Posted on Friday 24 October 2003

Almost 2,000 years ago, at a temple in Roman London, someone with slender fingers took a small tin box, scooped a blob of white paste into the lid, and used that as a palette to smear the paste on to ... a face? Hands? An image of a god? The archaeologists jostling for position yesterday, as the box was opened for the first time in almost 2,000 years, had no idea.

The beautifully made box was easier to open than a new jar of Marmite. There was a gasp as conservator Liz Barham gently twisted off the lid to reveal perfectly preserved fingerprints, so small they may have been those of a woman or even a child. There was a second gasp as the smell hit the company.

"Asses' milk?" wondered Francis Grew, the curator of archaeology at the Museum of London. "Asses' yoghurt," retorted Hedley Swaine, the keeper of early London archaeology.

"A somewhat sulphurous smell, highly characteristic of waterlogged deposits from that site," Ms Barham said carefully. "And cheesy," she added, unable to stop her nose from wrinkling as the paste warmed under the camera lights.

[2,000-year-old pot opened]