just one fragment of Roman amphora, but with a story to tell

In June, the Trust conducted an archaeological watching brief on groundworks at a property in Butt Road in Colchester, near the police station. It is very close to the site of the remarkable Butt Road Roman cemetery which we excavated in the 1970s and 1980s, but it is a small urban site which has undergone much ground disturbance. We recovered one fragment of Roman amphora during the watching brief: this was unstratified in Layer 1 in Trench 1, that is, it did not derive from a dated context. However, it was recovered with a complete human arm bone (a humerus). It doesn’t sound like much, but the fragment of amphora is actually unusual, interesting, and even a little mysterious.

An amphora was a large ceramic container with two handles, manufactured in large numbers for the transportation and storage of commodities such as wine, olives or olive oil. Trust pottery specialist Steve Benfield studied the amphora fragment on Monday (20th June) here at our HQ, Roman Circus House. It is a fragment from the shoulder of a globular Dressel 20 amphora which would have been made in Spain and used to import olive oil into Britain. This type of amphora was in use from the mid 1st century to the early/mid 3rd century AD. It is the most common type of amphora found on Roman sites in Britain and, normally, such a fragment would not be commented on – however, this fragment has a couple of unusual features. It includes a cut-off edge and part of a cut-off incised graffiti. The cut-off edge shows that the amphora had been modified for re-use.

The fragment also includes a handle scar where one of the handles of the amphora was broken off. The cut edge has been smoothed off and the handle scar also seems to have been smoothed, which suggests that the handles were deliberately removed at the same time as the neck and rim of the amphora. These were cut off in antiquity and, unusually, the cut was made above the two handles. The Trust has excavated examples of Roman amphora in Colchester which have been cut off at the shoulder, but these are not common: moreover, these were cut below the handles and not above. These amphoras had been re-used as cremation urns, for example, one of the two amphoras which we excavated in one burial near the site of the Roman circus (not that far from Butt Road). However, this fragment from Butt Road represents a re-used amphora with an unknown function, which is even less common.

Steve has managed to find two parallels for this unusual re-used amphora in Colchester: we excavated a similar re-used amphora and fragments of a similar amphora from our excavation at the Balkerne Lane site in 1973-76, and these were dated to about AD 43-50/55 and to about AD 300-400 respectively. One had been buried upright in the ground with its cut-off edge at Roman ground-level, near two Roman buildings, and seems to have been modified and re-used as a permanent accessible storage feature. The fragment from our watching brief may represent an amphora which was re-used in the same way. (It’s not quite the Monte Testaccio in Rome, but it is very interesting – and that’s archaeology: it can be small fragments and big evidence!)

The watching brief was carried out by Trust archaeologist Nigel Rayner.
The human bone from the site will be reported on separately and, eventually, re-buried in Colchester cemetery.
Read about the Butt Road and Balkerne Lane sites in Colchester Archaeological Reports 3 and 9, whch are both available in our online archive at http://cat.essex.ac.uk/all-reports.html .

The images show the site; a section in Trench 1; the fragment of amphora, showing the smoothed cut-off circular edge, the smoothed handle scar and the cut-off graffiti; and a drawing of the re-used amphora from our Balkerne Lane site.

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