but important pottery sherds of Beaker vessels,  like the  Grooved Ware sherd from Day 136, the two Beaker sherds were found together in the 1976 excavations at Lord of the Manor, Ramsgate.

The sherds are from Phase 2 of the development of the Lord of the Manor 1 monument, a period of Early Bronze Age activity associated with the re-use of the earliest ring ditched enclosure as a burial site. In this phase a burial was placed within a smaller ring-ditch that was cut inside the circuit of the earlier large causewayed enclosure ditch, to create a round barrow.

The smaller sherd on the left of the image is decorated with a cord impression, which would have extended over the whole body of the vessel. The second sherd on the right is decorated with a pattern in zones, created with impressions from the teeth of a comb.

The first cord impressed style is the earliest, dating between c.2300-200 BC. The second comb decorated sherd is marginally later, around 2100-1900 BC. Both sherds are made of an identical fine oxidised fabric, with a fine silty fabric matrix and fine crushed pot grog tempering. Both have a similar neat, finely executed  decoration and so can reasonably be thought of as contemporary vessels.

Both sherds were found in a small pit, located  outside the ditch enclosing the central burial. The two sherds indicate a date between c.2100-2000 BC for the feature, although this has not yet been confirmed by Carbon14 dating.

Once again today’s VM_365 image and information on the pottery has been provided by ceramic specialist Nigel Macpherson-Grant.

VM_365 Day 136 Ramsgate Late Neolithic Grooved Ware sherd

Archaeology, From the Archives, In the Store, Lord of the Manor, Neolithic, Ramsgate, Thanet archaeology, Uncategorised, VM_365 Project
Late Neolithic Grooved Ware sherd
Late Neolithic Grooved Ware sherd

Today’s Image for VM_365 is of a small scrap of Late Neolithic pottery from 1976 excavation of the ring ditch of one of the ceremonial enclosures at Lord of the Manor, Ramsgate.

The sherd is a rim fragment from a tub-shaped vessel with a small-diameter. The exterior of the rim is decorated with incised grooves, the inner edge of the rim has a distinctive bevel, similar to the rims of other examples of this type of pottery. The typical decoration of the sherd with a pattern of grooves in the surface, provides the name that has been given to this ceramic tradition; Grooved Ware.

Before flat based grooved ware vessels began to manufactured, all Early and Middle Neolithic pottery in this country was made with round bases. Grooved Ware is believed to have been first used in the Orkneys, spreading southward across Britain and seems to represent the only truly ‘homegrown’ tradition in the entire history of British ceramics.

The style of decoration on this sherd, coupled with the beveled rim,  places the sherd into the Durrington Walls style, which was current during the main building phases at Stonehenge and is dated to c.2800-2300 BC

To date the tiny sherd pictured here seems to the best example of Grooved Ware archaeologists have recovered on the Isle of Thanet. Although it is small, the sherd  is a valuable hint that there may be more evidence of this important period of settlement to discover in the future.

The image and information for today’s VM_365 post were kindly provided by a guest curator, ceramic specialist Mr Nigel Macpherson-Grant

In 2007 a group of potters experimented with manufacturing Grooved Ware vessels, follow this link to the Prehistoric Ceramics Research Group website article on the process.

VM_365 Day 135 How to carve a spindle whorl.

Archaeology, Broadstairs, In the Store, Iron Age, Uncategorised, VM_365 Project

VM 135-a

Day 135’s  VM 365 image shows the two sides of an unfinished spindle whorl of Late Iron Age or Early Roman date, which was found at in 2005 at Dumpton Gap, Broadstairs .

This particular object is  interesting because it shows the different stages that the maker went through to carve the spindle whorl from Chalk. The first stage would have been the selection of a suitable sized piece of hard chalk, probably picked up from the beach nearby, and carve it roughly into shape.  It seems likely that the outline was then scored in the chalk using a pair of compasses, marking the location of the central hole at the same time. The central hole would then have been drilled through the chalk and the finished object was shaped and finished more carefully using the scored circles as a guide.

We do not know why this object was abandoned part way through the manufacturing process, it may have been because the fragment was damaged, a large chip that had been removed from one side (left image) may have been the cause.

Although many of the objects archaeologists examine have been broken after use, it is rare to see one that gives such an insight into the manufacturing methods, because it has been abandoned while it was being made.