A Roman Age Brooch Workshop from Philippopolis

Abstract

A workshop for strongly profiled brooches was discovered in the eastern part of the ancient city of Philippopolis (the modern city of Plovdiv, Bulgaria). The workshop was located in a building with rectangular plan and stone and mud bricks walls. Inside the room furnaces, a worktop, a working pad, small pits, places for storing hot ash and an anvil were identified. In the southeastern part of the room trash layers with about 1500 fragments of clay moulds, 150 fragments of crucibles, bronze spilths and residues were studied. Iron tools (an anvil, a shovel, a hammer, a knife and probably a file), defective items, and bronze ingots were also found inside the room. The fibulae type is a derivative of Almgren 84 Type. The variations of the moulds and the defective items define that several variants of this type were produced in the workshop. A whole exemplar is found in the area close to the room. According to the stratigraphic position of the workshop, together with the artefact, found in it, including two bronze coins (an imitation of an Emperor Octavian Augustus’ as with a countermark and a dupondius of Emperor Vespasian) the brooch manufacturing dates to the last decades of the 1st century. The fibula workshop excavated in Philippopolis is the only one found in the city and in the territory of Bulgaria dated to the Roman period and provides important information about organization of brooch manufacturing.

Keywords

• fibulae
• workshop
• Philippopolis
• strong-profiled brooches
• bronze casting.

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