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The Roman Pottery of Kent
by Dr Richard J. Pollard  -  Chapter 4  page 89
Doctoral thesis completed in 1982, published 1988

(ibid., IIF 10) and bead-rim (IIA 17) jars, in contexts dated to around A.D. 120/130. The jars include ‘grey-ware imitations’; the latticed bead-rim jar (no. 114 here) was recognised by Gillam and Mann (1970, fig. 2, no. 14) to be a form produced in BB2, but so far no kiln sites are known to have produced it, and it is extremely rare on sites in Kent (only eight vessels, from four sites, are known to the present author, plus examples from London, Southwark and Enfield — see Appendix 3). The Greenhithe evidence is less reliable, since only single features of each relevant period can be studied, but the site is valuable in this context both for the contrast which its status — a rural farmstead apparently — provides with suburban Southwark, and for the insight which its pottery gives on the development of BB2 in north Kent. A mainly Trajanic pit group is devoid of BB2 (Detsicas 1966, Pit 1; see Appendix 5 here), being dominated by wheel-thrown (44 per cent by vessel rim equivalence) and hand-made (18 per cent) unslipped sandy wares. A large assemblage from a well-stratified rubbish layer of Hadrianic-early Antonine date (ibid., layer 17) contained similar proportions of these fabrics, but also nearly 6 per cent BB2 (Appendix 5). A mid-second century group from an oven (ibid., Oven 1) comprised almost solely sandy wheel-thrown ware (23 per cent) and BB2 (73 per cent). Tyers and Marsh (1978, 580—2) have demonstrated that ‘within a short time of their introduction black-burnished wares (primarily BB2) and their imitations came to dominate the coarse ware assemblage’: this is particularly true of BB2 types in the Antonine period. Unfortunately, the Southwark evidence is presented in the form of an unspecified type of ‘numbers of vessels represented’ analysis, and cannot be compared directly therefore with the statistical evidence compiled by the present author.
   The development of the sand-tempered wheel-thrown ware industry in north Kent led to the apparently rapid demise of other wares in use in the area, both local and 

imported. ‘Patch Grove’ ware at the Lullingstone villa is dated by the excavator (Meates, pers. comm.) mainly to the Flavian-Trajanic period, with examples occurring in Antonine contexts. Other sites in the Darent valley and more westerly areas, such as Joyden’s Wood (Tester and Caiger 1954) and the Otford ‘Charne’ site (Meates 1954) do not provide sufficient stratified sequences to enable the decline of ‘Patch Grove’ ware to be dated; it is clear that large ‘storage’ jars continued to be used throughout west Kent, and even east of the Medway, to the end of the second century and into the third, as were shell-tempered storage jars. It can be assumed with confidence that few, if any, ‘Highgate Wood type’ or ‘Brockley Hill-Verulamium’ jars or bowls were imported into west Kent after the Hadrianic period, since these virtually disappeared from Southwark within the first half of the second century, in the case of ‘Highgate Wood’ types as early as c. A.D. 130 (Tyers and Marsh 1978, 581).
   The introduction of BB2 in the south-east of Britain also stifled the small-scale trade (up the Thames Estuary) in BB1, presumably from Dorset (cf. Williams 1977), that took place during the Hadrianic period. At this time the hand-made; sand-tempered, ‘Black-burnished ware 1’ from Dorset was becoming established in the northern military zone (Gillam 1973), and also in the Severn estuary region (Williams 1977, 200). The occurrence of flange-rim dishes and bead-lip everted rim jars (nos. 100—101 here) at Southwark, London and Enfield in Hadrianic early Antonine contexts implies the extension of this coastal trade to the Thames Estuary also; however, second century BB1 forms are extremely uncommon elsewhere in the south-east (Fig. 35 and Appendix 3) and occur in contexts avowedly earlier than the very late second century only at Richborough. This suggests that the Thames cargoes were transported to London alone, from which a very limited redistribution was achieved. The Richborough vessels

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