ROMAN RING

Unknown artist

Ring made from a piece of copper-alloy strip 8 mm wide and c. 82 mm long, with the ends overlapping (but not secured) to form a circle 22-23 mm in external diameter. The ends are square-cut, and the strip flattens from 1.2 mm at the inner end to 0.8 mm at the outer end. The interior of the ring is smoothly polished and the exterior is decorated with fine, perhaps worn, engraving. At the outer overlapped end the decoration consists of oblique grooves filling one-third of the width along one long edge, and the other two-thirds filled with transverse grooves. The oblique grooves become shorter and disappear about a quarter of the way around the ring, to be replaced by a longitudinal line or series of lines. At this point the transverse grooves are divided into two by a space down the centre of the ring. Close to the other end the decoration becomes more worn and hard to see. The size of this ring means that it could have been worn as a large finger-ring. It may have been cut down from some other object, just possibly a late Roman bracelet, although it is rather wide and the decoration is rather unemphatic for this. The date of the ring is very hard to establish.