DID ROMAN VILLAS HAVE OPEN VERANDAHS?
In Rebuilding the Past, programme 3, the issue
of whether Butser’s villa should have an open verandah or an enclosed corridor
is a major talking point. The whole subject illustrates some of the absurdity
of archaeological debate, so I thought it was worth discussing it in a little
more detail because the film creates the impression that experimental
archaeology at Butser has produced a definitive answer.
The Butser
construct is supposed to be based on experimentation, and the idea that in
actually executing a structure this gives a better insight to solutions. To
some extent that is true, but experimental archaeology certainly won’t answer
the verandah question, whatever the conceit that it will. Anyone who watched
the programme will have seen two experts (Dominic Perring and David S Neal)
presenting two totally opposed views, while the Butser build team simply argued
that since Britain is subject to cold winds an open verandah was most unlikely.
But, one man’s cold wind is another’s balmy breeze.
And a lot more
goes into designing a house than temperature considerations. Fashion, personal
taste, money, function, available materials and skills, all play a part. It’s
impossible to say in any one instance what those resulted in, unless you have
an extant building.
So what is the
evidence? Needless to say, not enough to argue the toss. Sometimes villa
remains produce dwarf columns that must have come from an open verandah, while
mosaic illustrations from North Africa and the evidence from South Shields show
that open verandahs were certainly used in some places. Equally, plenty of
villas don’t produce columns, and while they might have been robbed out, the
probability is that in some cases the corridors were closed in.
What about
load-bearing walls on the outer corridor? In the programme it was argued this
as good as proved the walls were solid, and did not support open verandahs.
Yet, the evidence from the Sparsholt villa is that all the internal walls were
built to an unnecessary thickness – one basic observation of Roman building
techniques is that there was little science involved. Over-building was quite
normal, and this means it isn’t possible to tell anything conclusive from a
wall’s thickness.
In any case,
people alter their homes. What began life as an open verandah might one day
have been closed in, or vice-versa.
Suppose a
seventeenth-century almshouse in Barnstaple was destroyed and no illustration
survived? One day, the site is excavated and front corridor is found. You can
just imagine an archaeologist saying:
1. Almshouses
are normally closed-in
2. Britain is
too cold for an open verandah
3. We haven’t
found any columns
And that would
be that, wouldn’t it?
Except that it
wasn’t destroyed and no-one has had to excavate it. It’s similar in scale and
outline plan to a winged-corridor villa.
Too cold in Britain
to build open verandahs? Apparently not in 1627, if you were so inclined, and I
doubt if the ambient temperature was very different then from the year 300. In
other words, it is perfectly possible that both open and closed corridors were
used in Roman Britain and the case for either is usually no better than the
other, given the evidence in any one instance.
In the end, a
lot of this kind of rather futile archaeological debate reminds me of a scene in
Blackadder Series 1. Percy has sagely informed Blackadder that the ‘you know,
my Lord, they say the Spanish Infanta’s eyes are bluer than the Stone of
Galveston’. Confusion results, but Blackadder establishes that Percy’s
informants have never seen the Stone of Galveston, and that Percy has never
seen either the Stone or the Infanta.
Blackadder:
‘so, Percy, in the end what you are saying is that something you have never
seen is slightly less blue than something else – you have never seen.’ Or words
to that effect.
And that’s
what archaeologists spend a lot of time arguing over: differences between
things they have never seen. I suppose it fills out the time of day, but
usually the principal benefit is to television producers.
http://www.discoverychannel.co.uk/rebuildingthepast/_home/