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NEWSLETTER 34 - April 2003 Welcome
to the Spring Newsletter. The committee met on the 29th March this year and discussed all aspects of the practical running of the group, including accounts, publications, projects, web pages and future conferences. Pam Irving announced the publication and distribution of JRPS Volume 10 Amphorae in Britain and the western empire. The committee would like to thank and congratulate the authors and editorial team in achieving the publication of this journal. This year many of the core members of the committee are coming to the end of their term of office with the President, Secretary, Treasurer and three ordinary members (Kayt Brown, Maggi Darling and Vivien Swan) stepping down. The committee faces a fairly radical shake-up, but this does also provide an opportunity for other SGRP members to play an important role on the running of the group. Please take time to consider if you would like to become a committee member, or know someone who would. Nomination forms can be found towards the end of this Newsletter. Personally I have very much enjoyed my term as Secretary and would like to thank you all for your support over the last three years. Alice Lyon The
Membership -------------------------------------------------------------------------- Conference News Debating Late Antiquity in Britain AD300-700 14-15th June 2003 A conference hosted by the Archaeology Department at the University of York. This conference seeks to bring together researchers of the period AD300-700 in a lively debate. For more details please email James Gerrard (jfg101@york.ac.uk) or visit the conference website: http://www-users.york.ac.uk/~rc132/ SGRP Annual Conference, ‘Form and Function’ 4-6th July 2003. The Claude Gibb Hall, University of Northumbria is booked for the weekend, although lectures and pottery handling sessions will take place at Wallsend Museum and a trip to South Shields has also been organised. Details of this conference and a booking form can be found at the end of this Newsletter. SGRP Annual Conference, ‘Romano-British Pottery and Trade’ 2-4th July 2004. Accommodation will be at the University of North London with lectures and pottery handling sessions at Eagle Wharf. Contact Fiona Seeley Tel (0171) 5669324, fax (0171) 4903855 or email: fseeley@museumoflondon.org.uk SGRP Annual Conference 2005. Location to be announced. S.G.R.P. Website www.sgrp.org The Group’s website continues to grow. The entire contents of Volumes 1 & 2 of the Journal are now up on the website. The National Research Framework, together with the four Regional Documents, Collated and Edited by Steven Willis are all on the website. The last five issues of the Newsletter are also up. I have recently put up on the Queries/Research Section pictures of a Samian Dr 31 bowl with makers stamp and graffiti. I would welcome suggestions as to the potters name, and suggestions on the graffiti. These would then be added to the webpage for the information of other members. I am working on a new section, called Identification of Pottery. The first thing up will be colour pictures plus drawings of Gaulish Coloured Coated Wares from Robin Symonds book on the subject. How to search the sgrp.org website. Open the search engine ‘Google’. Type into the search box the item you are looking for, e.g. Nene Valley Ware. Click on search and many thousands of hits will be listed. Now scroll down to the bottom of the first page and click on ‘Search within results’. A new search box will appear. Type into the search box sgrp.org and click on search. Only those hits that are on the sgrp.org website will appear. Now scroll down to the bottom of the first page and click on Include omitted results. Now the number of hits displayed should be manageable. The Google Search Engine visits the website at least every two weeks and catalogues every word of the contents. If you would like to add an item to the Queries/Research section, or
have any suggestions as to how the website many be developed, please
contact Ted Connell 01474 872763, ted.connell@btinternet.com Sad News On Sunday 13 April 2003 Jaap van der Werff was struck by a cardiac arrest while playing hockey and efforts to resuscitate him had no effect. His wife has asked the news of his death to be made known in archaeological circles. Members of the Study Group may remember him from Fautores meetings at York and Newcastle, and the meeting on Amphora held at the Museum of London in 1994, which has just been published in JRPS 10. His loss is a very sad one for Dutch archaeology and for the study of amphorae in the Roman provinces. -------------------------------------------------------------------------- Notice Board The IFA is launching a consultative process to discuss the future of
archaeological training. For further information about the Archaeology
Training Forum please contact Bob Hook, Secretary, Archaeology Training
Forum, NMRC, Kemble Drive, Swindon, SN2 2GZ, email: bob.hook@rchme.co.uk
or look at www.britarch.ac.uk/training/future.html Back Numbers of JRPS for sale: Volume 6 (1993) Nine general papers including: 3rd century samian ware in Britain - Joanna Bird, Roman Red and Staffordshire Cream - Peter Webster, Pottery function and finewares in the Roman north - Jeremy Evans, A new form of céramique à l'éponge - Mark Wood, Plus the Roman Pottery Bibliography. Price £10 to members Volume 7 (1994) A Corpus of Relief-Patterned Tiles in Roman Britain Ian Betts, Ernest W. Black, & John Gower. Devoted to a comprehensive study of stamped decoration of flue tiles. There is a catalogue of the known patterns and a complete corpus of the known examples of each with their. Price £10 to members Volume 8 (1999) Roman Pottery from Excavations at and near to the Roman Small Town of Durobrivae, Water Newton, Cambridgeshire, 1956-58 Describes excavations in the Nene Valley and its pottery: Lower Nene Valley, cream grey, shell-gritted and mortaria . Price £10 to members Volume 9 (2001) The Roman Pottery Kilns at Rossington Bridge Excavations 1956-1961 by P C Buckland, K F Hartley and V Rigby. Rossington Bridge lies next to the Roman road between Doncaster and Lincoln. Excavations between 1956-1961 discovered eight pottery kilns, a site of considerable significance. The kilns and material from the waster heaps excavated lie on a site with at least fifteen other unexcavated kilns and ancillary structures lying either side of the Roman road. The bulk of the finds clearly belong to the main period of activity on the site during the mid-2nd century when the mortarium potter Sarrius and his associates were involved in the production of mortaria, 'parisian' fine wares, black-burnished and grey wares intended for the military markets on the Northern frontier. 82p, b/w pls . Price £12 to members There is a full contents page of each volume of the Group’s website. If you would like to order copies please send a cheque payable to the Study Group for Roman Pottery, adding £1.50 p&p for each volume, to Ted Connell, 110 Manor Forstal, New Ash Green, Longfield, Kent DA3 8JQ Please remember to keep your contact details up to date, including any
new e-mail addresses. The secretaries contact details are at the end of
this Newsletter. The article below has been submitted by Victoria Bryant of the Worchester Archaeological Unit describing an exciting development in ceramic studies. Worcestershire on-line ceramic fabric and form type-series www.worcestershireceramics.org The Worcestershire on-line fabric and form type-series is the first part of Pottery in Perspective, an innovative project to provide information on the pottery used in Worcestershire from prehistory to c AD 1900. The county fabric series currently contains 250 pottery types dating from the Neolithic to the 19th century and includes types which are of national and international interest. Extensive analysis of ceramic production and consumer sites has resulted in a substantial corpus of illustrated vessel forms. These resources, along with the results of 30 years research and synthesis, are essential to researchers studying material culture in the Worcestershire region, but are not generally easily accessible. The on-line fabric and form type-series brings this data together into one accessible research resource. For each type of pottery the database contains information on:- Fabric, Manufacture, Forms, Source, Distribution, Date In addition there are magnified images of pottery sections to aid identification, together with bibliographical references for each fabric including cross references to other fabric series. The search engine facilitates general and detailed searches. The database you can see now is just a small part of the whole project and will develop over the next two years. At the moment it only contains information on medieval fabrics but, when complete, it will include:- Prehistoric, Roman and post-medieval fabrics (Roman fabrics by June 2003, prehistoric fabrics by December 2003, Post-medieval fabrics by June 2004) Overviews of the ceramic history of the county A form type-series for each fabric with descriptions, images, dates and bibliographies. Information on kiln sites, including text, dates, maps and bibliographies Descriptions and images of thin sections Photographs of typical sherds as well as sections Database of all the pottery assemblages in the county linked to the Historic Environment Record GIS This digital resource will help researchers address the complex economic and social questions generated by the material, and has regional and national applications. At present this is a specialist database, but it is being developed for use in schools as well as in the wider community. We are hoping that the project provides a model for the dissemination of resources using the web. The wider adoption of this model for regional or national fabric and form type-series would provide a resource flexible enough to cope with regional traditions but consistent enough to facilitate the study of widely distributed pottery types. The fabric and form series was developed by the Archaeology Service of
Worcestershire County Council. Its development as an on-line resource is
being undertaken with the Ceramic Research Centre (a partnership between
Worcester Archaeology Service and University College Worcester). The
software was developed by OxfordArchDigital. It is a research resource
which will support the Historic Environment Record for Worcestershire. For
more information on the HER please visit our web site www.worcestershire.gov.uk/archaeology/her-news Treasurer -------------------------------------------------------------------------- THE STUDY GROUP FOR ROMAN POTTERY
ANNUAL WEEKEND CONFERENCE 2003 PROGRAMME -------------------------------------------------------------------------- Alice Lyons, Hon Secretary SGRP, Back to Newsletters Back to SGRP Homepage The Group would welcome
comments upon its WebPages and any information that may be useful to Group
members
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