Chester Amphitheatre
Before we even touched a trowel, we worked hard to discover as much as we could about the site by studying aerial photographs, old maps, the reports from previous excavations, and the remains still visible on the surface today. We also made use of the latest technology to try to ‘see’ beneath the surface, so that we knew as much as possible about what to expect when the excavations began. And we started to put all this information onto a single computerised map. We’re not just interested in the amphitheatre: we want to understand how it fitted into the wider townscape of Roman Chester, and we want to understand what happened before and after the amphitheatre was built. This took place with Non Evasive research of Chester Amphitheatre.
A ‘live’ web camera was also been installed, providing 24 hour coverage to enable visitors to keep tabs on progress, and view the excavations through the web cam, by logging onto the official website www.chesteramphitheatre.co.uk
Trench A
In Trench A, we’ve taken 25 days to excavate the sewers and gas-pipes of a 19th-century house and to re-excavate the trenches excavated only a few decades ago by 20th-century archaeologists! The Victorian house is shown on the 1875 Ordnance Survey map, so we know that it was built before that date, but it’s probably not much more than 150 years old. As we’ve worked downwards, we’ve recorded the brick floor, the cellar steps, and the sewage and gas pipes. Fortunately the cellar itself lies beneath the modern road, so hasn’t destroyed any of the early remains we’re most interested in. Why are we treating these modern remains so carefully? For one thing, we need to understand precisely what has been destroyed by recent activity. Also – more excitingly – we now have a number of extremely useful ‘previews’ into the earlier archaeological deposits, exposed in the sides of the modern cuttings. So we can already begin to put forward a few ideas.
It seems that the house was built directly on top of Roman remains. This is remarkable: why are there no medieval and later remains? Maps of the 17th and 18th centuries certainly show buildings in this area: where are the remains of these? It must be that the ground level was deliberately lowered in the mid-19th century, just before the house was built, destroying almost all the medieval and later remains. Only a few of the features cut more deeply into the ground – rubbish pits and so on - have survived. Even the uppermost parts of the Roman deposits were scraped off and carted away by the Victorian town-planners. Despite this, we can now begin to see that at least two stone buildings were constructed re-using the surviving masonry of the Roman amphitheatre as their foundations. We don’t yet know what these buildings were or when they were constructed, but it was clearly at some point after the amphitheatre was demolished in order to recycle its fine building stone.
To sum up, it’s already becoming clear that the remains of the Roman amphitheatre have suffered a lot of damage over the centuries, so we’re unlikely to be looking at another Pompeii when the excavations finish! The good news is that the two foundation courses of the outer wall of the amphitheatre survive fairly intact, along with part of at least one course of the superstructure. It had been assumed from the findings of past excavations that buttresses stood at regular intervals around the outer wall, but we haven’t found these, so perhaps they were only used to embellish the entrances. Around the outside of the outer wall is a Roman road, which was clearly resurfaced many times, and obviously gave access to the amphitheatre’s four main entrances. We have also begun to reveal traces of the first amphitheatre on the site, constructed in timber, which we had thought might have been totally destroyed by Thompson’s excavations in the 20th century.
But perhaps our most intriguing discovery so far in Trench A is the first evidence for occupation on the site pre-dating the construction of the amphitheatre. As yet, it’s too early to date this, or say anything more conclusive about it. We’ll just have to wait and see!
Trench B
So far, excavation in Trench B has been limited to the removal of topsoil and other modern garden remains. We have also been recording the many phases of building and rebuilding evident in the boundary wall between the trench and St John’s Church. And we have emptied a modern sewer trench: just as in Trench A, the sides of this trench offer us a useful preview into the earlier remains. Unlike Trench A, where the Victorian builders swept away almost everything from the medieval and post-medieval periods, it is already clear that a great depth of early deposits survives intact in Trench B. In fact, there’s every hope that we will be able to reveal the whole sequence of Chester’s past, from Roman to present day.
Find out more by logging onto the official website
