Now that's a jigsaw puzzle

Team spends years piecing together Roman frescoes

- By Lauran O'Toole

THOUSANDS of fragments of 2,000-year-old frescoes discovered in an excavation in London have been painstakingly put together in a four-year project shedding new light on high society in Roman Britain.

It is believed the paintings once decorated at least 20 internal walls at the site between AD 40 and 150.

The building was then demolished and the plaster dumped into a pit before the start of the third century.

The fragments made up one of the largest collections of painted Roman wall plaster to be discovered in the capital, at a site in Southwark, near London Bridge station, in 2021.

The paintings which display bright yellow panel designs with black intervals, decorated with images of birds, fruit, flowers and lyres demonstrate the wealth and taste of the building's owners, said the team at the Museum of London Archaeology.