Hostname: page-component-cd9895bd7-gbm5v Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-27T08:57:58.915Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

VIII.—Excavations on the site of the Roman city at Silchester, Hants, in 1897

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  25 January 2012

W. H. St. John Hope Esq.  and
George B. Fox Esq.
Get access

Extract

We have the honour of laying before the Society of Antiquaries, on behalf of the Executive Committee of the Silchester Excavation Fund, an account of the excavations carried out by the Committee in 1897, for the eighth successive season.

Type
Research Article
Information
Archaeologia , Volume 56 , Issue 1 , 1898 , pp. 103 - 126
Copyright
Copyright © The Society of Antiquaries of London 1898

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

page 104 note a Such stud partitions were used to subdivide the central portion of the principal of the three houses forming the so-called villa at Darenth, Kent, excavated by Mr. George Payne, F.S.A., in 1894–5 (see Archœologia Cantiana, xxii. 49–84). This portion was 80 feet long and 23 feet 9 inches wide, but had been subdivided by partitions into six unequal sections. The partitions were formed of wood, plastered on both sides, and varied in thickness from 7½ to 15 inches.

page 110 note a Jacobi, L., Das Römerkastell Saalburg bei Homburg vor der Höhe (Homburg, 1897), Taf. iv. and Taf. viiiGoogle Scholar.

page 114 note a The upper and under surfaces of this stone are parallel, i.e. the stone was of the same thickness throughout, and thus unlike the usual form of the ordinary hand querns. The under side is scored, and at the centre there is no sign of a chase for a rind. The centre hole is 4 inches in diameter at the top, contracting somewhat at a depth of 4 inches, and thus forming a hopper, and then again expanding. A small hole just above the line of contraction possibly had to do with the arrangement of the pivot on which this upper stone was poised upon the lower.

The material is a fine white sandstone sparkling when fractured. Fragments of the same material are occasionally met with on the site, and, like the piece in question, always reddened as if by the action of fire. The stone resembles that of which the walls of the station of Branodunum at Brancaster, on the north coast of Norfolk, were built, and is known in that neighbourhood as sugar stone, from its colour and peculiar fracture. It perhaps com.es from the lower greensand, and might have been quarried in the neighbourhood of Aylesbury.

page 114 note b These are described and figured in Bennett, Richard and Elton, John, History of Corn Milling (London, 1898), i.180.Google Scholar

page 116 note a Mitchell, Arthur, M.D., LL.D., The Past in the Present: What is Civilisation ? (Edinburgh, 1880), 36.Google Scholar

page 116 note b See a representation of this method of working a quern, though with a slight variation from that described, in an illustration taken from a MS. of the fourteenth century, engraved in Die Burg Tannenburg und ihre Ausgrabungen, by Dr. J. von Hefner and Dr. J. W. Wolf. 1850. Pl. xi.

page 117 note a See At the Court of the Amir. A narrative by John Alfred Gray, M.B. London, late surgeon to H.H. the Amir of Afghanistan.

page 118 note a See the work previously cited, The Past in the Present, where on page 37 a sectional diagram of a quern showing all its fittings may be seen.

page 118 note b For an account of an Irish hand-mill, presented by the Kilkenny Archæological Society to the Archæological Institute in the year 1850, see Archœological Journal, vii. 393–4, with an illustration and section to scale.

page 119 note a For these particulars we are indebted to the kindness of Mr, Horace B. Woodward and Mr. A. Strahan, M.A., of the Geological Survey Office.

page 119 note b In a paper on “The Materials of Roman Querns,” in The Wiltshire Archœological and Natural History Magazine, ix. 291–294.

page 120 note a The Wiltshire Archœological and Natural History Magazine, ix. 293.

page 120 note b See Lieut.-General Pitt Rivers, Excavations in Oranborne Chase, near Hushmore, on the borders of Dorset and Wilts (1887), i. pi. 1. fig. 4. For a complete quern 2 feet in diameter, found at Poole, Dorset, now in the British Museum, see Bennett and Elton, History of Corn Milling, i. 182, 183.

page 120 note c Transactions of the Bristol and Gloucestershire Archœological Society, xiii. 197.

page 120 note d Archœological Journal, xiii. pl. 3, fig. 28.

page 121 note a Archaeologia, liii. 561, fig. 3.

page 121 note b Ibid. Iv. 245.

page 121 note c This well had the following section: soil, 2 feet; gravel, 6 feet; marly sand, 7 feet; in all, 15 feet. Below this was the usual bed of clay.

page 122 note a This board has had since to be replaced by a modern substitute.

page 122 note b The variations in the size of the letters as printed above are due to typographical needs, and do not show the relative sizes of the original letters, which are indeed fairly uniform.

page 123 note a See Holder's Sprachschatz, 863; Bonner Jahrbücher, lxxxix. 8; D'Arbois de Jubainville, Noms gaulois chez César, 23. I have also consulted Professor Rhys about the name.

page 123 note b Mr. Haverfield informs us that Roman wells were sometimes constructed in Italy with earthenware cylinders, from 2 to 3 feet high, placed one above the other, like the barrels at Silchester. There is such a well at Ostia, and there are cylinders from others in the Communal Museum on the Ceelian Hill at Rome.

page 125 note a This illustration, which has been recently made for the new edition of Murray's Handbook for Hants, has been kindly lent by Mr A. H. Hallam Murray, M.A., F.S.A.