Cumberland Woodruff also claimed to have seen the remains of actual manufacturing, stating that most of his collection had come from Otterham Creek, and that it was on the right bank where he had “seen the clearest traces of kilns….”4
They may have been clear enough in the 1880s, but there was not a sign of them when we began our search in 1951; the three-quarter-mile stretch of the creek identified by Woodruff yielded only three sherds of Roman pottery and the bronze frame from a sixteenth-century purse. With my wife, who was already an experienced excavator of Romano-British sites, and two friends who worked as volunteers with me on the London salvage projects, we set up our headquarters first in the hamlet at the head of Otterham Creek, and then, when that site proved barren, we moved on to the village of Upchurch itself. It was from there, on and off over the next five years, that we explored the miles of mud flats and marshlands (Fig. 57). It was quickly apparent, however, that they bore small resemblance to the easily accessible sites with their adjacent green swards from which Roach Smith had sung to his admiring Victorian ladies. The Ordnance Survey map of the area put it in a nutshell when it marked “ROMAN POTTERIES (Site of)” in the midst of terrain simply labeled “Mud.”
Most of the spots marked as the sites of Roman remains were now unproductive, the pottery either having been washed away or buried deep in the silt. In some areas its place had been taken by literally tons of brickbats and thousands of sherds of Victorian crockery, shattered bottles and other garbage brought down from London in the 1870s and used to build dikes to protect ground then remaining above the tide level. The rubbish was also used to build roads or strayways between the islets where a few stubborn sheep farmers still lived, the last of a line of such inhabitants stretching back nearly a thousand years. Ruined houses, the skeletons of sheep, and the remains of farm equipment half submerged in the mud are all that is left of generations of effort. Here and there the hulls of abandoned wooden barges survive as reminders that clay for brickmaking used to be dug on the marshes, an operation that opened large holes which subsequently filled with mud and remain as traps for the unwary. It was the clay cutters who first began finding the Roman pottery and who brought Roach Smith and his colleagues out onto the marshes in those halcyon Victorian days. Another much more recent hole-digging activity had no archaeological reward, namely the use of the mud flats as artillery and bombing ranges during the Second World War. The mud-filled shell holes and bomb craters added appreciably to the hazards, for none of them could be seen until we sank struggling into them. But we were all sufficiently young to find the dangers stimulating, and when at last we hit pay dirt the rewards were unbelievable.
At a point about a mile and a quarter out across the marsh, in an area about a thousand feet in diameter, broken Romano-British pottery was strewn over the mud as thickly as pebbles on a beach. We began picking up every piece as we approached it, and long before we reached the main concentration our back packs were so laden that we could barely struggle onward. When we got there we dumped out the packs and reassessed our goals. Picking up everything was an impossible task and would accomplish little. We could see that the sherds had a date range of more than a hundred and fifty years and so were not directly related to each other; so I decided to collect representative samples of each type, as well as all the pieces of shapes I had not seen before. In addition, I elected to salvage every fragment of one seemingly common type of shallow gray dish (Fig. 58). This arbitrary decision made on the first day of discovery was adhered to over the years, and before long my attic became loaded with fragments of literally hundreds of dishes, disappointingly few of which joined to each other. Nevertheless, three large fragments making up two-thirds of one specimen did go together, and after eighteen months of failure to find the still missing pieces, I restored the dish, substituting plaster for the missing segment. Six months later, the absent sherd turned up. Later yet, all the pieces of another such dish were found lying together.
57. Crossing a gully on the Upchurch marshes, 1951
58. Romano-British pottery found amid the Upchurch marshes; first and second centuries A.D. It is questionable whether the left jug or the center tazza were actually made there, but all the other vessels are now established as being typical Upchurch products. The center black dish was recovered, fragment by fragment, over a period of two years. Height of the small jug 5¼ inches.
The vast majority of the potsherds rested on the modern mud surface, but under it lay the uneroded bottoms of Roman rubbish pits into which more pottery had been thrown. By probing through the mud with steel rods it was possible to feel the buried vessels and then to dig slices through the pits before the tide came in and again filled them with mud. Many of the pit bottoms were found to be lined with perfectly preserved sedge and peat, and with the remains of roots extending into the clay below, suggesting that the holes had been dug by the potters to obtain clay and then had been left open while plants grew up in them. Later, domestic pottery and other refuse was tossed in. Amid the usual miscellany of animal bones and bits of shapeless wood, we found part of a writing tablet, a toy boat, and a bronze brooch; but it was the pottery that was important, for at last we were finding associated groups that included waste products from the kilns. However, the best of all the pots were discovered lying together in the mud within a foot of the surface, and were found only because I happened to tread on them (Fig. 59). These wafer-thin and highly burnished carinated beakers epitomize the pure art of the thrower, and for simplicity and fluidity of form they are surely the equal of any pots made anywhere at any time. One is broken at the rim, but the larger and better specimen is unchipped, and I have wondered time and again as to how and why it came to be lying in the Upchurch mud (Fig. 60).
We were eventually able to find enough evidence to confirm the presence of potters on two different sites at dates from the mid-first to the mid-second century, and a review of previous finds made as long ago as 1868 showed that some pottery making had continued in the area as late as the third or fourth century. Although the real success of our years of hard work rested on the recovery of that information, it would be a canard to contend that we were unmoved by the realization that intact vessels were scattered through the mud waiting to be scooped up by anyone lucky enough to put his foot in the right place. The instinct of the treasure hunter and the gambler is common to most of us, but for those having a professional responsibility toward the past, the pleasures of finding must be subordinated to the discipline of finding out.
59. Two Romano-British beakers as revealed on the Upchurch marshes after discovery through the scientific process of stepping on them in the mud.
60. The carinated beakers (Fig. 59) freed from their mud. These thin and highly polished black vessels represent the British domestic potter’s craft at its best, and for simple, geometric elegance have never been excelled. About A.D. 60–80. Height of largest 6½ inches.
That treasure in the popular sense might be found on the marshes remained a real possibility, for the map showed two spots in our sector marked “Roman Jewellery found 1864.” So when I found a pot standing vertically in a freshly eroded area, I felt sure that it contained something of importance. The mud filling its mouth was removed with a degree of care that would have earned applause from a surgeons’ convention—which, as it happened, would have been appropriate. The pot contained bones, the remains of an embryo puppy mixed with a small quantity of charcoal. Between 1951 and 1956, seven puppy burials were found, six of them by our team and the seventh by the owner of the land. All except one of the pots were of the same type and dated from the latter half of the second century A.D. (Fig. 61). No parallels for these potted puppies had previously been recorded from Roman sites in Britain, nor in Europe as far as I have been able to determine, yet it is certain that these were ritual burials and not merely the whimsy of an early British dog lover.
The association of dogs with the underworld is a well-known feature of classical religions. We know, for example, th
at young dogs, preferably black puppies, were sacrificed to Hecate, the goddess of darkness, of magic, and of childbirth. She was also believed to have power over fishermen and the sea, which attributes could have had particular relevance to the inhabitants of the low-lying Medway marshes. But were our puppies black? There was no knowing, nor even any certainty as to their breed. Later, however, two rubbish pits were found containing in one the bones of an adult male dog, and in the other the remains of a bitch and two puppies. These bones were examined at the Royal Veterinary College and tentatively identified as those of dogs similar in appearance to the Russian Laika, a small husky with a long history in northern Europe as a hunting, sled-pulling, sheep, and guard dog. Similarities between the bones of the puppies found with the bitch and those in the pots suggested that all were of the same breed.
61. Gray earthenware urns found together on the Upchurch marshes, each containing charcoal and the bones of an infant or unborn dog. Late second century A.D. Tallest 7¼ inches.
The Hecate theory was not the only one put forward by colleagues in the archaeological world; the most convincing alternative was that the puppies were sacrifices to Roman earth spirits in the hope of promoting and protecting the growth of crops. In Devonshire, as late as the nineteenth century, a farmer wanting to keep them free of weeds was advised to “bury three puppies brandwise” or “brandiwise” in the field. Dogs also figured in British folklore as the means by which unpleasantnesses could be drawn away from the physically and mentally sick. Thus, for example, in the counties of Devon, Northampton, Wiltshire, and Gloucestershire it was believed that by taking a hair from the nape of the neck of a patient suffering from measles or whooping cough, placing it between two pieces of buttered bread, and feeding it to a dog one would transfer the evil of the illness to the animal. Presumably, of course, one fed the sandwich to somebody else’s dog. In America the Iroquois New Year festival included the hanging of white dogs decorated with feathers and red paint, and to which the tribal sins for last year were transferred.
Although the true significance of the Upchurch puppy cemetery has never been determined, one more clue remained to be added before we were through. On my last visit to the marshes in the winter of 1957, only days before leaving for Virginia, I returned to the puppy area and found that recent storms had further eroded the remaining high ground, leaving a large gray urn protruding from the bank. The pot was of local earthenware, but it was covered by a red, Gaulish, Samian ware dish made at Lezoux in south-central France in the mid-second century, and impressed with the name of Statutus, the potter (Fig. 62). The urn contained cremated bones (unlike the previous puppy burials where the bones had been accompanied by charcoal, but had not themselves been burned), and I deduced that this was a human burial and not just another dog. Although I knew of no others being found in that sector of the marshes, cremation burials were common in Roman Britain in that period, and a number of such cemeteries had been found in east Kent. There being no time to make a careful study of the bones before leaving for America, the urn and its contents were packed for shipment and were not examined again until a year later in Williamsburg when a local physician identified the bones as dog. This certainly made better sense than the idea of burying one human in a doggy cemetery. Two more years elapsed before I finally got around to preparing an account of the discovery for publication, at which time I took the charred bones to a veterinarian pathologist in the hope that he might identify the breed. He did; it was Homo sapiens.
The Samian ware dish covering the human ashes was one of the few examples of non-British pottery found on the marshes; another was the fragment seen in Fig. 63. The latter seems to have been part of a thinly potted redware beaker coated with a brown metallic slip and decorated with an applied ornament in high relief, perhaps representing a scene from the legend of Venus and Adonis. Professor Jocelyn Toynbee has described the modeling as “an exceptionally fine piece of work of its kind—graceful, delicate, and sensitive.”5 Indeed, nothing quite like it had previously been found in England, and when first shown to ceramicists at both the British and Victoria and Albert museums, they suggested that it was too accomplished to be of Roman date and must have been made in Staffordshire in the eighteenth or nineteenth century. Subsequently, however, the fragment was examined by nine of the foremost classical scholars in England, all of whom accepted it as Roman. It was an interesting division of opinion that had been matched a few years earlier when a black pottery lion found in the top of a Roman well near Bristol was hailed by classical archaeologists as a major example of Roman ceramic art. It later turned out to be the finial from the lid of a Wedgwood basaltes teapot.
62. A gray Upchurch urn and the Samian ware dish that covered it. The pot contained cremated human bones and one small fragment from the leg of an unidentified bird. Found in the same marsh area as the puppy burials (Fig. 61). Second half of second century A.D. Height of urn 9⅞ inches.
63. Ceramic historians often think of sophisticated sprig molding as a sixteenth-century German development. They are only half right, as this early-second-century Rhenish fragment shows. Sprig-molded onto a thin, metallic-slipped earthenware beaker, the pattern was probably borrowed from a Roman silver vessel and depicts the death of Adonis. Found on the Upchurch marshes. Height 2¾ inches.
That experts disagree is well known in academic circles, but when the public hears of two great museums rejecting an object and being off by at least sixteen hundred years, eyebrows are raised and doubts fostered. But in reality there is nothing to be surprised about. The Upchurch sherd was initially shown to ceramic specialists who do not ordinarily have much to do with classical wares. The sophisticated technique of sprig molding exhibited by the sherd reminded them of the work of eighteenth-century potters such as Astbury, Whieldon, Wedgwood, and Turner (Fig. 7). The black basaltes lion, on the other hand, was first examined by classical archaeologists having no experience with Wedgwood teapots. Similarly, the William III halfpenny from Queenhithe was examined by an extremely knowledgeable specialist in English coins, but who had not examined specimens that had acquired their patinas through being buried in the Thames mud.
Inevitably, the amateur collector will want and need to turn to professionals for advice; after all, that is what museum staffs are there for—though I know that some colleagues see their curatorial roles quite differently. The caliber of the advice received depends upon taking one’s question to the right person. The lepidopterist who takes a rare butterfly to a professional geologist theoretically deserves as little satisfaction as he gets. In practice, however, this seemingly idiotic example is frequently unwittingly acted out. As I have previously noted, many small-town American and British museums contain a bit of everything from butterflies and rocks to arrowheads and an incredibly ancient waffle iron, and are maintained by a single curator whose own specialty may be botany. Nevertheless, the public expects him to be able to pronounce authoritatively on any object in his custody and, by extension, on any object we may own that is remotely comparable. Rather than admit that waffle irons are not his forte, the embattled curator will protect the credibility of his museum and give the best answer he can based on his limited experience and on whatever books he has to hand. It should be no surprise that the result may, on occasion, be something short of splendid. I speak from experience, having more than once been guilty (and disastrously) of dispensing what is known in the trade as bum information.
After working as the Guildhall Museum’s archaeologist for less than a year, I was asked to visit a warehouse near the street called the Minories, where builders underpinning a basement wall had unearthed some fragments of decorated stone. When I got there I was shown what looked like part of a sandstone pillar with scalelike leaves sculpted all around it. The hole whence it came had been back-filled and there were no potsherds or any other artifacts to suggest the stone’s date. It did not resemble anything I had seen before (which, in view of my minimal experience, was hardly surprising), and as I adjudged the
warehouse to be well outside the limits of early London I decided that the pillar was almost certainly Victorian and not worth keeping. So I said so. Some months later I discovered that there was a similar column fragment in the London Museum, where it was identified as Roman. A closer look at the map showed that the warehouse was near the site of Londinium’s city wall into which many important pieces of earlier Roman architectural stone had been built. I am convinced that through ignorance and a distaste for admitting I did not know, I was guilty of causing the rejection and destruction of a major Roman object, and the memory of it has haunted me ever since.
I remember with equal horror the day when a silver collector came into the museum to look at mousetraps—at least that was what I thought he wanted.
“I’m collecting information about pest abatement,” he told me.
“About er…?” I countered.
“Pest abatement.”
He had to be talking about rodent control. “Ah, yes, well. You’re thinking about old rat traps and that sort of thing, I suppose? Right offhand I can’t say that we…” Whereupon the man snorted and walked out—which I thought was rather overreacting. It being “my Saturday,” I was alone in the museum, and it was not until the following week that I mentioned to the keeper (British museum-eze for “curator”) that I had had this rather unsatisfactory exchange with the mousetrap man. Only then did I discover that the silver collector had not been asking about pest abatement but about the celebrated female silversmith Hester Bateman.
All the Best Rubbish Page 14