‘finds Friday’ at Williams & Griffin

On Friday (20th June), Trust archaeologist Adam Wightman reported back to Trust director Philip here at Roman Circus House. Adam is supervising our excavations at the Williams & Griffin store in the High Street at Colchester. On Friday he brought with him the haul of small finds which the excavation team had found that day: in fact, there were so many small finds that the team had called it ‘finds Friday’. Apparently the finds were so prolific that an element of competition had developed during the day’s excavation…  It was a bit like Christmas, back at the Trust, as we gathered round to open all the finds boxes and see what we’d got. The haul of small finds is varied and interesting – and some of the finds are very small, indeed!

Friday’s  small finds derive from the complex of intercutting medieval pits and a ditch on the site which we are currently excavating, in what was formerly the backyard of K D Radcliffe Ltd’s shop (no 150 High Street).

The finds include items made of lead, heavily corroded copper-alloy, worked bone, jet, slate, and glass. We have had a very quick look at the finds before they are recorded and then studied, and come up with some tentative dating and identifications. The finds date to the Roman and post-Roman periods, and include quite a few coins, some interesting pins, fragments of early roof slates, a fragment of decorative jet, and a tiny glass bead. Some of these items derive from the fill of a large medieval pit, possibly a quarry-pit, which may have been dug to extract the gravel from the Roman street which lies across the site, while others derive from a medieval boundary ditch. We have selected just a few of Friday’s finds to illustrate in this blog post: a coin; a post-medieval diamond-headed pin which may have been associated with a window; the fragment of jet; and some items for personal use, ie a pair of Roman tweezers, a pin from a brooch or buckle, a Roman hairpin, an interesting Roman needle, and a Roman game-counter.

The varied character of the small finds and the range in their dates demonstrate the range and variety of activity on the site over many centuries of continuous occupation.

The Trust’s excavations at Williams & Griffin are being funded by Fenwick Ltd.

The images show the finds at Roman Circus House today: from left to right, the diamond-headed pin; the tweezers; the brooch/buckle pin; the hairpin; the needle; the game-counter; and the coin – and, below, the fragment of jet.

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