Trials have begun on making tesserae for the mosaic floor in the Roman building. Stone (recycled from a Roman building) and tile are cut into rods by a tile cutter and then broken into cubes using a traditional hammer and hardie combination.

When you look at the originals from the Hurcot mosaic they obviously weren’t too bothered about getting them all a regular shape, so perhaps we are aiming for too high a standard. Mind you they didn’t have a tile cutter to make neat rods. Only 99,876 tesserae to go.

hammer and hardie in operation

the original Hurcot cubes

cubes made from tile and 2 different stones

tile rods from the tile cutter