A mysterious Roman object unearthed in an amateur dig has baffled experts as it goes on display in Britain for the first time.
The 12-sided object was discovered in Norton Disney, near Lincoln, in 2023, and will go on display at Lincoln Museum as part of the city’s Festival of History.
Richard Parker, secretary of the Norton Disney History and Archaeology Group, said it was a “privilege to have handled” the dodecahedron, but was still at a loss over what it was.
They weren’t cave men, they had plenty of metal stuff.
These dodecahedra are vastly over-complicated for “utilitarian” uses. As Boinkage says, if you need something for fastening some ropes together just to lash stuff, why use an intricate forging like this? All those knobs, the complex hollow shape, the variously-sized holes, those are features that took a lot of work to add. If it’s a utilitarian piece then those features need to be for something. Otherwise we’d be finding examples of simpler versions that lacked those features.
The “they could be for knitting glove fingers” idea, for example, could be just as easily done using a hunk of wood with five nails driven into it.