Roger Ling

Mosaics in Roman Britain: Discoveries and Research since 1945

The present paper originally formed part of a Forschungsbericht on all the main branches of interior decoration in Roman Britain prepared for Aufstieg und Niedergang der romischen Welt n, 12, 4 in 1981-82. Since fifteen years have elapsed without any sign of ANRW , 11, 12, 4 seeing the light of day, I have decided to publish a new version, revised and updated to cover the half-century 1945-1995. The main difference is that the section on wall-paintings, on which I have written extensively elsewhere, is now omitted. What remains is primarily a review of research into Romano-British mosaic pavements, with brief comments on other media ( opus sectile , wall-mosaic, and stuccowork) appended in a concluding section. The nucleus of this review is the Bibliography, arranged partly by themes and partly by locations, with items numbered serially (Section iv); reference will be made to it, where appropriate, in footnotes.

The Insula of the Menander at Pompeii: interim report

A British team has been working since 1978 upon a programme of documentation and analysis in the Insula of the Menander at Pompeii, one of the irregular city-blocks situated immediately to the west of the old part of the city in an area which was developed from the early fourth century B.C onwards. Study of the structural techniques, of wall-abutments, and of anomalies in plan can be used in conjunction with the evidence of painted wall-plaster to identify five main phases in the building-history: Phase I (fourth-third centuries B.C), Phase 2 (second and early first centuries B.C), Phase 3 (c. 80-c. 15 B.C), Phase 4 (c. 15 B.C.-C. A.D. 50), Phase 5 (c. A.D. 50-79). These illustrate a complex pattern of changing property-boundaries, but underline the general trend towards increasing commercialization and greater pressure upon living-space in this area of the city. There is also interesting evidence of the economic basis of life in the individual houses during the years immediately before 79.

Brading, Brantingham and York: a New Look at Some Fourth-Century Mosaics

In an article published in Britannia in 1980, Reinhard Stupperich argued for the dominance of classical iconography in the mosaic pavements of fourth-century Britain and showed how a number of pavements had previously been misinterpreted. Among the scenes which he examined, at least three which had appeared anomalous to earlier interpreters were shown to fit more or less within standard iconographic formulae: a scene from East Coker showing Dionysus and Ariadne, and panels from Keynsham representing Athena playing the flutes and Achilles discovered on Skyros. The difficulties which they had caused were due to lack of skill or understanding on the part of the craftsman who produced them, to the imperfect state of their preservation, or (where destroyed) to the unreliability of the modern draftsman to whose record we owe our knowledge of them.

Inscriptions on Romano-British mosaics and wall- paintings

The article reviews the principal surviving examples of inscriptions on mosaic pavements and wall-paintings in Roman Britain. For some of these it makes tentative suggestions towards new readings or seeks to adjudicate between the conflicting readings of earlier commentators. The eleven inscriptions examined belong to different classes: signatures, dedications, good luck messages, labels, and literary or pseudo-literary glosses upon figure-scenes. The existence of the inscriptions implies that viewers were expected to be literate, or at least that being literate, if not actually well-educated, was socially important.

Roman Mosaics in Britain. An Introduction to Their Schemes and a Catalogue of Paintings

In 1970 the journal Britannia was launched for publications on Romano-British material, which were becoming too numerous to be accommodated in the Journal of Roman Studies. The monographs reviewed here represent the expansion of this venture to a series of specialist studies under the aegis of a now well established journal. The announcement of the project aroused high expectations, which, in the case of these two books at least, have been fully realized. At the outset, the similarities and differences between the two works should be noted. One is written entirely, the other in part, by authors who would consider themselves primarily conservators rather than academics in the narrow sense of the word. The arrangement of introduction, catalogue and plates in each case is almost identical. Yet these similarities, as well as the titles used, are somewhat deceptive. Neals book, it must be emphasized, makes no claim to being a general treatment of the subject, which is a vast one. It deals exclusively with those mosaic floors that he has painted in water color over the last twenty years, much of it as an archaeological illustrator for the British Department of the Environment. These floors certainly represent an excellent cross-section of the material available, but by no means constitute the complete picture: some of the most familiar British examples, such as the splendid scenes from Bignor Villa or the Virgilian scenes in the Low Ham Villa, to name but two, are not represented. The kernel of the other book is the corpus of Romano-British wall paintings restored by Davey, also associated with the Department of the Environment. Since, however, the study of Roman wall painting in Britain is still very much in its infancy, and the total amount of material recovered much more limited, Davey, in collaboration with Ling, an authority on ancient art, has been able to attempt a general and comprehensive treatment of the whole subject. The tradition of British mosaic-illustration goes back to the 18th c., to the work of men such as Samuel Lysons and William Fowler. In recent times, of course, much more emphasis has been laid on photography in recording mosaics, but since the pavements are invariably dirty or covered by lime, the results are often in fact much less satisfactory. As an illustrator, Neal can discuss his material with the eye of a craftsman. He demonstrates, for example, that in setting the mosaics, the craftsman laid the motifs first and added the background tesserae afterward. This procedure is illustrated clearly at Brantingham (no. 12), where the motifs actually break into the surrounds of the panel and were thus demonstrably set first. Neals skilful account of how mosaic patterns evolved is especially fascinating. A scheme of nets was laid out first as a guide to the design, which could be changed radically by an expansion or contraction of the network. He concludes that there is no evidence that mosaics

Wall Paintings from the Winchester Palace Site, Southwark

During 1983, in advance of redevelopment, archaeologists from the Museum of Londons Department of Greater London Archaeology investigated the site once occupied by the palace of the medieval Bishops of Winchester, 250 metres west of the southern end of London Bridge. The excavations revealed a series of Roman buildings dating from the first to the fourth centuries a.d. , one of which yielded the painted wall-plaster which forms the subject of the present article.

Two Silchester Wall-Decorations Recovered

G. E. Foxs reconstruction of fragments of painted plaster found in house XIV, I at Silchester is subjected to new scrutiny, and it is argued that, rather than belonging (as Fox thought) to a dado, they derive from two separate all-over patterns of the type described by German writers as Tapetenmuster. It is suggested that the decorations come from the adjacent rooms 22 and 29, and, by comparison with other examples of similar patterns in other parts of the Roman Empire, that they probably adorned the walls rather than the ceilings.

The Oxford Handbook of Roman Sculpture . Edited by Elise A Friedland and Melanie Grunow Sobocinski with Elaine K Gazda. 253 mm. Pp xiv+713, 154 ills (10 in col). Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2015. isbn 9780199921829. £115 (hbk).

meaningful information in the modern context. For instance, there is potentially a useful and interesting section in the chapter devoted to Roman Malta (from the author’s 1980s PhD) that discusses the agricultural production of Roman Malta. Recent archaeological work across Malta has examined olive presses and cultivation evidence in the light of environmental sampling and economic reconstruction, but the unrevised essay makes no reference to this significant work. The studies of Christian Malta are on safer ground, given Buhagiar’s specialist knowledge. The cult of St Paul – a major saint in Malta – forms an intriguing discussion, and the essay sets out to reveal the controversies of claim made by different places in the central Mediterranean. This is the scholarship where the writer is most comfortable, and where contentious archaeological evidence is incidental to the story. The value of Buhagiar’s work is properly reflected in the chapters on catacombs, Christian art, the various burial cults and the often little-known sites that occur across Malta. The art-historical approach is at its best here, focused on iconography and style, the form and layout of the catacombs, the paintings, symbolism, religion and ritual, and the historically recorded events and trends that are reflected in the remains. The background studies of research on many sites, including the sustained research at Tas Silġ by the Italian Mission, are usefully described and often critically discussed. Many obscure but interesting points of information are presented that make the latter chapters a sourcebook for ongoing inquiry. In conclusion, I read this book with interest and have gathered useful descriptive details and a sense of the traditional debates around the Romanisation and Christianisation of Malta, together with the various monuments and forms of evidence. The style is deferential, descriptive and informative rather than critical, and perhaps rather typical of the traditions of island scholarship. This isolationism is especially reflected in the bibliography, where most sources relate to work published in Malta rather than wider European scholarship. For this reviewer, the lack of revision in both the writing and the illustrations (line, colour and black-and-white photographs) that accompany the essays is a disappointing aspect of an otherwise rather well-written volume. The collection would have been better with investment in redrawn figures, so they were unified to a form and type, and also had they been interspersed throughout the book rather than in a section at the end. Understandably, such revisions would have been onerous, but would have presented a more obviously unified collection.

The Arch of Constantine: inspired by the Divine. By Iain Ferris. 248mm. Pp 160, 61 b&w ills, 39 col pls. Amberley Publishing, Stroud, 2013.isbn 9781445601298. £18.99 (pbk).

during the excavations and have clearly had difficulty working from the site records. This is particularly true of the contributors writing on the architecture, mosaics and paintings. Jennifer Tobin, on the houses, has performed a tour de force in presenting her material (though her descriptions tend to be difficult to follow, because of confusions and inconsistencies in giving orientations), but Bettina Bergmann on the paintings seems to have struggled to make sense of inadequate drawings and photographs of what was often fragmentary and poorly preserved plaster. However, it ill behoves us to be too critical. The largesse of the PHI, the skills of the excavators and conservators, the expertise of the authors of the three volumes – all have contributed to an immensely important rescue project. Without their efforts far less information would have been salvaged from the destruction of Zeugma.

Rome, Portus and the Mediterranean . Edited by Simon Keay. 280mm. Pp xviii + 439, 158 ills, 14 col pls. Archaeological Monographs of the British School at Rome 21, British School at Rome, London, 2012. isbn 9780904152654. £90 (hbk).

the extensive campaign of radiocarbon dating and Bayesian modelling. All the information is combined for an authoritative interpretation and summary in Chapter 9. There is much to be praised in the volume: it is amply illustrated with site plans and feature sections, many of the former in colour, and each site report ends with useful tables summarising the site phasing, structural sequences and contexts with associated dimensions and small finds; weaknesses or limitations in some data that impact on interpretation have been addressed directly; and the volume as a whole is easily interrogated, cross-referenced and supported by an index. Perhaps the most useful aspect of the work, however, is the series of sixty-two radiocarbon age determinations that are not only published, but incorporated into a number of Bayesian models. Thesemodels are presented for each site that produced C samples; also presented is a model that combines the data from each site for a more synthetic picture of settlement on the coastal plain. Furthermore, the Bayesian modelling and interpretation is given separate treatment from the excavator’s interpretation of the C dates. This enhances understanding considerably, moving beyond a discussion of dating to include an appreciation of the location, method and significance of each dated sample. The general conclusions (Chapter 9) contextualise current understanding of the settlement archaeology of the region, before exploring the implications of the more recent excavation campaigns, further incorporating the results of excavations at Pegswood (Proctor 2009). Evidence from pit alignments reinforces the notion of Late Bronze Age–Early Iron Age division and organisation of an increasingly cleared landscape during which we find unenclosed settlement. Enclosed settlements appear by the later Iron Age, c 200 BC, conforming to a trend observed from the Midlands of England to south-east Scotland. However, there is an occurrence of earlier enclosure atWest Brunton, c 400–200 cal BC. This exception noted, the general agreement in the appearance of enclosure opens up the discussion of settlement size, density and patterns, as well as the arrangement and use of space within individual settlements and roundhouse architecture. Discussion of these latter aspects of settlement is then related to the Roman conquest and establishment of the Imperial frontier. There is much food for thought in the discussion, particularly as Hodgson et al link the abandonment of settlement on the coastal plain, which can be dated to around AD120–75, to the construction of Hadrian’s Wall. Substantiated by the Bayesian modelling and the general dearth of Roman artefacts post-dating the second century AD, this is an attractive suggestion, and leads to two fundamental questions. What happened to the population of Northumberland in the later second century? Can Hadrian’s Wall be seen as a sharp line of economic/ cultural division with a cleared landscape to its north? Clearly, further excavation and more radiocarbon dates are required.