During a recent walk around the site of Venta Icenorum (Caistor St Edmund, south of Norwich) I checked out one of the Roman period ‘middens’ (waste tip) where the rabbits regularly dig out lots of material. Over the years I have found a wide range of artefacts here, including coins, tesserae, oyster shells (loads of them!), worked bone and pottery. On this day, I was pleased to find a fragment of Roman ‘Samian Ware’ pottery made in sites like La Graufesenque in Gaul (modern-day southern France) on an industrial scale (as many as 40,000 pots in a single firing!).
The smooth orange-coloured outer surface was produced by dipping the unfired pot into the ‘slip’. Around the rim I can see some small irregular lines produced by the potter’s finger nail as the pot was being turned on a wheel. These vessels would normally be stamped with the maker’s name - something to look out for. Lifting this from the rabbit’s ‘spoil’, I was mindful of the thought that the last hand to have touched this belonged to a Roman citizen or slave living in the ‘lost’ regional capital of Venta Icenorum. Then - prompted by the ‘whoosh’ of a passing train in the distance - it occurred to me that, if the life of that long dead person living in a long gone town is almost unimaginable to me, then my life and times would have been completely inconceivable to them - and, yet, we tend to experience our little lives as ‘ordinary’/‘workaday’/‘humdrum’ - they are not
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