Roman Colchester and Continental Europe

After the E.U. referendum in Britain last week, it is interesting to consider the long history of Colchester in Continental Europe. Colchester has produced considerable archaeological evidence for trade and cultural interaction, and conflict, with the Continent, and of invasion and incoming groups of people from the Continent, during but also before and after the control of Britain by the Roman empire. The evidence includes centuries of trade and imported goods, burial practices, structures, and inscriptions. Burial goods from the Lexden tumulus, for example, show that the elite of Camulodunum, the Iron Age precursor of Colchester, enjoyed trade with the Roman empire on the Continent, Roman cultural products, and Continental foods and wine. Tribes from the Continent settled in pre-Roman Britain and Camulodunum itself may have been founded by the tribe of the Belgae. This is a large and very interesting subject and Colchester has produced so much archaeological evidence, and has such remarkable remains, that we will look at some evidence for diversity in ancient Colchester, of incoming individuals and groups of people, in just a few examples.

The most direct evidence is in inscriptions or even pottery stamps. The Roman empire was diverse in its populations: Longinus Sdapeze was a soldier (an auxiliary) in the Roman army and, as the inscription on his funerary monument shows, he was from Sardica, the modern city of Sofia in Bulgaria. His funerary monument dates to the early Roman period in Colchester and it was discovered at Lexden. Several potters or potter families working at Roman Colchester have been identified from the stamps on their pottery products as incoming craftsmen from the Rhine Valley and East Gaul, including G. Attius Marinus, Miccio, Minuso (from Trier), and Sextus Valerius. (Four Roman-period kilns uncovered at Colchester are also paralleled by kilns at Neuss in modern Germany.)

Over the years, the Trust has uncovered a large number of burials at Colchester, dating to the Iron Age, the Roman period and the post-Roman period and these show a wide range of burial practices. The Roman-period burials include several remarkable bustum burials on sites within the old garrison at Colchester, for example, on our Garrison Area E. These are rare and special pyre burials, with Germanic military associations, and they provide evidence for the presence of different incoming groups of people in Roman Colchester. On Site A of our Meeanee/Hyderabad Barracks site, within the old garrison, we excavated a large cemetery which included cremation burials and inhumation burials. These date to the mid-Roman period and to the post-Roman period (the late 6th or early 7th century). Eight of the later inhumation burials had been placed within ring-ditches, in a distinctive and unusual form of burial practice. Five of the later burials produced Anglo-Saxon shield-bosses, spear-heads and knives. This later cemetery may be associated with incoming groups of people. We uncovered another ‘ring-ditch burial’ on the site of the new car-park at Napier Road, within the old garrison, and this one dates to the 3rd-4th century. In the 1980s, we excavated a large Roman-period cemetery on the site of the police station in Butt Road (Colchester Archaeological Report 9). One burial, of a child, produced some remarkable small fragments of copper-alloy and glass from a headband, and this is paralleled in some burials on the Continent.

We excavated another burial of a small child in a Roman cemetery on the Abbey Field sports pitch, within the old garrison, in 2000 (CAT Report 138). (The Abbey Field is just over the road from the Trust’s HQ and Roman circus centre.) This 4th-century grave included cremated human bone, a nailed wooden box and a small collection of jewellery including a necklace of jet beads with two complementary bear amulets made of jet. The protective amulets were pendants which would have been used to ward off evil and may have been worn by the child during illness or included in their burial for the afterlife: other examples are from Yorkshire, Malton, Colchester, and Cologne and Trier on the Continent, with several from near Roman military sites. ‘… The jet bear may represent either the Continental bear goddess Artio or the wider protective funerary power attributed to the animal…’ (CAT Report 412): these child burials which included bear amulets may represent the children of military personnel from the Continent.

Archaeological evidence from burials is special and personal: it tells us about individuals and their families, and diverse burial practices show that incoming individuals and families settled in ancient Colchester over the centuries to live and work here, and are buried here.

The image shows our drawing of two of the jet bear amulets from the Abbey Field site (from CAT Report 138).

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