Pottery sherd with dark inner

[Dave The Slave]

Have seen this sandwich effect pottery before but can`t find the right link to Id.
Found near to an area, where Roman coins have been found.
Hoping it is old, so any info welcome.
On first photo 2 parallel lines near top of piece approx 6mm apart,




Thanks for any info.
Dave.

[Oxgirl]

Dave please could you add the geographic area where it was found? It'll help with the ID

[Dave The Slave]

Hampshire.
Forgot the geographical context, while thinking more of the Historical one.
Cheers,
Dave.

[Pottery Man]

A sandwich of grey core with outer surfaces in oxidised sandy red clay......
Somewhere we need to list the stuff that turns up everywhere.
Pottery - the round stuff that used to be pots?

We get used to rims, bases, wall/body-sherds, spouts & handles. There will be legs and bung-holes [sounds rude, but...hey] and other stuff like textures and decorative bits.

Tiles - the flat stuff that used to be roofing or walling [or kiln shelving] or flooring - architectural for the most part.

< I have a suggestion that Dave's thing may be a tile >
> How big is it?
> Was it completely alone or were there more bits around? If so, roughly how many?
> Did you have reason to look and did you pick up other items nearby (within 5 metres)?
> Imagine looking at the ground around: is it near a stream or buildings or on sloping or rough ground or in a flat area?
> [Dave has told us the big picture - the County is Hampshire - Bournmouth to Havant and north to Farnham and west to Tidworth and back south to the New Forest]
> Here I would apologise for putting him on the spot. I hope he is thick-skinned and doesn't mind my using this one as an example!

So, Dave's 'tile'. It is possibly too thin to be a piece of a shelf unless that photo shows something about a foot long, but it has a few similarities to similar lumps of fired red clay that I already know to have been kiln furniture. If it was a shelf in a small wood-fired medieval or post-med kiln, the heavy reduction character with a flashed oxidised red outer is a match. Another point has been that the shelves have been smooth on one side and sanded (an addition of grits or sand) on a few shelve samples but often the marks made by plucking or chipping glaze from the one surface and not the other. Lots of pottery (those round things) bases had drip marks but never added sand adhering on most C14th & C15th wasters. The sanded clay could be chipped clean when a smooth clay would fracture right through. My kiln shelf certainties are 25-40mm thick. A roof tile is still the same today as those from Roman, Norman, Dutch and Tudor tiles, be they peg-tiles or pantiles..... thinner: around 15mm.
Cath will tell you how thick medieval encaustic tiles are: they vary. An inch, plus or minus some, but often having conical holes underneath to allow the tile with a tightening or expanding slip/glaze to allow the drying tile to stay flat before and during its firing.

Dating all the stuff folks turn up is easy enough for much of the time, but so often a nightmare for a big chunk of the 'walk-in' material. People pick up the unusual and miss the mundane that has good value, too.
Why do I need more info?
Well, without a few answers and just a single sherd..... I'd be looking for scale or size or comparisons. I'd be looking for geographical prompts - like: where was it found? Big picture may be the county or town, but 'next to the old mill' or 'in the fields where the Roman Villa was excavated' or 'where they demolished the old colliery buildings'.
More modern or detailed or decorated sherds are so much easier than rough or tumbled Beaker Pottery or BB ware or Ipswich or some rural as yet unclassified bits of gritty unglazed brown or red ceramic material akin to brickbats, but so difficult unless you work with local specialist archaeology and see it daily, and remember, it doesn't arrive with hammered imagery or graphics. It is made out of endlessly varied mixtures of mud, and some of it is painted. We know a lot about some of it and very often we find that the facts that used to apply have been discarded or reassessed in the light of newer science and rather better descriptions.

There is a lot of clever support material out there. I know where to look for some things but if anyone finds a good source, lets share it.
"He's off on one.....!"

[Dave The Slave]

Pottery man, have taken a lot from your detailed reply which all makes perfect sense.
Tried to collate as much info as possible, so here goes.
Piece pictured is 9mm thick, 60 mm long and 20mm wide, normally on an Id request do use the gridded measurement scale.
As said 2 parallel grooves aprox 5mm apart and about 5mm from top of this piece.
The remnant is virtually flat, slight arch of 1mm max on the inside
No water around, no known Roman habitation, slight slope.
Did find a few other pieces in an area of 70m x 30 m.

The above is the smoother sides,

Top piece10mm, 2nd piece is just to support, 3 is 9mm, 4 is 12mm bottom is13mm.Did find 4 Roman coins in this area 300-350 AD.
Hope this is of more use to you.
Cheers,
Dave.

[Pottery Man]

I need more detailed images to be of much use here, Dave.
Excellent idea to lay out sherds on metric graph-paper, but the oblique views or section through the edges may be more useful. Sad to add that I may not be able to offer much more insight with these. To be fair to both of us, it would be quite extraordinary to get much out of a small number of flat and rather uncharacteristic red clay or gritty red-clay items. Have they got a formed edge section? Are there notable features in the way the clay was formed or the way it has fractured?

I added a picture of vaguely similar kiln waste - possibly shelf fragments and 'placing' aids for setting glazed ware in a single-fire clamp kiln or cross draft wood-fired kiln where pots were once-fired from raw clay to glost in one go. (Glost = finished glazed ware)

[Pottery Man]

Seems like an age since I collated a few opinions about Dave the Slave's ceramic licorice allsorts. I have a friend in the Andover-Warminster-Salisbury triangle. If I'm in Dave's stamping ground with this, so much the better. She is very interested in the things our ancestors buried as part of the folk-lore or superstitions of building houses.
She was browsing through some of my photo-files and announced that she regularly gathers very similar lumps of broken tiles (she's a local planning officer, but be nice, someone has to be the bod that inspects and writes reports) for her French drains.
She tells me that tile scatters are often a sign of demolition or previously tile-clad buildings. They used broken tiles and bricks as hardcore in field entrances and it gets spread about by muddy wheels.
In her area, they hang the walls as well as covering the roof with tiles. Her earliest complete ones found their way to the Weald & Downland Museum at Singleton......