Now THAT jigsaw wasn't built in a day! Experts recreate 2,000-year-old Roman frescoes from thousands of fragments of wall plaster
Experts have reconstructed 2,000-year-old Roman frescoes from thousands of fragments in a remarkable archaeological achievement.
The parts were discovered at a site in Southwark, near London Bridge and Borough Market, during an excavation in 2021.
It has revealed one of the largest and most significant collections of painted Roman wall plaster ever found in the capital.
Archaeologists from the Museum of London Archaeology (MOLA) have spent four years carefully analysing and assembling the shattered remnants, which once adorned at least 20 internal walls of a high-status Roman building.
Dating between AD 40 and 150, the frescoes were discarded into a pit during the early third century when the building was demolished.
Now, the reconstructed wall art is offering fresh insight into elite life in Roman Britain.
The frescoes feature vibrant yellow panels, a rare design choice in Roman wall painting, framed by bold black intervals and richly decorated with images of birds, fruit, flowers, and lyres.
Their scale and style point to both the wealth and refined taste of the building's occupants.
It took three months for Mola senior building material specialist Han Li to lay out all the fragments and reconstruct the designs to their original place.
He said: 'This has been a 'once-in-a-lifetime' moment, so I felt a mix of excitement and nervousness when I started to lay the plaster out.
'Many of the fragments were very delicate, and pieces from different walls had been jumbled together when the building was demolished, so it was like assembling the world's most difficult jigsaw puzzle.
'I was lucky to have been helped by my colleagues in other specialist teams for helping me arrange this titanic puzzle as well as interpret ornaments and inscriptions, including Ian Betts and the British School at Rome, who gave me their invaluable opinions and resources.
'The result was seeing wall paintings that even individuals of the late Roman period in London would not have seen.'
Speaking to the Today programme on BBC Radio 4, Mr Li said: 'When you are looking at thousands of fragments of wall paintings every day, you start to commit everything to memory.
'You are sometimes working when you are sleeping as well.
'There was one time that I thought that this fragment goes here, and I woke up, and it actually happened, so you could say I was working a double shift.
'But it's a beautiful end result.'
One fragment features the face of a crying woman with a Flavian period (AD 69-96) hairstyle, hinting at the time period it may have been created.
Work to further explore each piece of plaster continues.
Among the reconstructed pieces is an extraordinary discovery: a fragment bearing the Latin word 'fecit', which means 'has made this' within a tabula ansata, a stylised frame commonly used to sign artwork in the Roman world.
While the portion containing the painter's name is missing, it remains the first known example of a signed Roman wall painting ever found in Britain.
Another rare find is graffiti featuring the ancient Greek alphabet, believed to be the only example of its kind uncovered in Roman Britain.
The neatly scored letters suggest the writer was skilled, ruling out the possibility of it being simple writing practice.
Other fragments were designed to imitate expensive wall tiles, including red Egyptian porphyry, a volcanic stone speckled with crystals, and African giallo antico, a richly veined yellow marble.
These imitation materials, coupled with the exotic imagery, reveal that the owners drew inspiration from across the Roman Empire, with stylistic links to frescoes found in Xanten and Cologne in Germany, and Lyon in France.
Adding to the picture of opulence and artistic flair is a fragment featuring the face of a crying woman with a hairstyle typical of the Flavian period (AD 69–96), hinting at the age and style of the original decoration.
With further work ongoing to examine and catalogue every fragment, the project continues to unlock stories from London's Roman past, one painstakingly reassembled piece at a time.
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