BONE, tile and pottery finds including some unusual imported wares are among the Roman finds unearthed in the Ewell archeological dig.

Investigating the secrets of lost Roman shrines at Hatch Furlong on the Ewell ByPass, schoolchildren were among visitors taken on a conducted tour of the site last week.

Also on site was David Brooks, of Bourne Hall museum, an authority on local archaeology and author of The Romans in Ewell.

He said: "We've also found a flint structure which we believe to be an oven. This would have been where food was cooked for people before they took part in ceremonies and where items where cooked then given as offerings to the gods."

Flint walls have been excavated and two more shafts discovered.

A virtually complete burial pot, for containing cremated remains, was another find.

Originally funerals took the form of cremation.

A funeral pyre was built in a field and when it had burnt down the bones of the deceased were picked out by relatives and gathered in a box or jar.

This was then buried with some token pleasure for the dead person beside it, a wine jar being an example found on a dig at Bourne Hall.

A well-off family at an earlier dig in Kiln Lane placed the ashes of one dead relative in an elegant glass bowl fitted inside a pottery jar, and another was interred in an amphora with its top chipped off.

The things buried with the dead were often broken, sometimes to stop grave robbery and sometimes as an emblem of death. Possibly wine was included as a symbol of energy and life.

The Hatch Furlong area will now be back-filled and a survey map recorded for other digs already planned for the future.