By Mr. and Mrs. B. H. Cunnington. 87 



upper and lower strata of the ditches. Certain kinds of ware and 

 types of vessels were seen to occur below, that were absent or only 

 poorly represented above, while wares and types appeared above 

 that were entirely unknown below. 



In the lower half, the pottery consisted entirely of bowls or 

 cooking pots with bead or inbent rims, and of a few other types 

 that are found elsewhere in association with the bowls — rim 

 sherds of the bowls themselves being actually more numerous 

 than those of all the other vessels put together in the proportion 

 of about one to four. 1 



1 This type of vessel is also described as a " cooking pot with inbent rim," 

 or as the " Haltern cooking pot." The bowls from Casterley appear to be 

 identical with the cooking pots found at Haltern and described by Loeschcke 

 under type 58 {Mitteilungen der Alter turns- Kommission Jiir Westfalen V. 

 1909, Die Keramischen Funde, by S. Loeschcke, p. 240). Loeschcke believes 

 the vessels found at Haltern to have been made at the Roman potteries at 

 Xanten, but that they are Belgian in form, and copied from handmade 

 Belgian models, these earlier handmade pots also occurring at Haltern and 

 being described under types 91a, 91b. The occupation of Haltern is stated 

 to have lasted only about a quarter of a century, and to have been not 

 earlier than the year 11 B.C. and not later than 10 or 16 A.D. The 

 rim described by Loeschcke as the least common and probably the latest 

 form of the "bead rim" at Haltern (Abb. 38-c, p. 241) is almost the only 

 form found at Casterley. The fact that it is found at Haltern at all shows 

 that this form was already developed not later than 16 A.D. Loeschcke 

 thinks that with certain changes this type of rim survived into the third 

 century,but the evidence as regards Wiltshire suggests the disappearance of 

 these bowls as early as the end of the first century. 



Mr. Thos. May, in his valuable paper on "The Roman Pottery in the 

 York Museum" (reprintedfrom the " Reports of 'the Yorkshire Philosophical 

 Society, 1912, p. 86), states that the "inbent rims " of later date are more 

 upright and end in triangular or heart-shaped thickenings. Mr. May states 

 that the " bead-rim bowl " or " Haltern cooking pot " appears to have been 

 widely distributed in the east and south of Britain in the first half of the 

 first century, and cites the bowls from Casterley as illustrated in the 

 " Catalogue of the Antiquities in the Devizes Museum, Part II." 



There is evidence to show that the " bead-rim bowl " type did not survive 

 here to any extent to the end of the first century. Among a large collection 

 of pottery from a Romano- British site at Westbury, Wilts, in the Museum 

 at Devizes, including first century Samian, there is not a single fragment of 

 a " bead-rim " bowl ; the type is scarcely to be found at all in the pottery 

 from the several Roman villas represented in the Museum. In the early 

 occupation of the Roman fort at Newstead, dating (it is said) from about 



