Opportunities to excavate inside the walled town at Colchester do not come along that often these days, so you can imagine our excitement when Fenwick asked us to do precisely that. The company owns Williams & Griffins, a department store in the heart of the historic town, where some of its most important archaeological remains lie buried. Fenwick was about to embark on a major redevelopment, and was keen to disturb the ground as little as possible. The first stage of our work was to excavate some carefully placed exploratory trenches to find out about the depth and nature of the archaeological deposits. As a result, the new build was designed in such a way that the ground disturbance was limited to three small areas where loss of archaeological remains was unavoidable.
As is often the case in Colchester, from the very beginning the excavations revealed plenty of interest, but it was Day 94 that proved to be the big one. By then we had reached the layers relating to the tumultuous events of AD 61. This extract from site director Adam Wightman’s dig diary captures some of the excitement:
Day 94. GOLD!!! Today I had the good fortune to uncover a collection of gold and silver jewellery. It was buried beneath the floor of a Roman building destroyed during the Boudiccan fire. The jewellery appears to have been tightly packed into a very small pit and then covered over. It was in the same room that contained the burnt piece of furniture and burnt foodstuffs. The jewellery had probably been buried for safekeeping during the early stages of the revolt and then became covered over by the remains of the collapsed building. It is a remarkable piece of good fortune that the jewellery had not been found before, as Roman foundation trenches, a medieval lime pit, and a modern sewerage pipe had all been excavated within a metre of the jewellery. At least three people over the last 1,954 years had come within an arm’s reach of discovering it!
Celebrity beasts