Roman egg found in Aylesbury still has contents after 1,700 years
The find was made by Oxford Archaeology which has been working on the Berryfields housing and community development site near Aylesbury, Buckinghamshire for nine years. Here they found “a middle Iron Age settlement and the agricultural hinterland of the putative nucleated Roman settlement of Fleet Marston”
Among the organic items found were four eggs, thought to be chicken eggs. They were all found intact but as they were being moved, three of them broke, as they were so fragile. The broken eggs emitted a very powerful and unpleasant smell, this was not a surprise as they were centuries old, after all.
One of the eggs was extracted intact from the muddy ground, after some painstaking work. This was astonishing as only fragments of eggshells had been found, previously in Britain, mainly from Roman-era graves.
The find was made by Oxford Archaeology which has been working on the Berryfields housing and community development site near Aylesbury, Buckinghamshire for nine years. Here they found “a middle Iron Age settlement and the agricultural hinterland of the putative nucleated Roman settlement of Fleet Marston”
Among the organic items found were four eggs, thought to be chicken eggs. They were all found intact but as they were being moved, three of them broke, as they were so fragile. The broken eggs emitted a very powerful and unpleasant smell, this was not a surprise as they were centuries old, after all.
One of the eggs was extracted intact from the muddy ground, after some painstaking work. This was astonishing as only fragments of eggshells had been found, previously in Britain, mainly from Roman-era graves.
18th century wooden church surrounded by pine trees,
📸 Kućani village, Serbia
📸 Kućani village, Serbia
“Minerva Bearing the Knowledge of Humanity” by Elihu Vedder.
📸 Washington Library of Congress
📸 Washington Library of Congress