Alderney's Roman artefacts could point to a larger haul
ALDERNEY'S oldest Roman artefacts have been uncovered in a stash of more than 500 pottery fragments which were handed to the island as a gift.
The haul stemmed from a dig on Longis Common in the 1950s by a group of history enthusiasts from the UK. The pieces were recently forwarded to the Alderney Society by the wife of someone who took part in the dig as a student.
The fragments have been identified as various styles of military pottery ware dating to the period AD70-180.
Historians have long been keen to find the local 'tip' of what is believed to have been a military or civilian Roman settlement on Longis Common – and think this haul may have come from such a site.
'We have a military assemblage of 500 pieces of Roman pottery connected to a site on Longis Common, indicating that there was a military garrison on Alderney in the first and second centuries AD,' said Guernsey Museums director Dr Jason Monaghan, who recently presented a talk on the find for the Alderney Society. 'The pottery is much earlier than the Nunnery, which was probably built in AD 370 and used into the fifth century.
'We didn't have anything to indicate an earlier presence before coming across this find, so it's quite exciting.'
