A carved marble fragment at Riom (Puy-De-Dôme) and the chronology of the Aquitanian sarcophagi

The carved marble fragment illustrated in plate IX and in the accompanying drawing (fig. 1) is walled into the right-hand side of the entrance to the museum of Riom, a small town about ten miles north of Clermont-Ferrand, in the department of Puy-de-Dôme. It is labelled ‘Fragment d'un tombeau gallo-romain’; and although nothing further seems to be known either about the circumstances of its discovery or how it came to enter the museum collections, to judge from the other lapidary fragments with which it is displayed there is a strong probability that it was found locally.