Interesting results from Trust excavation at Kelvedon

Last week (21st-25th August), the Trust excavated a site at St Mary’s Primary School at Kelvedon in Essex which produced some really interesting results. These include the remains of a Roman-period round house in the form of a ring ditch with a causeway on the east side and post holes around the inside. The ditch contained two Roman coins and five fragments of a large and usual Roman pottery vessel with barbotine (applied) decoration. The coins date the ditch and hence the building to the late 3rd century or later.

Trust pottery specialist Steve Benfield has identified the sherds as coming from a probable cornice-rim beaker of the 2nd century. The pot is grey in colour with a darker grey slipped surface. Barbotine is a technique similar to decorating a cake with icing but using a piped clay slurry. The pieces appear to belong to one pot which, given its large size and unusual decoration, looks as if it is a rare vessel. The pieces (of which three join) have parts of a scene of running animals, a stag can be clearly identified, among vines identified by a triangular bunch of grapes and vine leaves on plant tendrils. One sherd has an outstretched human arm, clothed with a sleeve ending at the elbow, holding, upright a thin staff or wand (possibly a spear) tipped with a trefoil head. It is this sherd that has a small part of the rim surviving suggesting a cornice rim beaker. It is notable that the figure is not in proportion to the animal figures, these being larger.

The pot can be compared with vessels from Colchester, recovered as part pots during the excavation of some Roman kilns on the west side of the town in the 1950’s. One of these pots, a bowl, is a similar sounding ‘hard, dark grey ware’ has a frieze of animals, including a stag, progressing right to left amid vines around a bowl. Another, in a more typical colour-coated ware, has human figures among vines, including one with a radiate head dress and holding on to vines stems or holding vine stem pieces.

The famous Colchester Vase (in Colchester Museum) and the Colchester Circus Vase (in the British Museum) are fine colour-coated versions of similar type. (Replicas of both are on display at the Roman Circus Centre.) Had the Kelvedon vessel been complete or reconstructible, it would be a similarly-significant vessel.

Kelvedon was a small Roman-period settlement on the road from London to Colchester when it was known as Canonium. Ours is the second round house to have been found at Kelvedon. A similar but smaller ring ditch was found over forty years ago not far from our current site. Roman round houses are not commonly found in our part of the world. The first one from Kelvedon was interpreted as a temple. This leaves us with some unanswered questions. Is our building a temple or votive site of some sort? Or are both buildings less exotic? And are there more – maybe many more – such buildings yet to be found?

The site was supervised by Trust archaeologist Ben Holloway and excavated by members of the Trust’s excavation team.

The images show the ring-gully under excavation and fully excavated, and the five fragments of barbotine-decorated pottery.