Roman ‘jigsaw' reveals 2,000-year-old wall paintings
Archaeologists have spent four years working on thousands of fragments of shattered plaster discovered at a site in 2021 in Southwark, near London Bridge station and Borough Market.
The researchers have pieced together the artwork of a high-status Roman building.
It is believed the frescoes decorated at least 20 internal walls between AD 40 and 150, before the building was demolished and the wall plaster dumped into a pit before the start of the third century.
The reconstruction of the wall art has shed further light on high society in Roman Britain.
The paintings display yellow panel designs with black intervals, decorated with images of birds, fruit, flowers and lyres. They demonstrate both the wealth and taste of the building's owners, according to the excavation team at the Museum of London Archaeology (Mola).
Yellow panel designs were scarce in the Roman period, and repeating yellow panels found at the site in Southwark were even scarcer, making the discovery extremely rare.
Among the fragments is rare evidence of a painter's signature – the first known example of this practice in Britain.
Framed by a 'tabula ansata', a carving of a decorative tablet used to sign artwork in the Roman world, it contains the Latin word 'fecit', which translates to 'has made this'.
But the fragment is broken where the painter's name would have appeared, meaning their identity will likely never be known.
Unusual graffiti of the ancient Greek alphabet has also been reconstructed – the only example of this inscription found to date in Roman Britain.
The precision of the scored letters suggests that it was done by a proficient writer and not someone undertaking writing practice.
It took three months for Han Li, a Mola senior building material specialist, to lay out all the fragments and reconstruct the designs to their original place.
He said: 'This has been a 'once-in-a-lifetime' moment, so I felt a mix of excitement and nervousness when I started to lay the plaster out... The result was seeing wall paintings that even individuals of the late Roman period in London would not have seen.'
Work to further explore each piece of plaster continues.
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