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Bone-working at Colchester
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 09 November 2011
Summary
A group of bone artifacts found at Butt Road, Colchester, points to the location of a craft workshop in the vicinity. The objects were almost certainly intended as applied ornament on wooden furniture. As most of the pieces are unfinished, the tools and techniques employed in the manufacture of the objects can be recognized. Experiments to simulate the tools used have provided valuable help in the interpretation of the artifacts, and highlight both the strength of bone and the speed with which it can be worked.
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- Copyright © Nina Crummy 1981. Exclusive Licence to Publish: The Society for the Promotion of Roman Studies
References
1 I would like to thank Roger Goodburn, Philip Crummy and Mark Hassall for reading this paper and kindly offering their criticisms and comments. I am also indebted to Carl Crossan for information about the stratigraphy of the Butt Road site, and to Rosemary Luff for examining the objects and making suggestions as to the identification of the bones utilized in their manufacture. The drawings are by Terry Cook, Suzanne Debski, and Bob Moyes, who also prepared the figures.
2 M. R. Hull, Roman Colchester (1958), 256–7.
3 ibid., 245–8; Dunnett, B. R. K., Trans. Essex Arch. Soc. iii, 3rd ser., part 1 (1971), 78–84.Google Scholar
4 Crummy, Philip in Rodwell, W. J. (ed.) Temples, Churches and Religion, BAR British Series 77 (1980), 264–6.Google Scholar
5 Britannia viii (1977), 407.Google Scholar
6 Crummy, Nina, Britannia x (1979), 157.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
7 M. G. Wilson in B. W. Cunliffe (ed.) Fifth Report on the Excavations of the Roman fort at Richborough Kent (1968), pl. lxi.
8 A Roman glue-boiling site has been identified at Augst (Elisabeth Schmid, ‘Beindrechsler, Hornschnitzer und Leimsieder im römischen Augst', in Provincialia, Festschrift für Rudolf Laur-Belart (1968), 194; idem, Atlas of Animal Bones (1972), 48). Bone decoration on a couch in the Fitzwilliam Museum was fixed with glue (Nicholls, R. V., Archaeologia cvi (1979), 10).Google Scholar
9 Nicholls, op. cit. (note 8), 1–32.
10 Fragments of bone decoration almost certainly from a similar couch are among the many grave-goods from a child's cremation burial attributed a pre-Flavian date, from Colchester's West Cemetery (Grave 3; Hull, op. cit. (note 2), 251; Smith, Charles Roach, Collectanea Antiqua vi (1868), 235).Google Scholar
11 Aldred, Cyril, ‘Furniture: to the end of the Roman period’, in Singer, Charles, Holmyard, E. J., Hall, A. R. and Williams, Trevor I. (eds.) A History of Technology ii (1967), 225, pl. 11Google Scholar; Frederick Litchfield, Illustrated History of Furniture (1892), 17–19.
12 John Hunt, ‘Byzantine and early medieval’, in Helena Hayward (ed.), World Furniture (1965), 20.
13 Nicholls, op. cit. (note 8), 1.
14 W. L. Goodman, The History of Woodworking Tools (1969), 116–22.
15 James Curie, A Roman Frontier Post and Its People (1911), pl. lxviii, 6.
16 Goodman, op. cit. (note 14), 161–2; Henry Hodges, Artifacts (1976), 116.
17 Curle, op. cit. (note 15), pl. lix, 12; George C. Boon, Silchester: The Roman Town of Calleva (1974), fig. 41, 7, 8.
18 Aldred, op. cit. (note 11), 230.
19 The pole-lathe is described in Hodges, op. cit. (note 16), 117–8.
20 Epigrams i, cxvii.
21 cf. Schmid 1968 (op. cit., note 8), 190.
22 For the opportunity to mention this pin, I am grateful to Stephen Greep (in J. Draper, ‘Excavations on the Roman site at Gestingthorpe, Essex by Harold P. Cooper’, East Anglian Archaeology, forthcoming).
23 Schmid 1968 (op. cit., note 8), 186; 1972 (op. cit., note 8), 44–5.
24 A large quantity of worked and unworked offcuts, tiny broken fragments, and hacked-off articulated ends of horse and ox long-bones and scapulae were found in a first-century ditch on the Crowder Terrace site at Winchester (Britannia vi (1975), 278–9). The identifiable artifacts consisted of two spoon bowls, many small fragments of spoon handles, and part of a ?knife handle. I am grateful to Ken Qualmann for the opportunity to examine this material, which is clearly the everyday detritus of a bone workshop.