The floors of Roman villas are not all covered in mosaics. Mosaics are a luxury and found in a minority of rooms.
There were many alternatives floor types.
The simplest form of floor is the 'earth' floor. This can involve using the existing natural surface but often, more elaborately, involved digging over the floor and adding material to it to make it stronger with agents such as lime, chalk lumps beaten in or cinders, including waste material from smithies. There is also the famous occasional addition of 'bulls blood', which is said to improve the composition. The important thing is that the mixture is beaten down hard to produce a smooth surface. Washing the surface with water and soot will help maintain the durability. These floors can be very hard, as long as the roof doesn't leak, but suffer a modern threat from trainers, which 'grip' and pull the earth.
The surface of the earth floor could be covered with straw or dried grass in order to protect it. This covering can be swept up and easily laid again.
The earth floor, by virtue of its material of construction, leaves very little in the way of archaeological traces. The other form of floor, which is also organic and so can decay with few traces on dry sites, is the familiar (to us) floor boards. There is now evidence that the Romans did have plank floors laid over joists and nailed down. But often the joists were simply laid in slots cut in the earth and this is the technique we have used at the Butser Roman Villa. This must have lead to more rapid rotting of the timber in constant contact with the soil but this is something that we will monitor.
Another type of flooring which is frequently found on Roman sites is the 'mortar' floor. This consists of spreads of mortar of varying thickness, usually applied directly on to the earth. This hardens up the surface and makes it look better. This sort of approach can also be used to repair other sorts of floor, when they are damaged or have become worn. The next sorts of floors are made of mortar, brick and tile and will be more hard wearing.
There is a type of floor whose name occurs frequently in the literature of Roman building techniques and this is the opus signinum. As archaeologists now use this term, it means a mortar mix with added crushed brick or terracotta, including some quite large lumps. The name does not help us in determining what exactly it was to the Romans did, as 'opus' means a 'work or construction' and 'signinum' means "after the fashion of Signia", a town near to Rome. There have been many arguments about what this type of floor was and its composition. The Roman architect Vitruvius is much quoted but he seems to be thinking of a water-proof cement for cisterns. At Butser, we made it by mixing quick lime and crushed brick with a minimal amount of water, allowing it to slake, then pounding it in place, now dry, and leaving it to set.
Next is a type of paving made from small bricks known as opus spicatum. Here spicatum means 'like an ear of wheat'. This refers to way the lines of brick are laid in a zig-zag pattern. The small bricks are set in lime mortar.
Finally, we come to tesselated pavements, a simple form of mosaic. They are made out of tesserae small cubes of brick or stone) set in a matrix of mortar. The tesserae used are commonly of a larger and much less variable size than those used for mosaics, being about an inch square. They are generally all of one colour, with no decorative patterns. They can, however, also be used to give a border to the more elaborate mosaics.
Created 15 November 2003 - Updated 15 November 2003