 Ychydig, chyfnod i'r unig hynny. Yn ei oedd yn nhw'n gwneud o fod yn grath rhan o ddigon nhw. Y cyddoedd gyda'r hwn ychydig Cyfrgell Hyrfrinaryll, ddylai ar hyn o uch稱io eu gymryd honno, i yw myhoffa i gwahaniaethol yma yn y 80-th— a'r wych yn y 80-th mor hwnna i'r由ch o gyllideb mwy ar y ganddoedd yma. Mae Soni Amwai First na fawr adegwydol, er rydych chi ydych chi arall a'r Soni Amwai Ymwai Cyngor. Fel ydych chi'n bwysig ar y byd a fyddion i weld i gael gael leirio. Roeddwn i'n gweithio'r gwahogol o'r Llywodraeth, ond yn y fwyaf, rydw i'n dod o'r gweithio'r ysgiliau ar y postdoctrwll ar y codi ymddangos ddwyf, o ddwyfodol ystod o bwysig o'r ffordd, o'r ffordd, oed o'r pwysig. Roeddwn i'n ffraith o ddwyfodol yn y ffordd sy'n ddwyfodol mewn ddwyfodol ond how to identify various types of objects and all that I can say is I wish I knew now what I knew in the early 1980s because my PhD might have been slightly different. However, I very quickly realised that to do a talk on ivories we really needed to do this together because to appreciate what actually is an ivory and what isn't from Rome and Britain because one of the biggest issues you're here has been the identification. You really need to understand how you can actually identify these objects in the first place. So tonight, see when you have an act from both of us, Simon is going to begin by talking about the actual material itself in terms of the identification and then I'm going to follow that with and here's the material that we know of so far from Rome and Britain. So I'm going to hand over to Simon to begin. As an archaeological conservator it was always very important to me to know what the material was that I was working on. If you misidentify something you might mistreat something and that could have really bad results. The York Archaeological Trust, we have a lot of material that was coming in, was beautifully preserved and exceptionally preserved so material that wasn't only found on archaeological sites often but also in a state of preservation that we didn't recognise as well. That's really when I got started working with these materials but it wasn't until Stephen said that I managed a few years ago to do my postdoctoral studies on skeletal materials worked into cultural objects which was funded by the EPSRC and the AHRC's Science and Heritage Fund. This gave me three years to really bring together all that I'd learnt over the previous 30-35 years and validate and evaluate different approaches to identification and also to develop more the skills for visual identification because most of the other approaches can be destructive but what we want to talk about today is the ivory and what an ivory is. Although ivory is often the term used as shorthand for elephant ivory it's really the dentine of teeth. The dentine is the material, the main body of the tooth and it's built up in my new layers over the pulp cavity and we see here a human tooth on the left and you can see it's quite a complex cavity in the centre and the layers of dentines are laid down successively over that pulp cavity gradually closed the pulp cavity down, closed the roots down until the roots are squeezed up and basically the tooth stops growing. But in open-rooted teeth like elephant tusks you have a conical pulp cavity and as more layers of dentine laid down around the pulp cavity the pulp cavity remains open and it's just like stacking ice cream cones into each other so the tusk grows down and forwards away from the skull and more ice cream cones are pushed in at the back so the newest most recent idea is right up around the pulp cavity. So when you look at this material in the cross section it's made up of cone within cone shapes of fine layers of dentine that you can really only just see under magnification one after another around a conical pulp cavity that has an oval cross section. And there's no blood vessels in the dentine the blood vessels are all in the pulp cavity and so that makes it very different from bone and ivory where you have a blood supply ramified throughout the material. Instead there are many tubules called dentinal tubules that keep the material hydrated during life and transport fluids in and out of the material. But elephant ivory is not the only ivory that was available to the Romans. They had access to hippo ivory from Egypt. Spurnware ivory from our own shores here is certainly the use of spurnware ivory as I've indicated here go back certainly into the Bronze Age. We're getting a lot of pommels on daggers which are either cetacean bone or actually cetacean ivory cut usually from the teeth of spurnware. And of course there's smaller teeth as well some of which are big enough to provide chunks of material which are substantial enough to cut objects out of them and this is just a little gaming piece here from a very ruffle cut piece from the tusk of a pig. These tusk, these curved tusk do tend to crack longitudinally and produce plates of material and this helmet from Cyprus, a date which I can't remember, I'm sorry, is an example of how those plates might have been used at least in a decorative form if not as something more protective. At datafine ivory there's lots of pitfalls here and a lot of common mistakes that people make in identifying them. Yes, something like the Goodman of Plain. There's very few materials that could be made out of other than a large chunk of ivory from a large tusk most probably elephant. But you can get large chunks of competitive tissue from Wales, from the George sperm whale for instance, which would be burned. Another thing that people often think of is that anything that is highly or intricately carved is going to have to be ivory because who would put that sort of work into something that's just made up of something as worthless as bone, or bones only butchery waste after all. In fact an awful lot of the pins that I see that are highly carved are actually bone and not ivory as people hope. But of course when you do cut something rectangular from a circular object like a tusk, you do end up with small pieces of ivory around the edges, which of course do get made up into smaller objects. Here are some bangles for instance, one of which is elephant ivory, and another one which is a fragment from a bangle of identical cross-section, joined in the same way with a little bronze fitting, but it's an antler. So that's the other mistake people often make because something's being published as ivory somewhere, maybe correctly, they've seen that their object of the same form is going to be ivory as well. And this has led to a lot of objects being identified as ivory quite erroneously over the years. Identifying ivories chemically has its problems. All ivories and bone and antler are all chemically very much the same material. They're a combination of a structure made from the protein collagen stiffened with a mineral, a calcium mineral, which we call bioappetite. Detail chemical analysis of this, using the most non-destructive techniques such as vibrational spectroscopy, can differentiate between some ivories and there's been some success in being able to show an ivory as from a marine source rather than a terrestrial source. But a lot of the work that I've reviewed, which tries to take this further and separating different sorts of ivory, I'm afraid the differences that they're picking up may well just as much be differences between individuals with different diet, different bone physiology, different states of health, and that may be causing greater differences in the spectra that they're getting than the difference between the species. Add to this a sort of contamination you get from archaeological sites. You've only got to have a little bit of dissolution of calcium or a small amount of magnesium being absorbed by your material, for instance, and your ratios will change and the results you get really don't mean very much. It just means you have contaminated material. DNA, of course, where you do have preservation of DNA is a very powerful way of identifying material to species. There are problems of contamination. A lot of objects have been in collections a long time and have been handled. And there's also the problems of decay. And DNA isn't the most stable of the protein molecules, and the more broken up it is, the more difficult it is to be sure exactly what you're looking at. And certainly from archaeological sites, this can be a real issue. Proteomics, the more recent development, is very, very useful. Proteomics looks at the collagen, and collagen is much more stable. And that collagen, depending on the components of the collagen, the fine detail, can allow you to differentiate, say, go from sheep, for instance. I know that we're talking about ivory, but it will allow you to separate elephant from walrus, for instance. In ivory. But it can't often differentiate between species. So African and Asian elephant, you can only separate using DNA. And neither technique is going to tell you what tissue you've got. You may, in fact, have bone and not ivory. So you really need to look at the structure and these results together in order to get the full picture. And looking at the structural detail is what I do and what I tend to promote, because it's the most non-destructive way of the human material. It's non-invasive. We're moving, looking at the object using a light and a low-power microscope and recording the information, usually using a digital microscope and a camera. And you don't make any changes to the object at all. The object at the bottom here, you see in detail on the right, is bone. I can see here we have a vascular structure. We have blood vessels running throughout this. And no matter how beautifully polished and finished and carved, this object is, it is just bone. It can't be ivory because it has a blood supply. Reading these objects requires that you know not only to look for things like vessels, horizons or not. You actually have to read them in a way that we would do, for instance, wood identification. Because of the way that these materials are laid down, the ivory is formed, you cut it in different directions, you will see different structures. And as I say, it's like looking at wood to do an identification on a piece of wood. You ideally look at a transverse section, a radial section and a tangential section. And putting all the information together from those tells you that you've got walnut wood in this case. And so the same it is with ivories. Looking at transverse sections or sections as close to transverse as you can get, radial sections, tangential sections will give you completely different information. You put that all together and you can come down to differentiating one ivory from another, walrus from elephant from hippo, etc. And one of the most characteristic things about elephant ivory is a pattern, and we can see that on the example of the transverse section here on the left. And that is running across the very, very fine layers of the dentine itself, which are more or less running vertically through that end section. You've got, it's overloaded with this pattern of crisscrossing lines, which form these little dark and white lozenge shapes. And this is called the Schrader pattern. And it all comes down to the organisation of the dentinal tubules within the ivory, which is very, very particular. And it produces this pattern, which you do not see in any other species of ivory. And that Schrader pattern does allow us to do things to a certain extent, we can use it to say, yes, we have an elephant ivory rather than a mammoth ivory. Because it's not just the extent elements that show this, the extinct species as well also show some form of pattern. And when you look at mammoth ivory right out of the edge of the tusk, what we call the, just below the rind of the tusk, the outer angles in the Schrader pattern, they almost remain below 90 degrees. But in extent elements, that angle gets flatter and flatter and flatter as you go out towards the rind, it becomes greater than 90 degrees and often almost completely flattened so that the Schrader pattern is hardly visible at all. And then we can say we have elephant ivory, but only if we know right at the edge of the tusk can we do this. What it can't do is separate Asian elephant from African elephant. That can't be done. So we can't take it down to absolute species. And here's an example of that. There's been a long debate about Anglo-Saxon backrings, where is the source of this from? I can't say if it's African or Asian, I can tell you it is elephant and not mammoth from the Schrader angle because we have, for instance, on this particular piece of cement. And you can see how the Schrader angle isn't just an optical effect as it appears in the modern pieces. It's actually a physical orientation, changing orientation of the structure of the ivory so that when you get decay, often it's enhanced. And you can see that here in the continuous rising and falling of the surface in the same way that we see the lozenges elsewhere. And the only way to separate the species, as I've said already, is using DNA, which of course is destructive and mostly we can't really afford to do that at all. Also, when looking for the non-elephant iris during my postdoc, I wanted to know when we know that a lot of iris are coming into this country at certain periods and a lot of them are not elephant ivory, but where were they? But certainly in the running period, actually everything I did look at that was ivory was elephant ivory. And the frosted corp dye was particularly problematic and it would be past ground for generations. I think I saw it three times over the years and it had been to the Natural History Museum and all sorts of places and people looked at it and said, well, it's an ivory, we put these fine and yellow layers, no blood vessels, but I can't tell you what sort of ivory. And in fact in the end, through the work I was doing, I was able to confirm that it was elephant ivory, but it was one of the examples where the Schrader pattern really wasn't very visible towards the centre of the tusk. And the only non-elephant ivory that I did come across on Roman date was the South Cave sword cache, which was actually a mid to late 1st century, I think you may have a better date of it now, and deposited at the time when the Romans were just across the Humber to the South. It's an eye-nation too, but as I say, that close, the Romans were clearly just across the water and presumably trading was going on backwards forwards. And here we have this cache of swords, five swords with handle confirmance, some of them rather smashed up. And looking at these, I was able to identify antlers, cetacean bones, cetacean ivory, the sperm whale tooth, elephant ivory and horn, and here's a diagram that shows a little more about the detail of how they were distributed between the pieces. And now we'll have a little further look at Roman icons. OK, I'm going to start really with Sonya left off. One of the key difficulties that we still have is identifying when is something ivory and when isn't it. And from when I came back into archaeology, my list of Roman ivories having now been taught by Sonya has shrunk by 33%. But we still see quite often things identified as ivory, which aren't. And one of the things I learned quite early on from Sonya is just applying common sense to some of the objects when you look at them. And I've just picked out a couple of examples. This is a series of Roman boxinges and the picture in the middle shows how they actually work. These are cut quite clearly from either cattle or horse bone and they're a very, very common type. There are hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of these identified throughout, certainly throughout the Western Empire, days into the first and early second centuries. But just occasionally, and the ones you see there on the left-hand side, they are identified as ivory, but they are in fact not a single example of one of these English segments, which are ivory, they are all made of bone. You sometimes see Roman ivories identified by what I've called association. Many people in this room will remember Hugh Chapman, who Chapman wrote paper in 1976, identifying the object on the screen now as an ivory. It's a Roman scabbid slide, which basically works the way that the illustration shows above. In Hugh's paper, he also published an illustration of a very, very similar, so it's an illustration of the other way around looking at the side, scabbid slide from South Shields. He didn't say that it was ivory, but when it was next published, and it's now been published four times, it's always been described as ivory, and it's been described as ivory because in Hugh's paper, he did publish one ivory one from London, and I'm sure that's why the South Shields one, which is very clearly when you look at it closely, not ivory, but bone, has been so described. And just occasionally, you still find a very, very rich burial, and this is a burial, a very recently published excerpt of publication in Britannia, of a find from Colchester with four very small feats, which have been published as ivory. I've blown this up as much as I can, but nowhere on there can either I or Sonya actually really identify, for example, a Shrager pattern, and we haven't quite got to grips with these yet. They could be ivory, but we feel it's probably an unlikely attribution. So there still remains a big, big problem in the literature today, but it is possibly from small objects, and I hope that those of you at the front can just about see where the arrows are pointing, that you can see the Shrager pattern. This is a small peg, only a few centimetres long from Silchester. Very clearly this is of Roman ivory, and quite often it's very, very obvious that the objects you're looking at are ivory, and I've just picked out three, not to scale, a pen knife handle, a class knife handle from Roman York, a razor, minus most of these iron elements from Carl Isle, and very much blown up, end of an ivory bracelet, and on each of these you can see the features that Sonya has been talking about earlier on. So let's just very briefly take a look at the wider context of ivories in the Roman and slightly earlier world. There's good literary evidence that ivory has been a valued product for a long time, and there are a few references to the actual value of ivory, which can clearly vary over time, just a few examples. In the third century BC we're told that the ivory market was flooded by autonomy for the Delphius, and the price dropped to one fifteenth of what it had been a hundred years earlier. Just moving on into the Roman period, and to the imperial period, in the first century AD the price went up quite a lot, and Pliny, probably writing in the 70s, tells us that ivory was very rarely obtained except from India. African ivory was very rare in the first century AD. In the mid-second century, for evidence from Papyrus in Egypt, we're told that the value of ivory was about the same as the value of silver. But moving on, in Dioclosion's edit, the market by this time had been flooded by the new source of ivory from East Africa, and we think that at this stage in the early fourth century it only had one fourth of the value of silver. So compared to maybe 150 years earlier, the value had dropped from equal with silver to about one fourth of the same price. There's plenty of evidence of the trade in both tusks and of the elephants themselves, and of course on the finished objects that I'll come back to, and there is some evidence that ivory was hoarded. In terms of actual workshops, the only good evidence for a workshop actually comes from fourth century Rome, but there is other evidence from Rome that ivory was worked there. So, for example, there are seven inscriptions of the first century BC and first century AD which mention ivory workers. They are all male and they are all freedmen. It's clearly mentioned as a female doing great images on ivory, as well as working as a painter. There are ivory workers mentioned in the second century. Opium mentions ivory cutters of inlay in the Hadramic period. There's evidence of ivory, people working with ivory and citrus wood together. And an imperial edict of 337 includes ivory workers amongst a group of artisans exempted from public service in order to improve their skills and instruct their children. So, there is other evidence as well. That's just by way of a background. From Britain, there is one small piece of evidence which is a sawn piece of ivory which comes from the second century context of Berylamian. That's the only piece of evidence for working of ivory in their own period from Britain. And just to remind ourselves, yes, there was a trade clearly in task, but sometimes the trade was in the finished objects. So, from Pompeii, there's an Indian ivory figurine and from Osium in Hungary, there's an Indian ivory comb. So, how is the industry actually organised? We know from literary references that there were factories operating as early as the 4th century BC. Just, for example, there was one factory using ivory which was producing couches, which employed 20 slaves. It was also making weapons. And they were selling off their byproducts, presumably chunks of ivory, to other people. And as far as the fury couches are concerned, as you'll see in a moment, these continue through at least into the late 1st century AD. And just looking again at literary references, at least three, if not four, Roman emperors were buried on a funerary pyre laying on a couch decorated with ivory. And we do find quite a number of these burials. So, here's a distribution map of rich burials with ivory couches which have been through the funerary pyre. There is, of course, one country known here, which is Britain, but not to be outdone. We have two examples. There is a very, on the left-hand side of this slide, there's a very small piece of a funerary couch in ivory, which, and I'm just illustrating where does it come from on the actual leg of the couch, which is from the 2nd century Barillianium. And there's a very famous burial, the so-called child's burial, which is preflavium from Colchester. But that's not ivory. That's absolutely every single piece of that. It has been described on occasions I remember that every single piece is of bone. So it's very much not quite up to the same standard as the ivory couches, which more or less dates to the 1st century BC until around about 50 AD plus a bit, which is perhaps one of the reasons why more examples from Roman Britain. But it is clear there was an organised workshop producing, in particular funerary couches, we don't know exactly where, probably more than one, but certainly not in Britain. There's limited evidence throughout the rest of the Roman world for other forms of manufacturing in an organised sense which we're using in ivory. I've just got two or three more potential examples in the late 1st, early 2nd century. You find these razor handles. I've already shown you the one from Carl Isle. There's a slightly more battered one from Richborough. The one on the left, the drawing from London is also an ivory, as is the one from Vindonissa. Just to show that these are actually quite widely distributed down, certainly down the length of the Rhine. The one from Vrallianum is in bone, and I've chopped half of this inscription off, but chose the workshop of Lucius Cornelius Asimus from the 2nd century AD, and the more eagle-eyed of you should be able to make out that on the bottom row there, every other one of those objects is a razor of the type that you can see here. There's about four examples in ivory from Britain, but these couplers and perhaps others like them were clearly using ivory, iron, there's lots of bronze examples which have wood infill. So a whole variety of material was used, but perhaps the most rich of those was ivory. Moving on into the later over period, the top left-hand side there for York is a pair of fan handles. There are other examples, but not many, as you can see from the distribution map on the bottom right-hand side, and not all of these are in ivory. The two on the bottom left are from mites and are probably of bone. You can see just from the cross-section there that they're not going to be ivory. So again, perhaps small organised workshops somewhere produce these very rare objects. Principally in ivory, although there's only about 80 examples known by the other materials as well. Finally, that's just how the fans are represented in various tombstones, the most famous of which is probably the one on the left-hand side from Cumbria. Then moving right on to the later over period, some has already shown you a picture of ivory bracelets, probably in the second half of the 4th century AD when we're told that ivory once again is quite common and quite cheap. There's a significant number of ivory bracelets produced. There were a lot more until Sonia told me how to tell the difference between ivory and amber bracelets. It's interesting going and looking at some of the large cemeteries which have published a lot of bracelets as ivory, for example at Black Hills. Many of the bracelets published and identified in the 70s before I even started working on my PhD when I went to look at those for the first time a few months ago. Quite a number of those which are published as ivory are in fact not ivory at all. Nevertheless, if you look at the number of ivory from Rome in Britain, almost 50% of them are actually bracelets and date to the 4th century. Maybe evidence of four workshops at different periods working in other materials, including ivory. Let's move on and have a look at some of the nicer ivory that we have. I'm sorry, I've tried to put all these on the same page and the scales are slightly different. These are all quite small, only a few centimetres in height. These are the only ivory that I'm aware of which actually show free-standing figures in any way. One from a guesting thought on the bottom left, unfortunately now, I think he's lost and he's quite a small piece. The one on the drawing on the right-hand bottom side from Hoxmy has recently been published as a very, very, very small piece of an ivory pixus dating to the very end of the 4th century, maybe into the 5th century. The other finds on the top line near Toofan Carlyan, one from Greenwich Park and one from Lexton are all free-standing, but probably come from boxes. Well, I was in Ephesus last year and I thought, well, I've never seen anything like this, it's just possibly something perhaps not as grand as this, but some scene and the ones in particular from Carlyan all have nail holes in them, showed that they've been attached to other objects. But as far as Britain is concerned, that's it in terms of nice free-standing ivories. It's interesting when you look at much of the western provinces, the Germanism and the Gauls, you find a very similar pattern. You don't find hundreds and hundreds of ivories, it's not just in Britain where they're uncommon. This goes throughout most of the western Roman Empire. Perhaps the most commonly illustrated find from the whole of Roman Britain is the South Shields Gladiator. Here's a page of just a few of the different publications. It's a class 5 handle or broadly dated 250, so it's mid-2nd to mid-3rd century. There are lots of class 5 handles in other materials, but in ivory, they're very rare, there are only three from Roman Britain, there's one from Southwick, a rather nice example together with a chain which probably had a key on the end, one from a pit in Silchester. The Southwick example was from a 4th century grave, so it was obviously a curated item because it was at least 50 to 100 years old when it was placed in the grave, and there's the South Shields Gladiator. But that's it, and when you look all the way down the Rhine where quite a number of class 5 handles have been published, the number we have in Britain in true ivory is not unusual, that's about the same number that you find there as well. And here's just a page of other gladiator class just to show there are lots of them, but only one from Britain is in ivory. The middle one there from Clywent was in fact published as ivory, but you can see from here that in fact it's not ivory, it's bone. Very closely paralleled to the one on the left-hand side which is from Avonche, which is in true ivory, and you can see some of the splitting of the ivory which is dried out that Sony referred to earlier on. Now, I think because there are lots and lots of class 5 handles with figures on mostly in bone, there must have been some sort of industry producing these, perhaps in Britain, perhaps down the Rhine, or more in more than one places. But there are no close power, this is about as good as it gets in terms of a close parallel. So I suspect most of these were actually made to specific order. And of course, the good and the plain that Sony has already referred to is the largest chunk of ivory that there is from Roman Britain. Unusial object to find in ivory, from a late 4th century sealed context. So we know it is a good sealed context. So we know it is Roman, found with other tools as well, but a remarkable and very, very unusual piece. And just to return to some of the more common ivories that we find in military equipment. We know that in the Roman army you could buy parts of your own equipment and you find a great smashery of different parts of swords in particular made from ivory. Here is just a small selection of them. I have included an illustration from mites where there is a rather nice complete ivory hand or pommel hand or hand guard. From Britain we don't have anything like that. There is all just odd pieces, not always found on military sites. Mostly from the 1st century, although the three in the middle are the scabbard shapes from York, from Neffleton and from Greenwich Park are of late 2nd and 3rd century dates. And just occasionally you do find parallels for the military equipment. Here is a dagger handler from London, just about a parallel by one from Heddonheim. And the reconstruction you can see on the left shows you what the normal bronze or sometimes iron dagger handlers look like. But on the whole most of the ivories that you find for military equipment again are one offs. There is a deep production centre producing bits of military kit and an ivory. Apart from the good and the plain, the next really unusual thing is the south case source that Sonia has already mentioned. I want to put this on just to remind us that this is a really unusual amalgam of an Iron Age tradition and a Roman tradition of two different types of ivory found on the same object. So just looking at chronology, of maybe what's the organised production and the four examples that I've used throughout the Roman period. The others also span throughout the Roman period. Maybe a few more in the 1st century AD and certainly a lot more in the 4th century but remember that mostly of one type which is the bracelets. This is a distribution that I'm not drawn up by myself but by Ella Hacart in a recent book which shows you that ivories actually occur throughout the whole of Roman Britain. So you might have gathered by now that what there is of ivory in Roman Britain is rather sparse and not very common. So how much ivory is there actually in Roman Britain? Well I think about two elephants worth. It's probably actually only one and a half but as this was Sonia's elephant I didn't like to cut it in half. The only evidence that there were ever any real elephants in Britain comes from Dio talking about the Claudian invasion. Now this is one of the translations of the actual phrase in Dio. Remember you write for a very long time after the Claudian invasion and what he says is that there were elephants amongst the extensive equipment which had been prepared. It doesn't say that the elephants actually ever got to Britain and yet if you read some accounts of the invasion of Roman Britain model accounts you find Claudius arriving to sector trike in Camledon with his elephants and you even see a number. Sometimes I've seen 12 and I've seen 16 reference but Dio doesn't actually say that. So whether there were ever any real elephants in Britain or not is really unknown. And what about what sort of objects are there? Well you can see there how a number I have on my list did start off before I was properly trained by Sonia about 140. It's now only just over 100. It's 101 and the first number there is the number of context and the reason why the number of context is smaller than the absolute number is quite a number of the ivory bracelets are found in the same grave together. So there's only 105 good Roman ivories and some of which I haven't gone back and checked on yet and I suspect that number is going to shrink even further from well let's call it 360 years of Roman occupation of Britain. So at the moment we only know of about one ivory for every three or four years of Roman occupation in Britain and many of those like the bracelets are very small fragments of ivory. And when we look at the types of ivory objects which are talked about in classical literature some of those we find in Britain like for example the dice on your shoulder a picture of the dice from Frostacourt which is in fact the only ivory dice from Roman Britain. There were seven published in the literature, there are seven published in the literature as ivory. There is in fact I think only one that is really true ivory. And where do they all come from or perhaps it's no great surprise they come mainly from large urban centres such as London, Colchester and York and then the next in the list is military science which obviously includes most of those pieces of military equipment and then a smattering from other types of site but mainly it's from the main cities of Roman Britain. So in conclusion the ivory from Roman Britain are typical in that they are very very few in number they are very difficult to parallel but it's a similar pattern throughout most of the western provinces in that sense Roman Britain is not unusual. But they occur right away through the Roman period they are the most common, if common we can actually say they are in the major towns, many have been misidentified I'm pretty sure still on my list of just over a hundred there are a few more on there that will bite the dust when either Sonia or I actually go and get to have a look at them. And they most probably are all imports we've only got one example of a piece of working, a piece of waste which is from Roman very early on and the one thing that we can say in conclusion in Roman Britain ivory is not only are they exotic but they're also very rare. Thank you.