Dumps and tesserae: high-status building materials from 33 Union Street, Southwark

A 2nd-century dump of Roman building materials included a piece of wall-plaster with a tessera embedded in it and fragments of moulded opus signinum with the imprints of tesserae, probably from a wall mosaic. There were also loose tesserae cut from tile, chalk and Kimmeridge cementstone. Most important were over 140 tesserae of blue and green glass (illustrated in fig. 6). These, together with 1200 recovered at a neighbouring site, form the largest asssemblage of glass tesserae yet found in London. The distribution of finds of glass tesserae in London is shown in Figure 7.