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2026 | Jan
16th Nick Fuentes Memorial Lecture
'The Roman River Finds Project'
Hella Eckardt, Reading University
The project is an Anglo-German initiative involving the universities of Koln, Trier, Leicester and Reading to investigate new approaches to Roman River finds. It began in 2024 in Germany, and is expected to continue until around the middle of 2027. The talk was divided into four sections.
Issues
The reasons things are deposited in rivers are numerous including, deliberately, accidentally, from shipwrecks, rubbish dumping and erosion of land settlements. All of these factors could contribute to an assemblage. Only the most spectacular objects were collected and recorded in the past and these have not been looked at in a wider context. The confluences of rivers are significant, also bridges, and local river gods. Deposition can be over a long period and dredging can cause movement and loss.
Ways Forward
Hella described work done on finds from the River Tees at Piercebridge to the west of Darlington. Here the Roman Dere Street crossed the river via a bridge and there was a Roman civilian settlement and later a fort to the north. There are far more Roman finds than from other periods, all have been described and catalogued via the portable antiquities scheme. It has been noted that some come from other parts of the Empire which is not unreasonable as this was the road to Hadrians Wall. There are over 2000 coins from fort excavation and over a 1000 from river, with those from the river showing higher value denominations than from the fort so much more likely to be deliberate deposition rather than accidental losses.
The UK experience - this is still work in progress
Finds data has been collected data into a database. It is often the case that what were considered as river finds are not really so, for example where a river has moved its course and eroded a dry land site or the distance of the finds from a river was not well recorded. These make sites difficult to categorise.
Putney is being used as a case study using data supplied by Pamela Greenwood, The project has tried to map all the locations of finds, this shows there are far more downstream of the Putney Roman bridge. Another area of the Thames for study is around London Bridge but the Roman foreshore was much further back than the current one. Demolition of old London Bridge led to lots of material from the river in the 1830s but while some locations of finds are accurately recorded, others were vague. These finds are now being fully catalogued. Billingford near Worthing (Norfolk) has also been studied.
The German city of Trier on the River Moselle
Trier was an important Roman city with the bridge piers surviving from Roman period. Due to low water conditions in the 1970s and 1990s many local people went into the river and found lots of items. Over 30,000 coins and 1000 lead seals are recorded but it is estimated that over 500,000 coins may have actually been retrieved with many remaining in private hands. Interestingly here personal adornment objects are not a majority of those found. Work is ongoing to analyse this huge collection of finds.
Colin Jenkins