November 2022

I saw this mosaic pavement every day of my working life for many years, every time I crossed the main gallery of the Verulamium museum. All of the mosaics in the museum are beautiful, but the Dahlia mosaic particularly appealed to me, I don’t know why. It comes from a townhouse in the Roman city of Verulamium, and probably dates from around 175 – 200CE. It would have been on the floor in Roman times, although it is now fixed to the wall of the museum.

It is made of black, red and white tesserae, and has a large central flower in a square with small motifs in each corner of that square. The flower is set within a circle and the whole mosaic is overlaid by a grid of nine squares surrounded by a pattern known as” three-strand guilloche”. There are flowers in the four corner squares of the grid. The excavator, Sir Mortimer Wheeler, referred to the large central flower as a dahlia and the four corner flowers as roses, but to me it looks more like a water lily or lotus, set in a stylised circular pond indicated by the wave pattern of the innermost circle surrounding it.

The mosaic was in one room of a small second-century CE house in Insula IV. The house was L-shaped and surrounded almost all the way round by a veranda. There were five rooms, an extra one projecting from one arm of the L, and two small buildings close by which might have been for cooking. At least two of its rooms had mosaic floors and the veranda had a red tessellated pavement (little brick cubes). The veranda also had painted wall plaster coloured green, white and black. Unfortunately this nice little residence was built over a swallow-hole, not uncommon in chalk areas like St Albans, and partly collapsed before the end of the third century CE. It happens even today. The site was levelled around 300CE when this area of the town was redeveloped.

Wheeler (1936, page 146 (2) considered it to be a “good example of careful pedestrian work.” I think it is very pretty. I would have chosen it for my floor any day.

(1) Image by Carole Raddato from FRANKFURT, Germany, CC BY-SA 2.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0>, via Wikimedia Commons

(2) Report of the Research Committee of the Society of Antiquaries of London No.XI Wheeler, Verulamium: A Belgic & 2 Roman Cities  p146 Pl XLIVB  REM Wheeler, D.Lit., V.P.S.A. andT.V. Wheeler FSA  1936

My two favourite artefacts found in Orkney both Viking-age brooches, and both are thought to have originated in Ireland. One comes from a hoard, the other from a burial. Although they are slightly damaged, reconstruction shows that they were very beautiful when they were in use.

The Skaill brooch is a penannular silver thistle brooch. It comes from a hoard of silver objects discovered in 1858 near St Peters Kirk, at Skaill, Sandwick, on West Mainland, by a boy digging up a rabbit hole. Alas, there were no archaeologists at that time to call in, and the hoard was dug up by local people and later reassembled by local antiquarians. It consisted of 8kg of brooches, neck and arm rings, pins, ingots, hacksilver, ring money; and 21 Arab coins, which allowed its dating to the late 10^th century CE.  The size of the brooch is not reported in any of the sources to which I have had access, but thistle brooches, while varying a lot in size, are usually around 20cm in diameter by 52cm long.

The Westness brooch was found in the grave of a wealthy Viking woman at Westness on the island of Rousay. The grave was discovered by accident in 1963 by a farmer burying a dead cow, who fortunately notified the archaeologists. The stone-built grave was in a Viking cemetery and is that of a young woman who probably died in childbirth, as it also contained the bones of a newborn infant. It contained many rich grave goods. This brooch was probably intended for fastening a cloak or shawl, and was more elaborately decorated than the Skaill brooch. It was 175mm long, silver-gilt decorated with zoomorphic gold filigree, large amber studs and red glass inlay. The amber studs were already missing when it was placed in the grave. Although the grave is believed to be early 9^th century, the brooch is thought to have been made in the mid-8^th century, so that it was 100 years old when it was buried with the young woman.

Both of these brooches are in the National Museum of Scotland. They are on display and you can access the collections database to see images of them online.