This trench was a bit of an oddity. We chose its location to see if anything survived of the slots for the timber amphitheatre (referred to as ‘strapping’ in the report). On the way down, we were certain to find no in situ archaeology, as this had all been shaved off by mechanical digger until the seating bank material was encountered.
The seating bank consisted of a deposit of reddish sandy material that had been excavated out from the arena, which lay about 1.5 m below Roman ground level. Distributed around the arena wall, this made a deposit about half a metre thick all round the amphitheatre, not enough to construct a proper seating bank. For this reason, the seats for spectators had to be held up on a wooden framework, but this was not appreciated during the 1960s excavation, and the mechanical excavators simply dug through any trace of it there might have been.
The soil we dug through was indeed backfilled material from elsewhere on site. It contained, amongst other things, the best collection of nineteenth-century pottery from anywhere on the site (and this sort of material was not kept at all during the 1960s excavations as being too modern).
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The most surprising find was a hollow-based flint point, of a type dating from the Late Upper Palaeolithic (about 12,000 to 10,000 BC). I was suspicious. Was it a ‘plant’ by a joking archaeologist in 1968? Probably not, as it turns out: the material is the sort of flint available locally and not at all like the material from which Horsham Points are usually made, which is much higher quality flint for the chalk lands of southeastern England. I'm also convinced that it’s not a fake made by a skilled twentieth-century knapper: it’s just too good for that! I think that we may be in a position to talk about a late Upper Palaeolithic ‘Cheshire Point’ tradition now! |
Underneath this soil we did find the slot for one of the horizontal beams of the timber amphitheatre (pictured above). It was so well preserved in the sandstone brash (a local term for the top layer of very decayed sandstone) that we could identify it instantly from the 1968 photographs! But the discovery of sandstone meant that this trench had no surviving archaeology, even if we had tantalising clues about prehistoric activity in this part of Chester and plenty of finds from the more recent past.