A Roman Jug from Wroxeter

A Roman jug from Wroxeter

During August, we are publishing through this blog a series of new photographs taken by archaeological photographer Ian Cartwright for an online Image Gallery created with the support of the Arts and Humanities Research Council. You can read more about the gallery here, and you can see the whole gallery online here.

Here is our caption for this image:

This ceramic jug dates from the Romano-British period, and is made from a fine grained black burnished ware known as Upchurch ware. The writing on the object, copied from earlier markings and labels, records the provenance of the object as Uriconium (Viroconium) – the Roman name for Wroxeter, which is now a village in modern Shropshire but was the site of the fourth largest city in Roman Britain.

Together with a contemporary label, it also records a detailed sequence of acquisition – its discovery in 1866 by ‘Mr Stannier who farmed the land’, its sale to a dealer in Shrewsbury named Mr Last, and Pitt-Rivers’ purchase of the object from Last in 1870.

(Pitt Rivers Museum Accession Number 1884.37.31)