Lecture

Talk by Neville Lyons, relative of the co-founder of J Lyons & Co

Talk by Michael Hyman, Editor MASCOT for the Assn of Singer Car Owners

Talk by Nigel Hills, of the Airship Association

Talk by Douglas Rose, London historian and information designer

NB This meeting is on Monday.

Ruth Shaffrey is a worked stone specialist currently working at Oxford Archaeology. She has reported on querns from several Surrrey sites and recently had a paper published in Surrey Archaeological Collections, 110, 71-142  Roman Ewell: a review of the querns and millstones and implications for our understanding of the organisation of grain processing.

Site director, Emma Corke, will update us on recent fieldwork at Cocks Farm Abinger. Work in the field adjacent to the scheduled Roman villa, targeted using the results of magnetometry, has revealed a concentration of Iron Age grain storage pits, enclosure ditches and related activity, Romano-British field boundaries and agricultural ditches, and evidence for Bronze Age activity on the site (up to 2017 season). 

David Graham, RSG vice-chairman, will be talking to us on archaeology in the East Hampshire border area, centred around the Romano-British small town of Neatham. He will draw together evidence for RB activity such as villas, a bath house, cemeteries and a pottery industry.

Garum was a favourite condimentof the Romans. It was made made from the fermented blood and innards of selected fish and was produced across the empire to meet the wide demand. Luckily, ancient sources describe the different types of garum and how it was made. The written sources are complemented by evidence from Pompeii, and it appears to have been a very lucrative trade. Salt was also a significant contributor to the Roman economy, and was vital to the preservation of foodstuffs including meat, dairy and fish.

Martyn Allen is well known to many in the Roman Studies Group, having talked to us previously, and as a freelance osteoarchaeologist he has provided expert bone  reports for some of our excavations. He is  currently a Post-Excavation Project Manager working for Oxford Archaeology Ltd. His  research focuses on the settlement and agricultural economy of late Iron Age and Roman Britain, with an emphasis on the zooarchaeological evidence.