It is a running joke in archaeology that the most significant finds tend to emerge right at the end of an excavation – and this was certainly the case during an ongoing community project near Norton Disney in Lincolnshire. In the summer of 2023, Norton Disney History and Archaeology Group were working with Allen Archaeology to investigate a possible Roman settlement at Potter Hill, close to the known location of a villa (which was dug in the 1930s) and the line of the Fosse Way (the Roman road between Exeter and Lincoln). As that season of digging drew towards its close, they had opened a final trench over a large Roman sand-quarrying pit, which had later been reused as a handy place to dump refuse. Its fill contained a wealth of familiar finds, from pieces of pottery to ceramic building materials – but towards the top was something more unusual: a copper- alloy dodecahedron.
Around 130 examples of these enigmatic objects are known from across the Roman Empire, with previous discoveries scattered across modern Austria, Belgium, Britain, France, Germany, Hungary, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, and Switzerland. Despite this wide geographic spread, it is striking that they all come from the north-western provinces of the Empire (and predominantly from Gaul), with none known from the imperial heartlands of Italy or the wider Mediterranean area, and none from Roman territories in Africa. The Norton Disney example is the 33rd to emerge from Britain, but it is the first from the Midlands.
Each dodecahedron has common features – they are hollow, 12-sided objects cast from copper-alloy, with a hole in each face and a round knob at each vertex – but no two are exactly alike, and they vary greatly in size, ranging from the dimensions of a golf ball to a tennis ball. What is clear, however, is that they would have been very complex to create, requiring great skill and a lot of metal to cast. The effort and expense involved in making a single dodecahedron suggests that they may have held some kind of special significance – but no written reference to them is known from any surviving Roman text, and no depiction has been identified in mosaics or wall paintings. For now, their purpose remains obscure, though diverse theories have been put forward.
Was Nero really a goodie?