third buttress found in Roman circus excavation

On Tuesday (12th November), Trust archaeologists Ben Holloway and Mark Baister uncovered the stone foundation of another buttress in our excavation on part of the site of the Roman circus, in front of our building Roman Circus House. This is the third buttress foundation which we have uncovered on this excavation site, and it is for a narrow buttress. We had already uncovered the foundations of a narrow buttresss and then a wide buttress here. All three external buttresses strengthened the outer wall of the circus cavea (seating-stand) on the north-eastern side of the circus, and show the pattern of wide and narrow buttresses around the external wall of the west end of the circus.

We have also uncovered a pile of unmortared (waste) stone chippings dumped here by some of the Roman masons who built the circus, and which was preserved under the earth bank on which the tiered wooden seating was constructed. The circus had mortared stone foundations, walls built of rubble faced with courses of brick and Kentish ragstone, probably stone architectural details, stone monuments, and tiered wooden seating on the massive earth bank. The arena was just a dirt track and its surface was not treated or covered in any way. The circus was all built by hand, and the building materials would all have been prepared by hand here on site, ie the stone blocks and facings all had to be chipped down to the right shape and size.

The chippings are like a vivid snapshot of a working day during the building of the circus. The Trust has found a pile of stone chippings before, on a site beside Colchester’s Roman town wall (the Culver Street site in the mid 1980s), which again represented waste building materials dumped by Roman masons who were building the town wall. Those chippings were also found with a builder’s mortarboard which even had some mortar still adhering to it.

Also, this week, Trust archaeologist Emma Holloway was drawing on the excavation site, including parts of the exposed foundations of a vomitorium (one of the public access passages into the circus).

Interestingly, as our archaeologists are uncovering parts of the structure of the Roman circus and some evidence of its building and its builders, we have a small team of modern builders working here at Roman Circus House this week, as well, building our new external store room, and using some similar techniques and materials to those of the circus, a few metres away and a few centuries ago.

The images show Mark working on the excavation, and then the foundation of the narrow buttress found this week (F16), the line of the outer wall of the cavea (F13), the backfill of the robber-trench (F2) and, in the third image, at the front, the pile of dumped stone chippings.

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