Archaeology

LGBT+ History Month – Roman Hair Pins

Published Thursday 16 February 2023 | By Keith Fitzpatrick-Matthews

For LGBT+ History Month we have these Roman hair pins pictured below as part of a display in the museum. Hair pins are often found on Roman sites, made from bone, bronze, silver, jet and glass. The commonest types are made from bone, which was much cheaper than the metal examples. In the ancient world, people used bone to make things that we would now make from plastic: cheap imitations of more expensive items. There are finds of half-made pins from Hartsfield School in Baldock, where scraps of bone, unshaped slivers and broken near-complete types were fly-tipped into the hollow way running up the hill there.

The earliest pins date from after the Roman conquest, around the middle of the first century AD,

and they continued to be made and used into the fifth century. Over this time, their styles changed – they were fashion items, after all – and we can use them to help date archaeological sites. Those seen here, all made from bone, were found in excavations at Gravely Road in Great Wymondley during house building in 1937 and date from about AD 150 to after 400.

Why are they so common on archaeological sites? The simple answer is that there was no hairspray in the Roman period, but women’s hairdos were often very complex. They would see portraits of Empresses on coins and elsewhere and try to copy their styles. To keep both their own hair and hairpieces in place, women (or more likely their slaves) would stitch and pin long hair into position. Some pins even have heads with their own hairstyles, showing famous women or goddesses with the latest fashions.

So they are clearly women’s dress accessories (as archaeologists like to call such things). But not so fast. They also turn up on Roman military sites, places strongly associated with men. Before the end of the second, women were not allowed into forts. The historian Herodian recorded that Septimius Severus was the first to allow soldiers γυναιξί τε συνοικεῖν (‘to cohabit with their wives’) after he had executed Clodius Albinus in 197. Before that, we wouldn’t expect to find women’s objects inside forts, yet archaeologists (including the writer) have found second-century hair pins in such places.

What are they doing in supposedly all-male places? One likelihood is that soldiers kept hair pins as reminders of their wives and girlfriends who lived outside the fort. In the course of any relationship, it’s not unusual for partners to have rows and throw away little gifts: this could explain why hairpins turn up among rubbish in alleyways between barrack blocks. But there may be more to them than that.

Might it be that some soldiers wore drag for entertainment? It was usual during the chaotic week-long winter festival of Saturnalia for men and women to swap clothes and social roles. This was a way of making fun of the social order, a time when slaves could talk back to their owners, public gambling (usually illegal) was allowed, and each household would choose a Lord of Misrule to disrupt everyday life. Outside the festival, cross-dressing was not technically allowed, except on the stage, where men performed women’s roles. Is it going too far to imagine Roman soldiers entertaining their colleagues with drag shows?

However, we know from ancient literature that certain Roman men known as cinaedi behaved effeminately, wore women’s clothes and make-up, and had sex with other men. Some served in the army. In a short story by Phaedrus, a freedman of the Emperor Augustus, a tall and very effeminate cinaedus heroically defeated and decapitated a barbarian enemy after begging Pompey to allow him into battle. Although this is fiction, Phaedrus’s work shows that it was possible for cinaedi to serve in the army, even if they were not always respected by their commanding officers. Perhaps some hair pins are evidence for such men serving in the army in Britannia.

Another group of people who could wear women’s clothing were the galli, who served as priestesses of Cybele or Magna Mater. These people were born male but self-castrated in a religious frenzy to make themselves women: other priestesses of the goddess were born female. Galli lived on the margins of society, partly feared, partly despised but also partly respected for their ability to make contact with the spirit world in their moments of ecstasy. They led a nomadic lifestyle, depending on other people for their livelihood. The cemetery at Bainesse, near the Roman town of Catterick, contained a skeleton that archaeologists identified as a fourth-century gallus with her necklace and bracelets but with DNA showing that she had been born male.

Taking these ideas into account shows us that we should not automatically assume that we know how apparently gendered artefacts were used in the past. Although women were no doubt the main users of hair pins, there are situations when we know that men might have needed to use them. Hair pins could have been keepsakes of men’s partners or items of personal adornment in special circumstances. In the unique case of galli – people we would perhaps now think of as trans women – the people who owned or used the hair pins were treated socially as women by their contemporaries. Gender is a very complex phenomenon!

Written by Keith Fitzpatrick-Matthews

Archaeology Tuesdays – Ravensburgh Castle, Hexton

Published Tuesday 14 February 2023 | By Keith Fitzpatrick-Matthews

The largest hillfort in the Chilterns, Ravensburgh Castle, lies on private land, hidden beneath a plantation of trees. It is southwest of Hexton, in the northwestern part of North Hertfordshire district and the county boundary with Bedfordshire follows the outer edge of its western ramparts. Before the trees were planted about 1908, it was a prominent and impressive site, surrounded on three sides by steep-sided valleys.

Francis Taverner wrote the first surviving description about 1640 in an unpublished history of Hexton, now in the British Library. He said that it had a treble rampart, although it is not clear what he meant: there are two banks and two ditches, except on the east, where there a single bank and ditch. Eighty-four years later, William Stukeley visited the site and drew it from the west, confirming that there are only two ramparts on that side. He thought that the earthwork was Roman in date.

Ravensburgh appears on the early nineteenth-century Ordnance Survey sketches made about 1802 and has always appeared on their published maps, and Robert Clutterbuck published a plan in 1817. Quarrying inside the earthworks at an unknown date made the interior uneven before the trees were planted. Three rides in the woodland existed by 1940 but they are now overgrown.

In November 1940, Percival Westell, curator of Letchworth Museum, began digging a series of trial pits at the site. He started with two by the northwest entrance, by a higher part of the rampart known as The Keep. A week later, he dug three alongside the northernmost of the rides. Finally, he dug a trench down to bedrock in March 1941 just inside the southeastern entrance; the chalk was found 1.4 m below the surface. Unfortunately, whatever records Westell may have kept have not survived, apart from his plan of the site. No finds from his excavations made their way to Letchworth Museum, either.

John Moss-Eccardt of Letchworth Museum began more excavations in 1964, assisted by James Dyer, a lecturer at Putteridgebury College of Education, and his students. They dug a trench across the western ramparts, establishing that the site had seen three separate periods of construction, between the Early Iron Age (about 850-400 BC) and the Late Iron Age (about 100 BC-AD43). James Dyer returned to the site in 1970 and again every year between 1972 and 1975. Since 2013, Ian Brown of the University of Oxford has been working on the site. He has all the finds, Moss-Eccardt’s and James Dyer’s records, and is organising surveys.

The first phase consisted of chalk rubble packed between parallel timber palisades, with a flat-bottomed ditch on the outside. Long after the ditch had silted up, a new V-shaped ditch was dug and the chalk piled on top of the degraded first rampart as well as outside the ditch to create a counterscarp bank. At the same time, a second entrance was added to the settlement, near the southeastern corner. The outer ditch on the west side was added later, although its date is not known.

Geophysical survey inside the southeastern entrance in 2015 showed traces of at least two roundhouses and a small enclosure with an inturned entrance. Another, outside the northwest entrance in 2018, revealed a hitherto unknown Bronze Age round barrow, long since levelled but recognisable from the ring ditch that formed a quarry for the mound material. Recent surveys by Lidar (a technique for recording often subtle changes in the land surface) show that as well as the enclosed area, there are outer earthworks to the east running away from the northeastern and southeastern corners of the hillfort. It is unknown if they are contemporary with it and, if so, with what phase.

Analysis of the finds is ongoing and only interim reports are so far available. Nevertheless, Ravensburgh is one of very few sites in Hertfordshire with pottery from the Middle Iron Age (about 400-100 BC) as well as both earlier and later material. Although James Dyer thought that most of the pottery dated from his first construction phase, there is a lot of material from the first century BC through to the Roman Conquest in AD 43. There are also Neolithic and Bronze Age finds, pointing to the long use of the hilltop.

Written by Keith Fitzpatrick-Matthews

Archaeology Tuesdays – Purwell Bathhouse

Published Tuesday 7 February 2023 | By Keith Fitzpatrick-Matthews

In the early 1880s, a tenant farmer of William Ransom found pieces of ‘brick’ on the surface of a field close to Purwell Mill. When Ransom visited, he found Roman pottery, brick and tile. In November 1884, he began digging and found a concrete floor just 0.76 m below the surface. He soon discovered a furnace for heating an under-floor heating system that fed three rooms. Beyond these were more rooms and a corridor.

He recognised that he had found a Roman bathhouse and assumed that it was part of a villa, a large country house. Traces of burning, animal bones and oyster shells covered all the floors. Ransom thought that this showed that ‘some semi-barbarous tribe took possession and dwelt there’. The coins he found in it run from Gallienus to Valentinian II (AD 253-392), while others found nearby included one of Septimius Severus (193-211).

Percival Westell, curator of Letchworth Museum, decided to investigate the site further in the autumn of 1921. His team found the site of Ransom’s excavation and located a tiled corridor about 2 m wide. The finds they made were like those found in 1884, but they decided that the burning was a result of the buildings being destroyed by fire. Walking north of the site of the excavation one afternoon, the team found Roman pottery several hundred metres away, suggesting the site of a second building.

The Cambridge University Committee on Aerial Photography’s aerial photographs from July 1960 show the walls of the building. They reveal that the walls do not extend far beyond those that Ransom found: what he discovered in 1884 was an isolated bathhouse and the main dwelling must have lain elsewhere. The second site discovered by Letchworth Museum in 1921 was perhaps the location of the dwelling. The North Hertfordshire Archaeological Society did fieldwalking north of the bathhouse site in November 1978 and found more worn Roman pottery. Whether this was in the same place as the 1921 discoveries is unclear.

Over the years, illegal metal detecting has stripped the site of metalwork. Some detectorists brought coins into Letchworth Museum, including a coin of Antoninus Pius dated 145 to 161. Mark Curteis, then Assistant Curator of Letchworth Museum, re-examined all the coin finds from the site and concluded that they fall into two groups. One shows activity in and around the bathhouse, which probably began around the year 200. By the 330s, it had gone into decline but continued into the 380s or 390s. The second group of coins derives from a hoard, which Ransom excavated but did not recognise as such (although Westell later did). It dates from the period of the breakaway Gallic Empire of Postumus and his successors (261-274) and was buried in the mid-270s. The person who buried it never came back for it because coins of this period ceased to be legal tender in the later 270s.

Councillor Sam Collins walked around the field early in 2021 and discovered more Roman tile. He contacted the museum and organised fieldwalking one Saturday in September. Most of the finds consisted of pieces of Roman roof tile. There was very little domestic pottery and virtually no oyster shell, both things common where people were living. If this had been a villa site, where was the rubbish left by the people who had lived there?

There is perhaps not a villa at Purwell at all. The bathhouse is low-lying and damp, as Ransom observed in 1884. There is a risk of flooding from the nearby Ninesprings, which suggests an alternative explanation: similar isolated bathhouses close to water have been interpreted as parts of a nymphaeum. This was a temple dedicated to a spring or river, and the bathhouses used water blessed by the nymphs who lived there. A second building, visible on aerial photographs, stood on the hill-spur overlooking the bathhouse and could have been the temple. The burning discovered in 1884 and 1921 could then have been the deliberate destruction of a pagan site by angry Christians in the fourth century, something that has been found on other temple sites.

Questioning received wisdom – the things we think we know to be ‘facts’ – is always good. It is how we make progress, improve knowledge, and increase our understanding of the past. Just because something has been accepted for years does not mean that we should regard it as written in stone. As we find out more about the past and our ideas change, so we should be prepared to alter our interpretations of old discoveries.

Written by Keith Fitzpatrick-Matthews