It was an amazing moment in 1990 in the course of the Historic England (HE) excavations at Stanwick Roman villa, when David Neal uncovered the first piece of sculpted stone, reused as a quoin in the north-eastern corner of the fourth-century villa building.

Removal of the mortar revealed the face of a giant or barbarian, trodden under a horse’s hoof. Excavations of the hypocaust of the villa baths the following week turned up a wealth of other sculpted pieces, triggering re-examination of blocks that had been removed earlier in the works. In total, well over 200 worked blocks of stone were retrieved, many of them architectural or sculptural. The stones were examined at the time by Dr. Martin Henig and the late Dr. Tom Blagg. More recently, as part of work on the Raunds Iron Age and Romano-British project, of which Stanwick is part, HE commissioned Penny Coombe and Kevin Hayward to join Martin and to work with Vicky Crosby of HE, in producing analysis and assessment of the sculpted and architectural stone. This article is the result.

Some of the architectural pieces appear to have come from the villa building, emphasizing the grandeur of the fourth-century building, which also had mosaic floors; others had been reused, originating from an earlier structure. However, the sculptural pieces comprise one of the largest caches from the province of Britannia and evidently derive from at least one or probably two monuments. These date to the second or third century but were wholly dismantled and reused in the fourth-century villa construction.

The authors suggest that the original monuments included a built tomb with relief decoration and another dedicated to Jupiter or the Capitoline triad. Mythological scenes graced the tomb monument, and the authors envisage a reconstruction in the vein of the built tombs found at Neumagen and Igel near Trier. The substantial built tomb of the Procurator C. Julius Classicianus in London offers a parallel in the province from the mid-first century, but the later Stanwick reliefs are considerably more detailed. Relief figures of Jupiter, Juno, and Minerva, an eagle, and a muscular torso perhaps from a figure of Jupiter associate the other monument with the Capitoline Triad, the central deities of the Roman pantheon. An inscription dedicated in honor of the divine house was also found and may be connected to these.

The results of the detailed petrological analysis are presented by Dr. Kevin Hayward, who records 15 different stone types found at the site. These include the exploitation and supply from different parts of the vast East Midland Jurassic limestone escarpment to the villa via the adjacent River Nene and the use of province-wide materials quarried from as far as South York shire and Dorset.

The article – The Sculpted and Architectural Stonework from Stanwick Roman Villa, Northamptonshire – offers greater insight into the supply and provision of stone in the east of Britain in the later Roman period. It provides detailed information on this major collection of relief sculpture and sheds new light on the use of large monuments in Britannia. It is currently free to access via Firstview in Cambridge journal Britannia.

Penny Coombe is about to complete her DPhil, which focuses on a comparison of Roman sculpture from Britain and Germany.

Kevin Hayward is a petrologist, building materials specialist, and expert on the source and use of stone in the south-east of England in the Roman period.