In many of the rooms the floors are not flat or have been damaged in some way. From the evidence available to you at the site and through other sources can you hypothesise about how the floors were damaged?

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Question 3 coursework.

In many of the rooms the floors are not flat or have been damaged in some way. From the evidence available to you at the site and through other sources can you hypothesise about how the floors were damaged?

   At the site of Fishbourne Roman Palace, there are over 100 beautifully crafted mosaics. These are a very elaborate type of flooring made from 1000s of multicoloured ceramic squares. Only very wealthy people with lots of status could afford to have them in their homes, let alone over 100 as there are on the Fishbourne site.

   Over hundreds of years, the mosaics have been subject to wear and tear from general use through to ploughing in medieval times. In this extended answer I will look at and explore the reasons of the damage to the beautiful mosaics.

I will divide the types of damage up into three sections:

  • Natural
  • Man – Made
  • Structural

 

   Firstly some of the natural damage was caused by tree roots coming through the ground then up through the mosaics. Weed roots although do little damage on their own would also have caused some damage is there was lots of them. These roots coming up through would have probably been the cause to cracks and breaks in some of the mosaics. This would have caused damage such as round holes and small cracks along the cement on the mosaics. The mud and the grass which had been sitting on top of the mosaics for hundreds of years putting lots of pressure onto them would have got in-between the ceramic pieces and done a bit of damage but would have preserved them more than done damage to them.

   One of the key facts that one of the most detailed mosaics; the dolphin mosaic, is sunk is that part of the Fishbourne site was built on top of a pre-roman rubbish dump so after a few years when the rubbish under the foundations began to decompose, a large gap where the rubbish was formed and so the heavy concrete foundations partially sunk into the hole beneath it. This is a great shame that this damage has been caused to this mosaic in particular as otherwise the dolphin mosaic (below), would be in pristine condition with only a few small holes in the corners which is expected from general wear and tear.

   Another key thing that caused the mosaics to sink and fall in some places was the areas where granary posts had been situated. The first known buildings on the Fishbourne site before the palace was built were granaries. These were buildings which could safely hold food which mainly consisted of corn and grain. These buildings were built on top of thick wooden posts pushed down into the ground to stop rats and other vermin from getting to the food and eating it. When the granaries were no longer needed, instead of just pulling the posts out of the ground, the builders or people who were working no the site just simply cut the posts off level with the ground so 10 inches or so of the wooden posts were still left pushed into the ground. Then when the foundations for the palace were laid, no one bothered to think about the post remnants and they laid foundations over it. Then mosaics were put down over the top of these wooden parts and where the wood had decomposed like the rubbish, the mosaics sank into these holes in several places and damaged parts of the flooring. This damage may have been simply that the mosaics were sunk in places or could even be that in some places the mosaics have cracked under the strain of sinking.

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   What the people who cut off the posts should have done is to pull the posts fully from the ground and fill the posts with some strong filler or even with mud like the rest of the ground. This would have prevented the mosaics from sinking and so could prevent costly damage.

Moving onto man-made or human damage, there is plenty of damage caused to the mosaics by humans. Most of it has not been done on purpose but by accident.

   Firstly the roman themselves caused ...

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