As I made my through Amberwood Enclosure, through the fading bracken and over fallen limbs, I passed a toppled tree, and the archaeologist in me just couldn't resist having a look at the root ball and bole. As peered through the hanging roots I spied the shape of human agency in the form of a small pottery sherd. It's was what I'd been hoping to find looking into the root ball, and what I expected I might find. I knew Amberwood had been a site of pottery production during the Romano-British period, specifically in the 3rd and 4th centuries AD. I'd found the occasional pottery sherd over the years walking here. A series of Roman kilns had been identified in the area, and excavated after timber extraction through 1969 to 1971. As I looked closer I found 2 more sherds, 1 reasonable sized and 1 fragment, none displayed any diagnostic features, and all I can say is that all were a sandy grey fabrics, the larger sherd and fragment are a sandy dark grey/brown fabric and appear to a have a black slip applied to them, the fragment also appears to be burnished, the small sherd (top and middle) is a sandy light grey fabric, though finer, and may have a thin white slip. I need to give them a proper clean. Some of the pottery from these kilns may have travelled far across the South of England, although most sherds of Roman Mortaria (mixing/grinding bowls) produced in the New Forest identified on archaeological excavations have been in a fairly limited radius of say, 40 miles. These sherds represent wasters, and I imagine an investigation would show the area covered in a liberal distribution of these type of finds. You'd never know it today, but this area of the forest was once an industrial
landscape, years later it's industry of another form which covers the land.
