evidence of Roman circus cavea emerges from the earth

Today (7th August), the Trust made good progress in revealing part of the length of the post-Roman robber trench on our current excavation site in front of our building, Roman Circus House. This robber trench defines the inner wall of the north-eastern side of the Roman circus seating-stand (cavea). Site volunteer Shirley has been working hard on the robber trench for a couple of days.

The foundation of the inner wall of the seating-stand is shallow and, in general, poorly preserved, making it difficult even to determine its original width. From previous work on the circus site, we can only pin this down to being between 0.6m and 0.9m. However, this time it’s different! Trust archaeologist Don Shimmin thinks that this is the clearest that we’ve ever seen this feature, in any of our investigations on the circus, which is great – and its width is very apparent here. We also know from previous excavations that the width of the cavea itself varied around the circus between 5.8 and 6.1m, as measured from the outer edges of the foundations of the inner and outer walls. We can now get on and do some vital measuring of the circus remains on our new site, which will help us reconstruct the plan of the building as a whole.

The site volunteers are all hard at work on our circus site, supervised by Don. They have uncovered modern features and services, the surface of the circus arena and the robber trench, and they are now looking for the foundations of the buttresses to the outer wall of the cavea. They have retrieved some fragments of Roman pottery and animal bone.

The cavea was stone-built, both above and below ground. When the circus went out of use, its walls were demolished for building materials. Then ‘robber trenches’ were dug to remove the stone of the foundations for re-use. Now, after several centuries, some solid ancient history is emerging from the earth…

With many thanks from the Trust to all our volunteers.

The image shows site volunteer Nathan doing a little cleaning on the robber trench at the end of the day, today. [Plan of the excavation site to follow.]

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