By Heather at Exeter
This small fragment of Roman Samian bowl was found in 2005 on land just north of Kinnerton Way in Exwick. I had always thought it would be nice to find something like this but had not imagined I would find it here on a what was once a remote hillside away from the main City Centre. How did it get there and what could I learn from it?
Pieces of old pottery are quite frequently found in peoples gardens. Depending on the age and frequency of finds they can tell us a lot about the past and what the land was used for. Agricultural land close to villages, old houses and farms was usually manured to make it more fertile and into the cart would often go waste of all kinds including old bones, shells from seafood, pieces of crockery, broken clay smoking pipes and all sorts of metal items to name a few. In other cases people in past times would cart rubbish from City Centres and throw it into hedges or ditches or onto common land where it would get mixed in with manure and finally find its way into nearby fields. The land on which your house was built was perhaps once farmed fields or part of an orchard or garden. If the plot was for example a single small field then any houses nearby may have similar finds in their gardens too.
The land on which this Roman fragment was found was an orchard in the late 19th Century and was probably valued for growing crops from at least Saxon-Medieval times. A collection of other pottery from the same spot revealed that items were discarded in the waste here from at least the 17th Century as is often common all round the City, but what about the piece of Roman Samian bowl?
This was found in disturbed sub-soil from a time when the houses were built here and the edges were encrusted with a distinctive yellow clay which is also found on the same spot in the deepest part of the subsoil. All the other pieces of pottery dating from the mid 17th Century onwards had brown topsoil on the edges. This could suggest that the Roman find was deposited nearby many centuries ago rather than finding its way into a manure cart some time in the last few hundred years from elsewhere in the area. I am not able to say with certainty.
My next search was to look at the Historic Environment Records (HER) for Exeter which are kept at County Hall. Although no other Roman pottery was recorded in the immediate area of Exwick several instances of Roman coins were to the south of Kinnerton Way as well as other finds in Cowick, Redhills and St Thomas.
Checking the topography of the area for early settlement patterns and tracks it also seems highly likely that Exwick would have had people living here in those times as well as major routes for travel and trade towards Crediton via Redhills, as well as high points where signals could be sent.
Finally a search of several websites has revealed to me the style and approximate age of this piece. The nearest match I could find is a decorated Samian bowl like the one in the picture included here (not from Exeter). My bowl originated perhaps from South Gaul and was imported into Exeter some time in AD 70-230. The bowl form type used by archaeologists is called a Dragendorff 37. They were made by pressing a red clay into a mould that carried decorations, in this case a border of "Ovalo" pattern with garlands and perhaps buds or leaves below. The surface of the bowl was dipped in a very fine red liquid clay in a process called terra sigillata which is what often gives Samian pottery the distinctive high quality surface appearance.
Older finds like these can be reported to the local Portable Antiquities officer at RAMM where experts can help to identify them and record them on the database giving us a better picture of life in Exeter in past times. If you should find other Roman pottery in Exwick do comment on this page.