A Local Study of Romano-British Fabrics in Kent
by Christopher St. John Breen of DDAG
The chosen study area is presently a crude triangle bounded at its three apex points by (1) Springhead, to the east, (2) Welling High Street to the west, and (3) Kemsing to the south.
In January 1982, the writer commenced afresh the personal examination of every sherd from every known Romano-British site in Dartford and the surrounding area and to date has a record of the sherds from some 140 sites. The Romano-British Fabric Record (RBFR) of the Dartford & District Archaeological Group (DDAG) "calls" for the description and site of every R-B sherd and its fabric in the area.
The purpose of RBFR is to provide a personally examined and recorded site occurrence rate of any chosen fabric in the area and its vessel form class series. RBFR is an aid for archive and/or report preparation for eventual publication, not a substitute.
It follows that as the database expands, so the actual picture of fabric/vessels is sharpened until evidence is available to comment on source, use, trade, distribution, and dating of fabrics within the RBFR data banks.
The system recognizes a maxim - that all the sherds from a site only represent an unknown percentage that originally existed in use and were subsequently discarded in, on, or about that site, during that site's "life". It follows that any one layer on any site is dated overall on the life-span of the known fabrics.
A study of each sherd and its RBFR, repeated site after site in an area, means that the data on a specific fabric as to its vessel form extent can be quickly built up.
If, in a given area, one ignores the following:
- unstratified sherds from any site;
- sherds from unpublished sites;
- sherds from poorly published sites;
- sherds from unrecorded but known find spot sites;
then one is giving a false picture of the actual fabric variability that exists. The results from DDAG's RBFR system are clearly promising in all directions given the exhaustive approach adopted.
