Finds Friday

This #FindsFriday to commemorate #WorldAnimalDay, we’re celebrating the #hare!

During our mid-1990s excavations north of Gosbecks Archaeological Park, we uncovered a 6-meter-wide #droveway (or trackway). Although the quantity of dateable finds was limited in this feature, one standout discovery was a remarkable, heavily-leaded copper alloy figurine of a hare.

This lifelike figure dates to the 1st or 2nd century AD, and its high-quality craftsmanship suggests it was an imported piece. The hare is skilfully modelled, featuring short ears, a well-proportioned body, and fine details highlighting the eyes, nose, and mouth. Take a close look at the small nicks used to represent the animal’s fur—truly a work of art! (see section 8.2 and Fig 19.10).

We have included an excerpt from the report below, but the full excavation report is available here !

CAT report 127: Page 16

The most notable object from Site C is a small heavily-leaded copper-alloy figurine of a crouching hare, from the fill of a Roman field ditch (CF70). The body of the animal is well-modelled, though the ears are rather short and the delineation of the eyes, nose and mouth is quite rudimentary (Fig 19.10). The fur is shown by small nicks over the body. The quality of its naturalistic execution suggests that this is an imported early Roman piece.

Other imported well-modelled pieces include the pre-Roman boar figurine from Colchester’s Lexden Tumulus (Pitts 1979, 86, pl 2, 166), the 2nd-century Silchester eagle (ibid, 92, pl 27, 198), and the animals accompanying the 2nd-century Verulamium Mercury (Pitts 1979, 57, pl 12, 39; Lindgren 1980, 58-9). A particularly similar piece is a late 1st-century crouching mouse from Exeter (Holbrook & Bidwell 1991, fig 116, 104).

The hare is not recorded as a live adjunct of a particular god or goddess, so the solid ground-base of this figurine is unlikely to suggest that it was soldered to a pedestal as part of a figure group, as were the three animals with the Verulamium Mercury (Lindgren 1980, pl 19). Like the Exeter mouse, it may have been nothing more significant than a child’s model.

To the Romans, the hare was both a popular food item and a pet. As a pet it occurs on tomb-reliefs from Lincoln and, probably, Housesteads (Toynbee 1973, 202), but it chiefly occurs in Roman, including Romano-British, art as a hunted beast. Hares were hunted both in the field and in private game reserves (leporaria), and there are many scenes showing hares hunted by dogs (Toynbee 1973, 16, 24, 200-202). In later Roman Britain, the theme of the hunted hare occurs on knife handles (Hattatt 1989, fig 36, 242-3; Rees et al forthcoming, SF VR 701, SF HA 72), and on colour-coated beakers (Hull 1963, fig 52, 6; Henig 1998, fig 12). The hare was depicted at Chedworth, Gloucestershire as the dead prey both of the hunter-god (Toynbee 1962, catalogue no 78; Green 1976, p 174) and of the personification of Winter (Henig 1995, 159).

In direct stylistic contrast to the Gosbecks hare is one of pre-Roman date from the Roman fort at Saham Toney, Norfolk. It appears to have been a fitting, rather than a free-standing model (Brown 1986, fig 26, 192), and is clearly of native, rather than Continental, manufacture. Though not necessarily considered to be a specifically religious item, the recovery of this piece in the heartland of the Iceni indicates that it is likely to have been a powerful symbol.

Caesar notes that the Britons bred hares as a source of ‘pleasure and amusement’, but also that they considered it ‘unlawful’ to eat them (The conquest of Gaul, V.12), and Dio Cassius confirms their sacred nature when recording the hare as the chosen sacrifice of the Icenian war-goddess Andraste
(Roman history, LXII, 2; Green 1976, 34; 1997, 185). Tangible evidence is provided by hare bones found in a ritual well at Jordan Hill, Weymouth, Dorset (Green 1976, 201) and in a ritual pit at Ewell, Surrey (ibid, 221), while hare fur was found in two ritual shafts at Ipswich, Suffolk (ibid, 218). A number of hare representations have been found in votive contexts in Britain: a small copper-alloy hare figurine found with 3rd-century pottery in a pit on the temple site of Thistleton Dyer, Rutland (Green 1976, 167); a stylised copper-alloy hare from Lincoln (ibid, pl 22c); and a hare shown on a repoussé-decorated copper-alloy strip from Winterborne Kingston, Dorset (Farrar 1953, 74-7). Of less immediate relevance, though important in that they, too, come from Colchester, are a damaged 4th-century jet hare figurine found in the fill of a 4th-century grave at Butt Road (CAR 2, fig 175; CAR 9, 130), and a 1st-century red jasper intaglio showing a small rodent, posssibly a hare (BM 70.4-2.87; Henig 1974, catalogue no 623).

It is uncertain whether or not the 2nd-century enamelled brooches in the form of running hares had any religious significance. They developed from mid 1st-century examples: a tinned brooch from Sheepen (Hull forthcoming, Type 211, no 0606); and one, probably from East Anglia, fitted with a spring styled on Colchester B derivatives (Hattatt 1989, 171-2). It may be no coincidence that both these early hare brooches come from eastern Britain, and might suggest that in origin, at least, they matched the symbolic importance of 2nd-century horse-and-rider brooches (Bagnall Smith 1996, 192). This idea cannot be sustained, however, by the findspots of enamelled hare brooches, most of which come from the urban centres of southern Britain (Hull forthcoming, Type 211).

Similarly, while the hare clearly had a symbolic importance to the native Britons, it is uncertain how much the Gosbecks figurine shared that emphasis, though its standard of manufacture suggests that, like the Exeter mouse, it was a purely Roman object.