Wine buckets and door found in Draper's Garden

[Melvadius]

Some evidence from 1st to 4th century AD Roman London has recently come to light with the completion of excavations at Drapers Gardens.

 

'The site was in the upper reaches of the Walbrook valley, 100m south of the City Walls, in an area where four streams of the river which divided the City were predicted to converge. With the exception of a multitude of concrete piles, the surviving archaeology was intact with an unbroken sequence dating to between 1st and 3rd centuries.'

 

'Wine buckets, bowls and dishes with an elegant beaded design are among a spectacular Roman hoard of international importance that has been discovered in London. '

Edited December 11, 2007 by Melvadius

[Faustus]

This a very interesting find. One reason is the preserving medium, water. If certain things can remain immersed in water, and secondly if silt from outside is not suspended in the water to do its damage, then they can remain pretty much the same for very long periods of time. Wood won't last very long at all if soaked in water and dried out repeatedly. It will ablate away in just a few years. We see that all the time in construction, and I 'm not talking about insect action. There is an estuary near the gulf of Mexico and New Orleans where tree stumps have remained below the surface of the water and have been there, scientists report, for 20,000 years, a very long time. That accounts for the wood door. Metal objects may be preserved too, we see. The one bucket looked very familiar, the shape, the bale, and the flanges on which the bail (handle) was attached looked like something from the early 20th century.

 

"Nineteen metal vessels emerged from the bottom of a wood-lined well. Although they look like fine household objects, it is possible that the hoard may have had religious uses.

 

It is also possible that the objects were hidden by Roman Londoners fleeing tribes from Scotland, Ireland and Germany who were converging on Londinium. They may have planned to return to retrieve them.

 

Until the 1960s the land had remained largely undeveloped. The site

Edited December 13, 2007 by Faustus