Chesters Museum

Chesters Museum building, Northumberland.

Part of the collection of inscriptions. Chesters Museum, Northumberland.

Chesters Museum, Northumberland.

Chesters Museum, Northumberland.

Date: 2nd to 3rd century AD Material: Sandstone Site: Chesters Fort Here Juno Regina, one of the Capitoline Triad – the three deities who shared a temple on the Capitoline Hill in Rome – is standing on a heifer (a female cow). She is dressed in a long-sleeved tunic, mantle and apron, with a toothed necklace around her neck. The standard of craftsmanship is unusually high for work carved in the province of Britannia, and there have been suggestions that the statue was the work of an eastern sculptor based on Hadrian’s Wall. This statue is thought to be the companion to a statue of Jupiter Dolichenus standing on a bull, trampling a serpent, of which only the serpent and the hooves of the bull remain.

These spiky pieces of iron were thrown down to stop cavalry charges. They would severely injure horses' hooves! Chesters Museum, Northumberland.

Date: 2nd to 3rd century AD Material: Ceramic Findspot: Coventina’s Well These incense burners are made from rough clay normally used for tiles. They are highly decorated and inscribed with dedications but have a home-made feel to them in their design and finish. The lettering is uneven, and almost crude on one example, with the name of Coventina spelt differently on each one (which happens on some of the stone altars too). These would have been a less expensive offering to Coventina than a stone altar, so allowing devotees with less income to participate in her worship. When the thuribles (incense burners) were discovered, how to decipher the inscriptions became the subject of much discussion. John Clayton, who found them, conducted a public debate via the letters section of the Newcastle papers with a Liverpool antiquarian, which became rather heated.

Date: Made AD 90–91 but used for much longer Material: Copper alloy Place found: Carvoran Fort, a few yards north of the north-west corner of Chesters Fort. This modius (grain measure) is an extremely rare find – grain measures are depicted on coins but almost none survive as objects. The inscription on the outside dates it to the reign of the emperor Domitian and says it holds 17½ sextarii. It can in fact hold 20.8 sextarii, however, so if it was used to measure tax paid in grain, the tax payers were being swindled! Domitian’s name has been scratched out, a practice linked with the phenomenon of damnatio memoriae – where the memory of someone was damned, and wiped from all official records.

Chesters Museum, Northumberland.