Brockley Hill Mortaria Kilns
About
Fourteen kilns strung along Watling Street at Brockley Hill turned this Middlesex ridge into Roman Britain's mortaria capital, supplying roughly half of the grinding bowls used across the province at its peak. Production started around 60 CE, twelve miles from Londinium on the road to Verulamium, exactly where the itinerary places the lost posting-station of Sulloniacae. Before these kilns were excavated, scholars assumed Britain imported every mortarium it used from the continent. Trajan's reign found the site past its peak but still working; output finally tailed off after 120 CE and stopped by 160.
What happened here
The workshop runs as a production line. Clay is dug locally, weathered over winter, kneaded and thrown, or pressed into moulds for the decorated wares. Vessels are dried under cover, stamped with the potter's name, stacked in the kiln around a central flue and fired for days with the temperature judged by eye and by test pieces pulled from a port in the side. A big firing holds tens of thousands of pots and a bad one loses the lot. Wasters are dumped in heaps beside the works. Some workshops export across half the empire and their stamps turn up thousands of miles away. Fuel is the limit on everything, so kilns sit near woodland and move when it runs out.
Sources
- UCL, 'Verulamium Region White Ware Production at the Roman kiln site of Brockley Hill'
- Perseus, Princeton Encyclopedia of Classical Sites, 'Sulloniacae'
Nearby
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