Celebrated crafts and cross-cultural connections

Buried in lead The excellent Museum of Antiquities in Rouen, Normandy, has mounted a special exhibition called Le Plomb et l’homme (Lead and Man; open until 5 March 2024) devoted to the large number of Gallo-Roman lead coffins and funerary urns in its collection, many of them discovered in the 19th century, with a concentration of coffins around Rouen and of urns around Lillebonne. What is puzzling about this distribution is the lack of a source of lead in the Seine-Maritime region. Instead, research carried out by Malina Robert at the University of Nantes points to Roman Britain as the source of the lead and the Seine estuary as a major production centre. Work has just begun to und