Society grant for work on an inscribed lead tablet from the Roman Roadside Settlement at Nettleton/Rothwell, near Caistor, Lincolnshire.
I write to record my thanks to theSPRS for the award of £500 for work on the inscribed lead tablet from the Roman Roadside Settlement at Nettleton/Rothwell, near Caistor, Lincolnshire.
I am grateful to the Society for making these funds available via the Hugh Last and Donald Atkinson Fund grant scheme and can supply the following progress report. The grant has assisted with the reading of the tablet, together with its cleaning and conservation. The tablet was a surface find recovered in the late summer of 2011. Dr Roger Tomlin examined the tablet in its 'raw' condition prior to any specialist treatment during the first half of last year (2012). He was able to decipher quite a proportion of the content and make a drawing of the inscription. The inscription is in fourth-century New Roman Cursive and both faces carry the inscription. On the basis of this reading he prepared a note on the tablet for inclusion in Britannia and this appears in the current issue (Vol. 43 for 2012, P. 403). The inscribed text is preserved to varying degrees and some text is seemingly lost. Dr Tomlin supplied the present author with a fuller interim transcript and commentary; the text includes, on one side, a listing of nine personnel names, preceded by a top line wherein, on provisional reading, the wordfurem ('thief') might be read. Overall the text is not straightforward and whilst it may be a curse following a theft, the formula and grammar are not consistent with normal practice with such documents.
Following this provisional reading the tablet then went to the Department of Archaeology at Durham University where Jennifer Jones undertook the cleaning, consolidation and conservation of the item. The opportunity was taken to subject the tablet to Reflectance Transformation Imaging (RTI) and the photographic images have been processed using dedicated software (this being the work of GeoffVeitch at Durham). It is hoped that the multiple images taken with this 'raking light' method across the two surfaces of the tablet will help with further discernment of inscribed details. The tablet was returned to Dr Tomlin towards the end of 2012 along with a copy of the digital photography. Dr Tomlin intends to have a further phase of examination of the tablet and digital images during the first half of this year. A full report will appear in the site publication which the writer is presently working on. The assistance of the Society and the specialists involved isacknowledged.
Dr Steve Willis, University of Kent, April 2013