Back In October 2022,

we made a post featuring this curios object, 

photographs BBC2 Digging for Britain, Rare TV., the post is here, at the time a list of possible uses was put forward, the Roman dodecahedron, or as it is sometimes called, a Gallo-Roman dodecahedron, it is a small hollow object made of copper alloy which has been cast into a regular dodecahedral shape, it has twelve flat pentagonal faces, each face having a circular hole of varying diameter in the middle, the holes connecting to the hollow centre, Roman dodecahedra date from the 2nd to 4th centuries AD. The first dodecahedron was found in 1739. Since then, at least 116 similar objects have been found from Wales to Hungary and Spain and to the east of Italy, with most found in Germany and France. Ranging from 4 to 11 centimetres (1.6 to 4.3 in) in size, nobody knows what they were used for, speculated uses include candlestick holders (wax was found inside two examples); dice; survey instruments for estimating distances to (or sizes of) distant objects; devices for determining the optimal sowing date for winter grain; gauges to calibrate water pipes, weapons or army standard bases; thread holder for knitting gloves; religious artefacts, fortune telling devices, or just purely decorative, well now the mystery of its use has been solved,

Norton Disney History and Archaeology Group secretary Richard Parker, Professor Alice Roberts and researcher Lorena Hitchens with the Roman dodecahedron, Raymond Greaves, of Bedfordshire, has presented the theory that the object would be used as a ‘night candle clock’, He was at a meeting of the Leighton Linslade U3A group when he “had a sudden burst of enlightenment” which led him to consider the correlation of the 12 sided object and the 12 months of the year, in his research he proposed: “The devices were used to hold wax candles of different dimensions for different times of year and for different latitudes to provide an approximate time during the period of night when sundials and water clocks would not serve, and in most cases were used to mark the passage of four watches as practiced by Roman military encampments.”, His research continued: “With the idea that these devices could in fact be a means to monitor the approximate length of night, along with the knowledge the length of night changes with the seasons, and that the Roman practice was to accept that hours change length depending on the date and location, and that while the notion of hours during the night was not as important as the four watches used by Romans during the night. It seemed that only an approximation was sufficient for the assumed use, monitoring the four watches.” so there it is, mystery solved! for the full story have a look here.