Chester Archaeology excavated nine trenches on the site of the amphitheatre between 31 July and 6 September 2000. We were assisted in the project by members of the Chester Archaeological Society, some of my archaeology students from Chester College and West Cheshire College, and by other local interested volunteers (including members of the Chester Amphitheatre Trust). This makes it a true community-based project.
The rationale behind the project was to see how much (if any) archaeology had survived the extensive excavations of the 1960s. Our understanding was that the post-Roman deposits had been bulldozed to one side of the site and then spread over the area that became the seating bank when the Ministry of Works landscaped the site in the early 1970s. We expected that little would survive under the modern gravel of the arena floor and that, at best, traces of the timber amphitheatre might survive under the seating bank. We were also concerned that stone we could see eroding through the gravel in the north entrance might be in situ archaeology. We therefore located our trenches to test these ideas.
We put three trenches in the arena, one in the north entrance, one in the east entrance and four on the seating bank. The results were not what we were expecting!