all hands on deck for the index

Today (21st March), several members of the Essex Society for Archaeology and History (ESAH) came to Roman Circus House to do the mailout of their newly-printed Index to the Transactions of the Essex Society for Archaeology and History (TESAH) to every member of ESAH. This Index (Third Series, dated 2013) is for volumes 31-40 of the annual journal, for the years 2000-2009, and it follows two earlier indexes published in 2008 and 2011. The journal is always inscribed ‘Printed by the Society at the Museum in the Castle’ (Colchester Castle), and so is the Index.

The ESAH was founded in 1852 to promote the study of the archaeology and history of Essex and to publish the results in their annual journal, as well as to organise conferences and to provide a library for members; their library is now housed in the Albert Sloman Library at the University of Essex, just outside Colchester. The Trust contributes notes on our work of the previous year to every issue of the journal, and we also contribute longer items on our more significant findings. Several Trust archaeologists are members of ESAH and senior Trust archaeologist Howard Brooks is on the ESAH Council.

Colchester makes a good showing in the new Index, and the Roman circus site has its own listing, as ‘circus’, and also a listing under ‘Colchester’. Some of the Trust’s fieldwork projects on the Abbey Field, in the old garrison and on the site of the new garrison, all in Colchester, were published as notes in volumes 37 (2006) and 38 (2007) of the TESAH (pages 158-9 and pages 171-3, respectively). These sites are all near or quite near to Roman Circus House and some of them produced evidence relating to the Roman circus. In volume 38, our notes included twelve garrison sites which produced a great deal of archaeological evidence, and which included the ‘Time Team’ trenches. The results from these sites are always interesting and sometimes remarkable, and the evidence ranges from modern military features to prehistoric features. These twelve sites produced evidence of a Late Neolithic pit, a prehistoric ‘four-post’ structure, Late Bronze Age features, ditches, a double-ditched trackway with Roman pottery sherds and cremated human bone in one of the ditches, a late Roman cemetery, another large Roman cemetery, a Roman track/droveway, field-boundary ditches, a Roman enclosure and villa/farmstead, part of the ditch and rampart of Berechurch Dyke, and a ditch associated with the Siege of 1648 – and, on the sports pitches on the Abbey Field, evidence of the Roman circus: part of the foundations of the seating-stand (cavea) wall and the robbed-out wall lines of the central barrier (spina). These sites also produced evidence of the circus starting-gates and the base of a monument in the spina, and many interesting finds.

Read all the Trust’s completed reports in our online archive at http://cat.essex.ac.uk/ ; our final publication on the archaeology of Colchester garrison is currently in preparation.

Visit the ESAH web-site at www.essex.ac.uk/history/esah/ and their blog at www.esah160.blogspot.co.uk/ – incidentally, the item posted on the ESAH blog today was about the books acquired for the ESAH library in 2013.

The image shows the front cover of the new Index. [Image to follow.]

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