12-Sided Roman Relic Baffles Archaeologists, Spawns Countless Theories
11th August 2025
As the group of amateur archaeologists sifted through tiles, animal teeth and pottery fragments buried within an ancient Roman pit in eastern England, one of them encountered something unusual last June.
It was a cast bronze object, hollow in the middle, flat along 12 faces, about the size of a clenched fist. Only one of the diggers — all members of Norton Disney village’s archaeology society — recognized the discovery: It was a Roman dodecahedron, likely to have been placed there 1,700 years earlier.
“You’re looking at a very strange and bizarre object,” Richard Parker, secretary of the Norton Disney History and Archaeology Group, said in a telephone interview.
At first glimpse, the dodecahedron looks more like a sci-fi illustration than it does an ancient Roman relic. Each of its pentagon-shaped faces is punctuated by a hole, varying in size, and each of its 20 corners is accented by a semi-spherical knob.
D12. Ask me a hard one. As Gary Gygax once famously said, “No pirate ever role-played as a marketing consultant.”