Founded 1906
Archaeology Report Autumn 2020
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Selected Article from the BHAS Bi-Annual magazine "Flint" Autumn 2020
In Search of Graffiti Last summer I had the huge treat of handling thousands of Ro-man-era pottery fragments, many of which were samian-ware, while volunteering on the LatinNow sub-research project di-rected by Dr Morgane Andrieu in Lyon (https://latinnow.eu/). This was advertised on the Lewes Archaeology Group site, so a big thank you to them! LatinNow is funded by the European Research Council, hosted by Nottingham University, and studies the spread of Latin in the north-western Roman provinces. Morgane’s specific area of study is graffiti on pottery, and what it shows about the use of Latin (or Greek, or Gaulish words written in the Latin alphabet) and its development and spread over time. Last year her focus was on Lyon, in collaboration with the Lugdunum museum (https://lugdunum.grandlyon.com/fr/) and Lyon’s Laboratory of Archaeology and Archaeometry (ArAr, UMR 5138, https://www.arar.mom.fr/). Lyon, Roman Lugdunum, was an important centre in ancient times, and has been subject to many archaeological excava-tions over the years, resulting in tonnes of finds, many of which are stored in archives below the museum and in an enormous warehouse in the suburb of Villeurbanne. Walking into the warehouse you are greeted with impressive statues, great inscribed stone blocks, and hundreds, maybe thousands, of large stacked boxes full of all the bits of bone, pottery and glass etc produced by each excavation. Thankfully most boxes were clearly labelled, as we were only interested in the pottery. Opening one to find a full human skeleton was a bit of a sur-prise however! We were pleased that most of the contents had been washed, mud totally obscuring any possible graffiti of course. Even clean, it was sometimes difficult to tell if a mark was a graffito, or just a scratch, but once confirmed, it was hugely exciting! A box full of samian was prized, as you could be pretty sure it would contain at least one incised piece. But not always.... And sometimes it was the more ordinary-looking fragments that sported graffiti, often inscribed pre-firing. The earliest boxes dated to excavations of many decades ago, and the shelves have been filling up ever since. There is an on-going agreement with the grave-diggers at the Loyasse ceme-tery, which overlays part of the Roman town, to hand in any-thing of interest. Maybe that explains the mystery skeleton! In all, over four months, Morgane and her team found over 1000 graffiti, all but 60 never before recorded (those 60 were published in 1892, but nothing since): many single letters, nu-merals, words, names, symbols and squiggles, and some drawings (of gods and gladiators for example). I worked on the project for just a week, with about ten other volunteers who came from many different backgrounds and places in France, and I had a really fun and fascinating time.This research, in studying cultural spread and co-existence, is providing an additional window on the Roman Empire, and is only possible because all those boxes of sherds have been preserved in the archives!
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