An Augustan Dressel 2-4 Stamped Amphora from Chapel Street, Chichester. avid Williams, Ian Scrivener-Lindley and Nicola Dowsett write: During the spring of 2007, Nicola Dowsett, a ceramics conservation student at West Dean College near Chichester, was asked by Chichester District Museum to undertake repairs and conservation on the top half of a broken Roman amphora as part of her graduate diploma studies. The amphora, which was represented by a collection of some 16-odd broken sherds, had been kept in the museum stores since the 1930s. The only specific reference to the finding of the amphora is in the Chichester Museum Accession Register, entry 487, which records a gift from W.L. White in 1939 of 'the mouth and shoulders (bearing potters marks) of a Roman amphora, found in Chapel Street'. There are no records of archaeological material being found in Chapel Street prior to the 1930s and it seems likely that the amphora was one of a number of pottery finds recovered from digging gas main trenches there between 1934 and 1935. The Chichester District Historic Environment Record contains a record of what would today be termed a watching-brief, carried out during trenching by 'the Gas Company' along West Street and Chapel Street in Chichester. The ground-works were watched over by Raymond Carlyon-Britton and William Llewellyn White. Although never fully written up, a brief account of the discoveries for 1934 was published in Sussex Notes and Queries. 94 The remains uncovered included walls of a Roman town-house with part of a tessellated floor and a '... considerable amount of pottery of several periods ...'. It was also noted that some of the finds were to be reserved for the city museum '... when it is fully established'. The gas main trenches were probably some of the first major disturbances to have taken place in Chichester's streets in the twentieth century; clearly Carlyon-Britton and White had acted upon this opportunity for archaeological discovery. Carlyon-Britton was a noted coin collector, the son of a founder of the British Numismatics Society. Both he and White were instrumental in the eventual establishment of a museum for Chichester in the former chancel of the Greyfriars church in Priory Park, their own collections forming a substantial part of the museum's displays. The 1930s proved to be an eventful decade for archaeology in Chichester and a number of important discoveries were made. Carlyon-Britton located the site of the amphitheatre on the south-east side of the city in 1934 and some limited trial-trenching was carried out there the following year by White's daughter Molly, later Lady Grahame Clark. Between 1934 and 1937 Carlyon-Britton and White also carried out the first planned excavations of the Roman cremation and inhumation cemetery at St Paneras outside the east gate of the city. The restored amphora, which has an almost complete rim, neck and attached bifid handles, belongs to the Dressel 2-4 classification (fig. 9).95 The Chichester example is distinctive as a hand-specimen, for the rather coarse fabric appears to contain much 'black sand' caused by the presence of frequent dark green crystals of augite.96 This visually distinctive fabric has been sourced to the region around the Bay of Naples and is especially associated with the towns of Pompeii and Herculaneum.97 It was used extensively, both for the local pottery and also for building materials such as brick and tile. The Dressel 2-4 amphora form (Koan type) was based on prototypes from the Aegean island of Cos and in Italy replaced the larger, thickerwalled Dressel 1 . It has a simple bead rim and a neck that tapers gently inwards towards a marked carination at the shoulder, with a body that tends to be cylindrical, leading to a short solid spike.98 The handles, which comprise two parallel clay shafts looted together into a characteristic bifid section, are flexed and join the amphora immediately below the rim and on the shoulder close to the junction with the neck. However, within this general type description there is some slight variation in shape depending on origin. This form is particularly common in the early Empire and was made in many different parts of the western and eastern Mediterranean, and to some extent in the northern Roman provinces as well, including Britain at Brockley Hill.99 In Italy, Campania was an important production area and several kiln sites are known in the north of the region, including Sinuessa/Mondragone,100 Falciano, Masseria Zannini, near Masseria Corbo, Masseria Pagliare, Santuario della Gran Celsa, Masseria Starza,
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May 12, 2013
Chris Downey 
Open Access
