Found a perfectly intact Roman oil lamp at a dig near Chester last Saturday

We were just cleaning out a trench from the 1930s and I scraped away some dirt and there it was, still had a bit of carbon inside too, anyone else ever find something that felt too perfect to be real?

2 comments

2 Comments

riverp3722d ago

Yeah so @black.margaret nailed it with the pollen angle, but what nobody's said yet is that carbon residue can also tell you if they were burning something local or imported - might prove Chester was on a bigger trade route than we thought.

black.margaret22d ago

That carbon residue alone makes it a pretty special find. In my experience, the really well-preserved stuff often comes from digs that had been sitting around since the 30s, nature had time to settle in around it. Worth getting a specialist to look at the carbon, sometimes you can get a pollen count or even trace what kind of oil they burned.