History beneath our feet

Colin Smale reveals some of the many historical artefacts found in the county.

Lincolnshire is one of the best counties in the UK in which to find ancient coins and artefacts.

If you could clear away today’s landscape and reveal that of Roman or Saxon times, you might be very surprised by what there once was near you. Your house may well have been right in the middle of a settlement site that has long been forgotten. While weeding her garden in Cleethorpes, one elderly lady pulled out a 1,000 year-old Saxon finger ring. It begs the question, what happened there 1,000 years ago?

Pottery shard
Discoveries can surface at the turn of the archaeologist’s trowel, the farmer’s plough or from the beep of a metal detectorist’s machine. Sometimes the coin or artefact is immediately recognisable for what it is, such as a button, but more often than not the item is enigmatic, such as the strange bit of pottery shown in PIC 1.

What could this be? It was obviously created for a purpose.

According to recent research, this type of perforated pottery was used to separate cheese curd from whey; it was for making cheese and had been used as such for well over 7,000 years! This has been loosely dated as Romano-British (AD 43-410).

Buttons
I mentioned buttons – well, ancient buttons can also be more interesting than you might expect. Just take a look at the one pictured here (PIC 2), known as a ‘livery button’, found on farmland in Caistor.

It shows a covered wagon pulled by two horses, and you can even see the harnesses around it. It reads ‘Brocklesby Caister’. It’s a bus and dates from around 1770-1850! Today’s Caistor was obviously yesterday’s Caister because such a wagon is hardly likely to have plied between Lincolnshire and Caister in Norfolk.

Celtic gold!
Well, treasure in the form of gold or silver does surface from time to time and PIC 3 shows a Celtic gold stater of Dumnocoveros, ruler or king based in the English East Midlands around the time of the Roman conquest of Britain.

He is traditionally thought to have been a ruler of our own (Lincolnshire) Celtic tribe, the Corieltavi, sometimes called the Coritani, who inhabited this region in the Roman period and perhaps before.

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