This trench was located on the south side of the wall separating that part of the site in the guardianship of English Heritage and the unexcavated part to the south, in the garden of Dee House. It lies approximately in the centre of the arena of the amphitheatre and offers, for the first time, an archaeologically excavated sequence through its post-Roman fills. Excavation during 2002 uncovered the upper part of the backfilled foundation trench for the wall between the Guardianship site and Dee House.
The excavation of four archaeological trenches (in contrast to the evaluation pits excavated in 2000) has shown that much of what was previously believed about the Roman amphitheatre is wrong in detail. In particular, the survival of much of the Roman masonry into the seventeenth century was unexpected; there is evidence for a Roman building on the eastern part of the site before the construction of the stone amphitheatre c 100; and the significance of some of the post-Roman archaeology is much greater than predicted. Moreover, a strong case can now be made for relating the timber framing discovered in the 1960s to the stone building and not to an earlier, entirely timber-framed structure; more work will be required to confirm that this is indeed the case. It is certainly interesting to discover that the site was not earmarked for the amphitheatre from the outset, but was a later redesign of this part of the civil settlement.
In the meantime, the question remains of the extent of surviving Roman masonry. Ground Penetrating Radar, which uses a method similar to sonar to recognise changes in the density of the soil, was undertaken in February 2002. It showed that the survival of masonry on the south side is at least as patchy as on the north, if not actually worse. There is little trace of the arena wall or the outer wall, except beneath the car park of Dee House; the remains of the west and south entrances were not seen, nor were any of the vomitoria (spectators’ entrances). However, geophysics is not always reliable and although we can be reasonably confident that where it shows surviving remains, they will be there, we cannot be so sure that there is nothing where it shows blanks!