Fishbourne Roman Palace and Chichester *Updated

On Saturday I accompanied the archaeology students on their field study to Fishbourne Roman Palace and Chichester, a nearby town. I did this same trip as an archaeology student last year, except that this year we got a behind-the-scenes tour with the curator at Fishbourne!

Fishbourne was a Romano-British villa and political/administrative centre that burned down c. 270 CE. It has the largest collection of in-situ mosaic floors in Britain, many of which date to the time of the palace's construction c. 80 CE, making them some of the oldest mosaics in the country.

*Updated: Betsey, to answer your question- the archaeologists didn't have to recreate the mosaics from found pieces; they excavated the soil and artifacts above the mosaics and then cleaned the mosaics and left them in place.

Those hills are the spoil heaps from the original excavations at Fishbourne.

I didn't take any photos during the behind-the-scenes tour, but it was awesome. We met with the curator and he showed us around their conservation lab and different storage areas, explaining his work and how they store, manage, and conserve artifacts. Fishbourne has a state-of-the-art artifact storage system and so they also house material belonging to the county museum. There's a smaller, carefully temperature-controlled/stabilized room for storing metal artifacts, and he showed us some gold jewellery that they haven't conserved yet; he mentioned how the labels on the (clear) artifact storage boxes are intentionally vague (meaningless numbers and letters unless you work there) to increase security, so that would-be thiefs can't just scan all the labels for something that says "treasure" or "gold".

He showed us the lab where the conservators work, and told us that there are only four full-time staff including himself, and so everyone has an incredible amount of work to do (Emily- does this sound familiar?! :) ) The lab has the only non-medical x-ray machine in West Sussex, and so they raise a lot of their funding by charging other museums and archaeological societies to use it.

My favourite part of the tour was when we got to handle some artifacts, including a 250,000-year-old Paleolithic handaxe. As the curator put it, "Take the distance in time between us and the Romans and multiply it by 125; that's how long ago this handaxe was made".

He also showed us some of the notebooks filled with plans from the original excavations of Fishbourne in the 1960s-1970s. They're quite lacking in information, especially by today's standards, and the accompanying cataloguing system was erratic; the curator said this was because "the archaeologists here were all on a lot of mind-altering drugs, it was the '70s after all!".

That's why I like it here so much :)

After Fishbourne, we had free time in Chichester. I spent most of it at the cathedral, which I knew I had been to but couldn't remember clearly before I got there. However, once I saw it again I remembered it well!

In the cloisters

Chichester Cathedral is very unusual in having a separate bell tower
(the building further from the camera)

Tactile cathedral floor plan and model for the visually impaired. I haven't seen
this anywhere else!

Paintings of early Bishops of Chichester. You can't tell from this angle,
but they all have the same face. 

The organ, seen from the back.

Roman mosaic under the cathedral floor.