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Meaning in Millstones: Phallic Imagery on Romano-British Millstones – ADDENDUM

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  20 October 2022

Ruth Shaffrey*
Affiliation:
Oxford Archaeology ruth.shaffrey@googlemail.com
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Abstract

Type
Addendum
Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s), 2022. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of The Society for the Promotion of Roman Studies

After online publication of ‘Meaning in Millstones: Phallic Imagery on Romano-British Millstones’, a new example of phallic imagery on a millstone, found at Glebe Farm, Sawtry in Cambridgeshire, was published in the Proceedings of the Cambridge Antiquarian Society for 2022.Footnote 1 The upper stone of a rotary quern was recovered from an enclosure ditch of Late Iron Age/Early Roman date. It has a crudely incised phallus on its upper surface. It is closest in terms of size and type of decoration to the example from Rocester in Staffordshire.

This is now the third example from a small area within 15 km of Huntingdon in Cambridgeshire. Given the rarity of phallic decoration on querns and millstones in the western Roman empire, this concentration suggests a particular local emphasis on phallic imagery that may warrant further investigation.

References

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Wells, J. 2022: Other Finds, in Leslie, I. and Pilkington, K., ‘Iron Age and Romano-British settlement on land east of Glebe Farm, Sawtry, Cambridgeshire’, Proceedings of the Cambridge Antiquarian Society 111, 8194Google Scholar