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The Roman Pottery of Kent
by Dr Richard J. Pollard  -  Chapter 4  page 90
Doctoral thesis completed in 1982, published 1988

could represent the occasional landing of a small part of the cargo at the Wantsum Channel port, or the dumping of vessels found to have been broken in transit. Fulford (1981, 202—3) has suggested that Dorset BB1 was transported up the west coast of Britain as a makeweight in cargoes of official supplies of essential commodities such as grain, rather than as a cargo by itself. The very small quantities of BB1 reaching the London area over a period of perhaps twenty years would also seem to fit this hypothesis of a subsidiary cargo; it is plausible that the burgeoning provincial capital required commodities that could be supplied from the south-west, perhaps food-stuffs or raw materials. The development of the BB2 industry in the Thames estuary and Colchester presumably rendered even this minor level of long-distance trade in coarse pottery unviable.
   The introduction of BB2 to the range of coarse pottery current in west Kent in the second quarter of the second century is a manifestation of a highly popular fashion for lattice-decorated everted rim jars and triangular-rim pie-dishes. Not only are these forms ubiquitous in west Kent in slipped, wheel-thrown wares (Figs. 25 and 30), but there is also a variety of unslipped, sand-tempered, often hand-made vessels extant from sites of the Hadrianic-early Antonine period which imitate ‘genuine’ BB2 in varying degrees of accuracy. Such vessels comprise nearly one quarter of the pottery from the rubbish deposit of this period at Greenhithe (e.g. nos. 107—109 here; see Appendix 5), in contrast with their total of only 7 per cent in the mainly Trajanic pit from that site. Early ‘BB2 imitations’ have also been recorded by the present author from Charlton, the Otford ‘Charne’ site and Springhead (all unpublished); Williams (1977, 198) considered that two vessels from Rochester (Harrison and Flight 1968, fig. 13, nos. 18 and 19) were in the same fabric as the Greenhithe vessels. It is conceivable also that the triangular-rimmed pie-dishes from Southwark published as BB1, but without parallels in the

north of the province, are in fact ‘BB2 imitations’ of local production (Tyers and Marsh 1978, type IVG 3, dated to c. A.D. 120—150+), although they occur somewhat earlier at this site than ‘genuine’ BB2 pie-dishes (ibid; type IVH). The development of the BB2 industry of the lower Thames is discussed further below (5.II; 6.V). It should be noted here that the present author contends Williams’ allocation of the Greenhithe material described above as BB2, on the grounds that it is neither slipped nor, in some cases, wheel-thrown (Pollard 1981a).
   The ‘imitation’ BB2 of Greenhithe and elsewhere did not remain in production later than the. early Antonine period. However, bead-rim jars and necked jar-bowls in grey sandy wheel-thrown wares continued to be made alongside BB2 throughout the timespan of the latter. Bead-rim jars probably declined in usage during the third quarter of the second century: kilns producing BB2 wares of c. A.D. 180-plus forms did not include bead-rim jars amongst the associated unslipped grey wares (see below), and the ratio of bead-rim to BB2 everted-rim jars in a deposit of c. A.D. 150—220/250 at Rochester is markedly lower than that in a deposit of c. A.D. 90—180 from the same site (2:7 and 7:5, respectively; Pollard 1981a). The Greenhithe sequence (Detsicas 1966: quantification by the present author) also exhibits a fall-off in the discard of bead-rim jars against BB2 everted-rim jars. The necked jar-bowl appears to have been used in smaller numbers than either of these forms during the Hadrianic to mid-Antonine period. In contrast with the production of jars and necked forms in BB2, burnished wares and plain wares, dishes appear to have been regularly produced only in BB2 during this time. The lattice-decorated pie-dish, found on kiln sites at Higham (Kiln C: Catherall 1983) and Chalk (Allen 1954) in Kent, was by far the most common form, with plain and decorated dog-dishes, and pie-dishes with oblique or wavy linear motifs (nos. 182 and 112 here) comprising the

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