Junior Teddy Bowers and post-doctoral researcher Melissa Chatfield started the kiln fire early on Friday afternoon.
What the Romans in Britain lacked in aesthetics they more than made up for in efficiency - and a Stanford researcher shows how they did it by recreating and firing a kiln based on the late Iron Age and Roman models in Britain. BY CYNTHIA HAVEN In the shadow of Hadrian's Wall, Roman soldiers defended their empire's northern borders in Great Britain, passed the time in their bath houses and inevitably drank a lot of wine. They also made an awful lot of pots. But how? Melissa Chatfield, a research fellow in ceramic geo-archaeology, was determined to find out. Hence, way out on the edge of the Stanford campus, a narrow column of pale smoke rose behind the Stanford Community Farm building last weekend. The source was a five-foot high grass mound atop a 12-foot square wooden box. It's modeled on several ancient kilns in England dating to the first century B.C. and the early Roman kilns that followed.
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