Roman Chester – Deva Victrix – is one of the unquestioned ‘great sites’ of Roman Britain. This was a major military centre from its late 1st-century AD origins through to its abandonment in the late 4th/early 5th centuries AD, and significant parts of the town survive beneath the medieval and modern city. Current Archaeology has been on site there since the start of the magazine, and its repeated visits shine a light not just on the evolution of the town, but also on its wider regional and national context.
Initial inscriptions
The magazine paid its first visit to Chester in CA 2 (May 1967) to examine two new inscriptions discovered during works clearing the amphitheatre prior to opening it to the public. One was a devotion to the goddess Nemesis, comparable to those known from the shrines around the amphitheatre at Carnuntum (modern-day Petronell) in Austria; the other was a graffito reserving a seat for a man named Seranus. Modern-day attendees at nearby Chester racecourse might recognise the impulse of the latter, and this mix of the divine and the day-to-day could be said to sum up Chester down the ages: it is a place with a reputation as a serious party town. But after this early appearance, it took until CA 84 (October 1982) for Current Archaeology’s first in-depth report, which examined life in the 4th century, at the end of the Roman era. Excavations were telling the story of the abandonment of parts of the fortress and the transformation of others into a purely administrative rather than military centre. This fieldwork also revealed the complicated earlier history of the site – of its foundation in the late 1st century AD, and then its partial abandonment in the early 2nd century when a large part of the legion moved north. There it spent half a century building first Hadrian’s Wall and later the Antonine Wall. Only towards the end of the 2nd century did Chester arise again as the XX Legion’s headquarters.
Doing the rounds
It was not until CA 167 (March 2000) that the magazine returned to Chester, and in unusual fashion. As that article explains, the town’s two famous elliptical buildings were originally identified in 1939 near the market hall, before the commencement of the Second World War put a stop to fieldwork. The local council picked up excavation of the buildings again in 1967, in advance of a new car park. However, like so much archaeology of that era, this data then sat unexamined and unpublished for decades before finally seeing the light of day. The results were worth the wait: the buildings, located near the centre of the Roman fortress, were found to date to the late 1st century, not long after Deva’s foundation. The first structure measured 52m by 32m and had an oval courtyard with a water feature at its centre, surrounded by 12 wedge-shaped rooms; the second was constructed on top of the first in around AD 220, its design modified using different diameters of arc to achieve a ‘fatter’ design. The quality of construction of these buildings and their unusual design led to the hypothesis that they were built by order of provincial governor Gnaeus Julius Agricola, with Deva as his administrative headquarters – in effect the early capital of Britannia, before Londinium rose to prominence.
Colonisation and cohabitation