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A New Roman Rider-Relief from Stragglethorpe, Lincolnshire

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  09 November 2011

Timothy Ambrose  and
Martin Henig
Timothy Ambrose
Affiliation:
Lincolnshire Museums: City and County Museum
Martin Henig
Affiliation:
Institute of Archaeology, Oxford
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Extract

In November 1977, a large relief sculpture of Romandate was discovered during drainage work on farmland in the parish of Brant Broughton and Stragglethorpe in Lincolnshire. The sculpture had been unearthed by a mechanical excavator in the process of recutting the sides of a field-boundary dyke. Although it was not possible to examine the sculpture in situ, it had apparently been found lying face downwards in a shallow scoop in the subsoil below a residual east-west plough ridge of the broad ridge-and-furrow cultivation which until recently had covered the field. Apart from a fine follis of Licinius I (A.D. 308–324), the sculpture was not found in association with any other Roman material. Part of a worn and battered Roman altar and heavy concentrations of Romano-British pottery and building stone were later found after ploughing some 200 m to the north-west, and fieldwork has located a series of such concentrations in the surrounding fields. Air photographs of the immediate area show an enclosurecomplex together with a pit-alignment nearby. Two kilometres to the west aerial photography has pin-pointed enclosures of probable Romano-British date in the parish of Beckingham and occasional finds of Roman material have been recorded over the years in Brant Broughton.

Type
Articles
Information
Britannia , Volume 11 , November 1980 , pp. 135 - 138
Copyright
Copyright © Timothy Ambrose and Martin Henig 1980. Exclusive Licence to Publish: The Society for the Promotion of Roman Studies

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References

1 The NGR of the findspot is SK 90250 53140 (FIG. I. Site A). We are extremely grateful to Mr D. F. Dobson, the owner, for bringing the sculpture to the attention of Lincolnshire Museums: City and County Museum, and for his kind permission to publish an account of the discovery. (See Lines. Hist, and Arch, xiv (1978), 85Google Scholar and Britannia ix (1978), 434Google Scholar for earlier notes on the sculpture). The sculpture remains in the possession of Mr Dobson, but a cast has been made for Lincolnshire Museums. T. M. Ambrose would also like to thank Professors S. S. Frere and J. M. C. Toynbee for their advice and help on the iconography of the sculpture.

2 FIG. 1. Sites: B (SK 90105325); C (SK 90405292); D (SK 904525); F (SK 90655195); G (SK 89905170).

3 St. Joseph air photograph: BDF 63/64.

4 Information held on Lincolnshire Museums Sites and Monuments Record.

5 J. B. Whitwell, Roman Lincolnshire (1970), 60–78.

6 We are grateful to Mr T. F. C. Blagg for commenting on the working of the sculpture. For the use of the point see Blagg, T. F. C. ‘Tools and Techniques of the Roman Stonemason’ in Britannia vii (1976), 159–61.Google Scholar

7 See Robinson, H. R., The Armour of Imperial Rome (London, 1975), 107–35Google Scholar and especially 105, pl. 300 for the stele of Genialis from Cirencester.

8 H. R. Robinson, op. cit. (note 7), 104–6.

9 Robertson, M., A History of Greek Art (Cambridge, 1975), 369Google Scholar and pl. 121 C for the gravestone of Dexileos.

10 See for example the Alexander Sarcophagus from Sidon in M. Robertson, op. cit. (note 7), 481 and pl. 151 a + b.

11 For early Roman examples Strong, D., Roman Art (Harmondsworth, 1976), 48Google Scholar, pl. 40 (now in Mantua) and 66, pl. 62 (Monument of the Julii, Saint-Rémy).

12 D. Strong, op. cit. (note 11), 85, pl. 87 and 86, pl. 88 for the sculpture; Mattingly, H., Coins of the Roman Empire in the British Museum iii (London, 1936), 176–7Google Scholar, pl. 31, Nos. 2–5 for coins.

13 Toynbee, J. M. C., Art in Roman Britain (London, 1962), 157Google Scholar F, No. 82, pl. 87 (Rufus Sita); 166, No. 97, pl. 102 (distance slab); see also Robinson, loc. cit. (note 7).

14 See for example the Great Frieze on the altar of Zeus at Pergamon (c. 180 B.C.); Schmidt, E., The Great Altar of Pergamon (London, 1965) passim and pl. 30 for a triton overcoming a giant.Google Scholar

15 See for example the glass gem from the fort of Castell Collen in Boon, G. C., Radnorshire Society Trans. xliii (1973), ii, pl. iGoogle Scholar, No. 1, and the cornelian in the Hague collection, Maaskant-Kleibrink, M., Catalogue of the Engraved Gems in the Royal Coin Cabinet, The Hague. The Greek, Etruscan and Roman Collections (The Hague, 1978), 186–7, no. 401.Google Scholar

16 Lambrechts, P., Contributions à l'Ètude des Divinités Celtiques (Brugge, 1942), 81–99.Google Scholar

17 Taylor, M. V., Antiq. Journ. xliii (1963), 264–8CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and refs. cited. In cases where armed riders occur an identification as Mars is highly probable.

18 RIB 213 illustrated in VCH Suffolk (i), 312 and plate.

19 See Henig, M. in Rodwell, W. (ed.), Temples, Churches and Religion: Recent Research in Roman Britain, BAR Brit. ser. 77 (1980), 91–113.Google Scholar

20 See for example Garbsch, J., Römische Paraderüslungen (Munich, 1978), 49Google Scholar, No. 15, pl. 4, and No. 16, pl. 4, 2. Mars stands on a monster, probably Scylla on a plece from Gherla, Romania, 58 f, No. 1, pl. 13, 1.

21 RIB 274.

22 JRS lii (1962), 192.Google Scholar

23 RIB 248.

24 Frere, S. S., ‘Some Romano-British Sculptures from Ancaster and Wilsford’ Antiq. Journ. xli (1961), 229–31CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Ambrose, T. M., Gods and Goddesses of Roman Ancaster (Lincoln, 1979)Google Scholar, 5 and refs.