Roman jewellery

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'I was having a quiet beer one Wednesday, in a hotel in West Africa, when I received a phone call from home: "Would you like to help with a project for Time Team?" Excellent, I thought to myself, should be great fun. It was then I found out that filming was on the Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday of the following week; my flight back was on Sunday morning!

'The Time Team challenge was to recreate a bronze enamelled Roman brooch in the shape of a hare that had been previously found on the Isle of Wight – using the same methods that would have been used for the original. There was no time for a test run and only three days to complete the filming.'

You can read Guy Morey's account of his Roman brooch-making cameo for Time Team (filmed for the Yalverland, Isle of Wight, programme in the 2002 series) on his website. Both the difficulties of the production process and the quality of the end product can only enhance the reputation of Roman jewellery-makers, who had to make do without the fine quality control available with modern kilns, tools and raw materials.

Guy first had to produce a master of the brooch, cut from a piece of lead. This was then used to produce a mould (by pressing it into cuttlefish bones, which take on an accurate copy of the image). Then a bronze casting was made (six, in fact, to be on the safe side!), with the level of tin adjusted in the metal alloy to get precisely the right degree of liquidity as it was poured into the moulds.

An enamel mix was produced from sand (hand dug from the local sandpit at Knighton), soda (good old washing soda), a colouring agent (malachite) and an opifier (tin oxide) – a recipe described in the Mape Clavicular and Diverse Art (Theopolus). With fingers crossed, our modern jeweller set the enamel to 'cook' overnight and the brooch was ready for finishing the following day. Carenza wore it at the end-of-dig get together.

The Isle of Wight excavation produced a range of evidence that Roman jewellery making or crafts of some sort had taken place at this site, including various pieces of bracelets and lumps of recycled glass. The location of the site on high ground overlooking what would have been a navigable waterway during Roman times suggests that it had been positioned there to maximise trade with visiting ships.

Guy Morey
G&M Jewellery
123 High Street
Ryde
Isle of Wight PO33 2SU
Tel: 01983 611232
Website: www.gmjewellery.co.uk/timeteam/timeteam.html

The Snettisham Hoard

A number of hoards of metal and jewellery have been found since 1948 at Snettisham, Norfolk. Most of them are 'Celtic' Iron-Age finds, dating from the first century AD, but in 1985 a second-century AD hoard was discovered consisting of a collection of silver jewellery, coins, engraved gemstones and scrap silver carefully packed into a small pottery jar and hidden for safe-keeping. There were 89 rings in the hoard altogether, including many with inset carved gems and others moulded into the shapes of snakes. A polishing tool and ingot of silver were also among the finds. The hoard was evidently part of the stock of a local jeweller's workshop, and as such is so far unique in the Roman world.

The hoard as a whole has proved exceptionally informative, demonstrating the close association between silver- and gold-smiths and gem-engravers and confirming that silver coins were hoarded and used to make jewellery. Although of a modest quality when compared with the many gold ornaments which survive from the period, the range of types found within a single workshop at one point in time provides a new and sounder basis for the close dating of other finds of provincial Roman jewellery.

In 1997, the British Museum produced a catalogue of the hoard, illustrated throughout, which brings together a team of expert contributors from the British Museum and elsewhere to produce an authoritative account of the treasure. The circumstances and context of the discovery are recounted and the combination of archaeological, art-historical and scientific approaches casts new light on many aspects of Roman jewellery manufacture.

The Snettisham Roman Jeweller's Hoard by Catherine Johns (British Museum Press, 1997) £35