Frampton Roman villa, located in the Frome valley of Dorset near Dorchester (Durnovaria), was a substantial high-status courtyard villa flourishing in the 4th century AD. It is celebrated above all for an exceptional suite of polychrome mosaics, attributed to the Durnovarian school of mosaicists, which adorned its principal reception rooms.
Source: Pleiades — A Community-Built Gazetteer and Graph of Ancient Places. View the Pleiades record →
The villa is one of the most important religious-iconographic monuments in late Roman Britain: one of its mosaics famously combines a Chi-Rho monogram with classical pagan imagery (Neptune, Bacchus, Cupid and Bellerophon), making it a key piece of evidence for the syncretic religious culture of the late 4th-century romano-British elite. Together with Hinton St Mary, it places this corner of Dorset at the heart of debates about early Christianity in Britain.
The site is known principally from Samuel Lysons' 1796 excavation and illustrations, which recorded the mosaics before they were lost (the pavements themselves do not survive). Limited modern fieldwork, including geophysical survey, has confirmed the villa plan in the landscape, but no major recent excavation has been published, and most of our knowledge still depends on Lysons' antiquarian record.
Frampton Roman villa, located in the Frome valley of Dorset near Dorchester (Durnovaria), was a substantial high-status courtyard villa flourishing in the 4th century AD. It is recorded in the Pleiades gazetteer of ancient places as a villa site from the Roman period in Britain.
Frampton Roman villa is classified as a Roman villa — a civilian site in the Pleiades ancient world gazetteer. Roman Britain's archaeology encompasses thousands of sites ranging from legionary fortresses and marching camps to villas, temples and towns.
Several Roman sites lie within a short distance, including Frampton (1.1 km), Multi-period landscape including an Iron Age or Romano British settlement, part of an associated field system, six bowl barrows and an enclosure 600m south east of Langford Farm (3 km), Part of a Later Iron Age or Romano-British settlement 590m north west of Compton Barn (3.8 km). Aubrey Research maps over 2,200 Roman sites across Britain, drawn from the Pleiades ancient world gazetteer.
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