Last month’s visit to Chester/Deva got me thinking about the other great urban sites of Roman Britain. I have previously visited Silchester/Calleva (CA 337, April 2018), Wroxeter/Viroconium (CA 338, May 2018), and London (CA 416, November 2024), but what about other Roman towns and cities? Going through the CA archive, I realised that I touched on Colchester/Camulodunum’s greatness in CA 330 (September 2017), commenting that ‘[it] may win the accolade of being the most-visited site by CA of all’. So this month the only way is Essex, headed to a city that was something big in the Roman world.
Current Archaeology’s first formal visit to Colchester came in issue 26 (May 1971), setting the tone for all subsequent reporting – a professional and detailed update about all known aspects of the city at this time from Ros Niblett, one of the two great names of its archaeological story alongside Philip Crummy. For more on both of these heritage heroes, you can read an interview with Ros in CA 209 (May 2007) and with Philip in CA 185 (April 2003).
The high standards that Ros and Philip instilled from the outset are a crucial part of Colchester’s story: other sites of equal richness were less ably excavated – and less well reported – in this era, when the pace of development and the threat of destruction sometimes led to corners being cut. Not so in Colchester. As that first article explains, the Colchester Excavation Committee (the origins of today’s Colchester Archaeological Trust) had been set up in 1964 in the face of growing redevelopment threats to the city’s archaeology, like many other urban sites at the time. The Committee provided the formal framework for all subsequent fieldwork and the exceptional quality of reporting that continues to this day – the most recent update being in CA 402 (September 2023). Across the 1970s, the intense pace of work there kept the updates coming, including Colchester’s first cover story (CA 41, November 1973); a focused report on its legionary fortress in the south-west corner of the town (CA 43, March 1974); and a detailed re-survey of the whole city in its wider landscape context (CA 72, July 1980), which is a fascinating demonstration of how much was achieved in under a decade. A further ‘state of the nation’ survey followed in CA 103 (July 1987), the city’s second and sadly most-recent cover story, although new finds from the core of the city continue to be made – see, for example, CA 314 (May 2016) on the discovery of a previously unknown Roman arcade and new finds from the legionary fortress in CA 349 (April 2019).
