Lorica segmentata from Caerleon

[Caratacus]

Looking at the structural evidence, I'd guess that one of the walls collapsed inwards, burying some of the contents.

Although it may well be very premature as yet to say what might have happened here (and, of course, it's more likely that we will never know for sure), there are some oddities. Apart from this one room, everything seems to have been cleaned out of the other rooms in this warehouse. Only in this one was the armour scattered all over the floor. In some ways, it is very suggestive of the the so-called 'armoury' at Carnuntum. When von Groller excavated this, it seemed as though the armour was stored on shelving against the walls and that when the place was demolished/burned down, the shelves came off the walls and scattered the contents all over the floor.

The armour here does not look like a hoard (as with Corbridge and also the BT excavation at Caerleon) which had been gathered together for reprocessing. If this were the case, it might have been expected that the metallic objects would be more or less in one place. This looks almost like it was simply discarded as being of no further use. It may have been in that store-room for some time and when they came to clean the block out, this was simply left there, strewn over the floor, because they couldn't be bothered to do anything further with it! Sounds sad, I know! You can almost imagine some Roman supply officer going through the lot: "Well have this, but [throwing it over his shoulder] this is no b**** use to anyone!"

Mike Thomas
(Caratacus)