Today, if you stand amid the Victorian terracing, the old factories, and the student bars in Leicester’s West End, it can be hard to imagine that only 150 years ago the area was still largely countryside. Yet centuries before that, this open space had proved a handy place for earlier communities to bury their dead, as the modern-day street names attest. Roman Street, Saxon Street: these labels recall the discoveries made by workmen in the 1890s of skeletons that had been buried in the vicinity with artefacts from those periods.
Accidental – and frequently poorly recorded – antiquarian finds in the 19th and early 20th centuries make it clear that there were large Roman cemeteries to the south, east, and west of the town, but until the early 1990s Leicester’s Roman funerary practices were poorly understood because no large-scale excavations of these burial grounds had taken place.
Thanks to redevelopment, however, over the last 25 years a number of these cemeteries have been subject to modern archaeological investigation – including, between 2010 and 2015, a burial ground to the west of Leicester, where the remains of 83 people were uncovered by University of Leicester Archaeological Services (ULAS). Spanning the early 2nd to the early 5th century AD, many of the graves also included artefacts or displayed burial customs not previously seen in Leicester. What we found there gave us an exciting new insight into the lives of the people who lived in the town over 1,600 years ago.
Q&A with site supervisor Lisa Westcott Wilkins