Around 1,700 years ago, a funeral took place on the outskirts of Roman Colchester. A young woman had been laid to rest in nested lead and wooden coffins, her hair fashionably styled with gleaming jet pins and her body sprinkled with costly perfumes and preservative substances. An array of food offerings and objects drawn from across Britain, continental Europe, and even further afield were carefully arranged within her grave, highlighting the far-reaching cultural and commercial networks that her family were able to access, and the wealth that they were willing to part with to give her a suitable send-off.
This was not an isolated grave. The woman had been interred outside the settlement’s walls, in accordance with Roman law, within a large area of burial grounds lining both sides of the main road running west towards London. Previous excavations within this area (today known as the Lexden Cemetery after the modern area of Colchester in which it lies) have revealed hundreds of other graves, and some of their occupants were also clearly of high social status, with discoveries like the finely sculpted Lexden Sphinx (now in Colchester Castle museum) testifying to elaborate funerary monuments.
As the centuries passed and Colchester evolved and expanded, the cemetery was eventually built over, and in 1820 the area of the young woman’s grave and the Lexden Sphinx became the site of the Essex County Hospital. While the aforementioned sculpture was found during this construction, the woman’s grave lay undetected for another 200 years, until the area was transformed once more. Plans for a new housing development on the now-defunct hospital site prompted excavations by Colchester Archaeological Trust (CAT), and in the summer of 2024 the woman’s burial was brought to light once more. The story of her rediscovery, and what has been learned about her life, is told in a thoughtful new exhibition which recently opened at the Roman Circus Visitor Centre in Colchester (see ‘Further information’ below).
