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Enormous Roman ‘puzzle' reveals rare luxury frescoes, ancient graffiti
Archaeologists in London have pieced together the shattered remains of an enormous collection of Roman frescoes in a painstaking three-month project, revealing artworks not seen for more than 1,800 years — including some found in Britain for the first time.
It's one of the largest discoveries of painted Roman plaster in the English capital, according to the Museum of London Archaeology (MOLA), which is leading excavations at the Liberty development site where the remains were found.
The 220,000-square-foot site, which will eventually be home to houses, restaurants, retail and offices in the city's south, has already yielded other findings from Roman London, including mosaics and a rare mausoleum, MOLA said in a statement Thursday.
MOLA senior building material specialist Han Li described the process as 'like assembling the world's most difficult jigsaw puzzle' in the statement. 'I felt a mix of excitement and nervousness when I started to lay the plaster out. Many of the fragments were very delicate and pieces from different walls had been jumbled together when the building was demolished,' he said.
The collection includes luxurious frescoes and ancient graffiti that once covered about 20 walls of a Roman building from between A.D. 43-150, in the ancient town of Londinium, now the site of modern-day London, MOLA said.
However at some point before A.D. 200 the building was demolished, with the decorated plaster smashed into thousands of fragments and dumped in a pit, where they lay until they were excavated between 2021 and 2022. Li said they were cleaned by a team of field workers before he worked with others to match colors and patterns until 'before you know it, you've got a lot of the wall.'
'Slowly I realized, oh, my God … the scale of what we can put back together and the amount of decorations, the diversity of motifs, it was incredible,' he told The Washington Post in a phone interview Thursday. 'Within a few days we realized just how much potential this had in terms of telling us about Roman paintings and, and indeed Roman archaeology.'
'What makes this sort of special is the scale of it,' he said. '… The completeness of the preservation is incredible, and that's actually what is really quite sort of stunning for me,' he said.
The paintings revealed two things that had not been found in Britain before — a Greek alphabet inscription and a fragment containing the remains of the artist's signature, MOLA said.
The fragment has the word 'FECIT,' which translates to 'has made this,' the museum said, providing a 'tangible link' to one of the artists behind the fresco.
It is framed by a tabula ansata, which is a carving of a decorative tablet used to sign artwork in the Roman world, MOLA said. Though a fragment piece containing the signature itself was missing, the writing was done with 'incredible' penmanship, showing the person who originally wrote it is 'obviously very fluent in the language and also very, very skilled at writing,' Li added.
The frescoes also showed images designed to reflect the status of the building's owners including flowers, fruit, lyres and birds, as well as large bright yellow panels that were rarely used in the Roman period, MOLA said.
'Usually what's very common in the 1st and 2nd centuries in Rome and Britain and to an extent in northwestern Europe, is you get red panels with black intervals. So red panels are actually incredibly, incredibly common, but yellow panels ... you don't see many of those at all,' Li said.
Fragments showed the original artists took inspiration from other parts of the Roman world such as Lyon in France and Cologne in Germany. Some pieces were designed to imitate high-status tiles such as red Egyptian porphyry — a volcanic stone speckled with crystals and African giallo antico — a type of yellow marble. 'Another fragment features the face of a crying woman with a Flavian period (A.D. 69-96) hairstyle,' MOLA added.
Li said he now has an 'infinite' number of questions about the site including what it was used for and who painted it. He said his team suspects it may be the same artists who worked on another site in London, known as the Fishbourne Roman villa, which he described as a 'proto palace' dating back to the 1st century, that contained similar yellow paneling.
They're also searching for parallels within the 'greater Roman world' including modern-day France, Belgium and Germany to see if the same artists may have worked elsewhere. 'Because of the sheer large assemblage and the completeness of our wall plaster, we can now, you know, do a lot more internationally and collaboratively,' he said.
