Fragments of Time

When archaeologists began excavating at a redevelopment site in London, they stumbled across thousands of fragments of shattered plaster.  

They didn’t know yet that they had stumbled on treasure.  

But after three months of piecing shattered plaster fragments back together, they discovered they were magnificent Roman artwork in the form of frescoes unseen for more than 1,800 years. 

“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,” senior building material specialist Han Li said in a statement. “Many of the fragments were very delicate, and pieces from different walls had been jumbled together when the building was demolished. It was like assembling the world’s most difficult jigsaw puzzle.” 

As the process to piece the remains back together progressed, images of birds, fruit, and even lyres, an instrument similar to a harp, began to emerge. Li also surprisingly found yellow panel designs with black intervals. 

“Usually what’s very common in the 1st and 2nd centuries in Rome and Britain and to an extent in northwestern Europe, is you get red panels with black intervals,” Li told the Washington Post. “So red panels are actually incredibly, incredibly common, but yellow panels, …you don’t see many of those at all.” 

The plaster also revealed ancient graffiti left behind by the villa’s owners and visitors, including an engraving of a near-complete Greek alphabet. Similar examples from Italy indicate that the alphabet had a practical use, like a checklist, tally, or reference. 

Cornered by a tabula ansata, a carving of a decorative tablet used to sign artwork in the Roman world, Li spotted the Latin word ‘FECIT’, meaning “has made this.” This could have been a rare link to the work’s artist but the fragment is broken where the painter’s signature would have appeared, meaning their identity remains a mystery. 

The remains are one of the largest collections of painted Roman plaster ever found in the city, which, thousands of years ago under Roman rule, was known as Londinium. They were discovered in 2021 at the Liberty site, a 220,000-square-foot redevelopment project that will eventually host homes, restaurants, retail outlets, and offices. Archaeologists had found other artifacts from Roman London at the site, such as mosaics and a rare mausoleum. 

Meanwhile, the researchers think the frescos once decorated around 20 internal walls of a luxurious Roman building that was torn down before 200 CE.  

The reconstruction indicates that the painters behind the frescoes were likely inspired by wall decorations in other parts of the Roman world, such as Xanten and Cologne in Germany, and Lyon in France. The Roman owners of the building wanted these paintings to showcase both their wealth and their artistic taste, researchers said. 

While the purpose of the building is not yet clear, the frescoes suggest it may have partly been used as a commercial property involved with storage or the distribution of storage jars and vessels reaching London by ship from other regions of the Roman Empire.