Ancient Roman jar riddled with mystery.
An ancient clay vessel reconstructed from pieces discovered at a Canadian museum is riddled with tiny holes, leaving archaeologists baffled over what it was used for.
The jar, just 16 inches (40 centimeters) tall and dating back about 1,800 years, was found shattered into an unrecognizable 180 pieces in a storage room at the Museum of Ontario Archaeology. But even after it was restored, the scientists were faced with a mystery. So far no one has been able to identify another artifact like it from the Roman world.
“Everyone’s stumped by it,” Katie Urban, one of the researchers at the London, Ontario, museum, told LiveScience. “We’ve been sending it around to all sorts of Roman pottery experts and other pottery experts, and no one seems to be able to come up with an example.”
The jar may have held rodent snacks for ancient Romans, or even served as a lamp, the researchers speculate, though no theory definitively holds water.
Where did the jar come from?
Archival research indicates the jar was among artifacts from Roman Britain (the part of Great Britain under Roman control from about A.D. 43 to 410) that were given to the museum in the 1950s by William Francis Grimes… read more at MSNBC.
The guy behind rogueclassicism.com suggests that it’s an octopus trap, because of a particular stoa (http://www.stoa.org/gallery/album21/Fishermen_Sousse_P4140090?full=1) It’s an interesting thought, and would explain the holes (the weight of the water plus the pot plus the octopus would probably be fairly heavy, whereas the weight of the pot and the octopus would be significantly less if the water poured out through those holes).