I surmise that this chunk of stone was from a stone-cutting school. The learner would have started carving
the decorative dadoes at the right (he probably was a left-hander), working his way left
(I'll also assume that the Romans would not have allowed women to work as stone cutters)
until the penultimate dado, when things went awry. Having ruined his project,
he would have thrown his mallet off in the distance while uttering Roman curse words.
After cooling down, he would have done the left-most dado to near-perfection,
then gone hunting for another chunk of rock to start it all over again.
I must stop reading so many detective books!
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