Abstract
AT an early date Tasmania will receive from the Corporation of the City of London a gift of a number of antiquities found within the boundaries of the City. This gift is made under a scheme of the Corporation for promoting in the Dominions and Dependencies an interest in the past history and culture of the central city of the Empire. The collection for Tasmania, which will be housed at Hobart, will include, according to a list given in The Times of December 22, some one hundred and forty objects, classified under sixty-eight headings, illustrating daily life in London throughout the centuries from Roman to medieval times. About one half of the objects belong to the Roman period. Among them are coins of eight emperors, bone pins and needles, bone and bronze spoons, knives, iron nails and wooden writing tablets. Among the pottery objects is an example of the work of Eucarpus, a lamp-maker working in London at about A.D. 100, many of whose lamps have been found. There is also a mixing bowl of about the same date, such as seems to have been in use in most Roman kitchens. It is of coarse white ware, roughened on the inside with grit. It bears the stamp of the maker—Albinus of Lyons. Samian ware, so-called, is represented by, among other pieces, three bowls and some fragments of the more elaborate decorated work. There are several of the leather soles of the Roman shoes which are frequently found in London in a good state of preservation. Pottery forms a large proportion of the medieval exhibits ; but there are also examples of tradesmen's tokens, bronze jettons' or 'casters', used in keeping accounts and making calculations in the Middle Ages, wine bottles, and other domestic objects, including examples of the familiar clay smoking pipes of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.
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Antiquities from London for Tasmania. Nature 142, 1150–1151 (1938). https://doi.org/10.1038/1421150c0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/1421150c0