This unnamed quarry lies on the Isle of Purbeck in Dorset, south of the known Romano-British settlement at Bucknowle Farm near Corfe Castle. It is one of several stone-extraction sites exploiting the Purbeck limestone and shale outcrops, likely active from the later 1st through 4th centuries AD, when Purbeck stone — particularly the distinctive Purbeck "marble" and Kimmeridge shale — was being worked at industrial scale.
Source: Pleiades — A Community-Built Gazetteer and Graph of Ancient Places. View the Pleiades record →
Purbeck quarries supplied a regionally and supra-regionally important industry: Purbeck marble was used for inscriptions, veneers, mortars, and architectural fittings across southern Britain, while Kimmeridge shale was turned into furniture, trays, and armlets distributed widely through the province. The quarrying landscape around Bucknowle is thus part of one of Roman Britain's most significant non-metallic extractive economies.
The nearby villa/settlement at Bucknowle Farm was excavated by Light and others in the 1970s–90s and produced abundant evidence of shale-working and stone use, but this specific quarry south of the site has not, to my knowledge, been subject to detailed published excavation; its identification rests on surface survey and topographic traces of extraction included in the Barrington Atlas mapping. No dating evidence specific to this individual quarry pit is securely published.
This unnamed quarry lies on the Isle of Purbeck in Dorset, south of the known Romano-British settlement at Bucknowle Farm near Corfe Castle. It is recorded in the Pleiades gazetteer of ancient places as a quarry site from the Roman period in Britain.
Unnamed quarry is classified as a Roman quarry — a industrial 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 Untitled (0 km), Jordan Hill Roman Temple (16.1 km), Preston Roman villa (16.9 km). Aubrey Research maps over 2,200 Roman sites across Britain, drawn from the Pleiades ancient world gazetteer.
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