Composite double-sided combs are part of the suite of artefacts characteristic of the final half of the fourth and early fifth centuries. Their study has been a long-running interest of the first author stretching back to the 1980s, and she has amassed a corpus of a little over 150 items to explore them. It includes many from unpublished excavations that otherwise moulder unseen in the archives of archaeological units such as the group from Wellington Row, York. This allows the combs across all of Roman Britain to be considered for the first time, and some rather surprising patterns emerge.
Chs 1–3 introduce the dataset, consider how the combs were made and marketed and provide the dating evidence. Their first appearance can be consistently placed within the period a.d. 350–370. Ch. 4 considers what has been excluded from the corpus, such as contemporary, but rare, forms. Composite combs were to be a popular artefact type for the succeeding half-millennium, and individual elements of them can be hard to date if they are without good contextual details. This chapter provides an analysis of the differences between the Roman and Saxon combs, producing useful rules of thumb which will be helpful to finds specialists faced with this problem.
Ch. 5 is the longest chapter and the core of the book. It details the stylistic groups to which the combs can be assigned. This is a difficult task as, on the whole, no two examples are closely similar. The system uses the profiles and decoration of the end-plates as the organising principle. First there are the recognisably zoomorphic forms depicting horse heads, dolphins and one suggested to be an owl. These then become devolved, losing the more obviously zoomorphic features such as eyes. Finally the end-places become curved and straight-ended. Very convincing links are drawn between the combs with horse head and dolphins and the contemporary buckles with the same motifs originally catalogued by Hawkes and Dunning. One probably has to have the depth of familiarity with the data Crummy has to trace the links of the devolved combs back to their original zoomorphic prototype easily. Fortunately, Nick Griffiths’ excellent drawings are an invaluable aid for future researchers using this system.
Ch. 6 explores the distributions of the combs both geographically and socially. Here and elsewhere, the second author provides helpful distribution maps. This is a carefully nuanced discussion taking into consideration such factors as places where bone and antler might not survive; places where very late Roman occupation may not survive because of development; places where there are few very late Roman cemeteries; etc. Even when all this is taken into consideration, some very curious patterns emerge. From my interest in wider finds assemblages of this period, I think these patterns are robust. First the distribution is patchy. Most have been found in the south and southern midlands, very few from the northern midlands and then more in the north-east from the Humber estuary up to Hadrian’s Wall. In the south they have generally been found in graves and appear rare as site finds. The northern ones tend to be site finds. They occur on a variety of site types, though the dominance in the civitas capital sites is clearly because of Winchester whose combs dominate the corpus to an extraordinary extent.
Ch. 7 considers the information that can be derived from their associations in graves. Unsurprisingly this is a strongly gendered artefact belonging mainly to adult females who may well have been of high status given the other grave goods. Judged by burial rite, isotope analyses and other grave goods, these women were Romano-British and not incomers.
After a short concluding chapter, there is a detailed catalogue. The organisation of this shows the long gestation of the project. One can see the original order ran to no. 122 with later numbers being dotted though the earlier ones. As the ordering is divided funerary/non-funerary and within that by counties radiating out from Winchester, locating a catalogue entry is not always simple!
Other than the issue of the catalogue, this is an excellent example of how the careful exploration of an artefact type can reveal information about the people who were using it. It will find a place on the shelves, or computer as it is open access, of everyone who works with the late fourth to fifth centuries. It leaves one with many questions, the main one being why does Winchester have so many? The authors suggest the combs may have been the possessions of women who were part of the military and administrative elite. In which case, why so few at Cirencester where there are many finds assemblages of this date? Good finds research always leads to more questions that need answering, and this book does just that.
