The following documentation for the 2003 dig was prepared, mostly, as the digging was just underway. Therefore the information doesn't represent the full picture of the excavations. However in the future we hope to be able to bring you a more complete picture of events.
It is hoped that further evidence will be found to clarify what the earlier building beneath the East Entrance might have been; the best suggestion so far is that it was part of an early extramural bathhouse, serving the lower ranking soldiers of Legio II Adiutrix and the population of the canabae legionis (the town that grew up rapidly around the fortress).
We also hope that we will be able to reach to the bottom of Trench XIII, as this will give us the first trench dug by hand using up-to-date archaeological techniques through the arena fills. The 1960 trench was simply bulldozed (see the picture!) and although an attempt was made to record the vertical section revealed in this way, the trench collapsed following a rainstorm and the attempt was abandoned with less than a third of the section drawn.
The consolidated remains of the amphitheatre were opened to the public in August 1972 as a monument in the care of the Department of the Environment (and latterly English Heritage). The major excavation on the site during the 1960s has been fully published (Thompson 1976); small scale work in 2000 (Matthews et al. 2001), supported by English Heritage, revealed that not all of the site was stripped during the 1960s work, as had previously been supposed.
Excavation of three further trenches was commenced in 2001 with the aim of recovering archaeological data not targeted during the original excavations, using up-to-date techniques and recovering classes of material not previously collected (e.g. environmental samples). In particular, periods not examined in the 1960s are to be targeted, covering the dereliction and abandonment of the Roman amphitheatre, the colonisation of the site for domestic use during the medieval period and the subsequent development of a townscape across the site. Two of these trenches (XI and XII in the north-eastern cavea) were completed in 2002. Trench X, in the eastern entrance, revealed unexpected evidence in 2002 for a Roman masonry building associated with a feature containing flowing water on the site before the construction of the amphitheatre; this needs further elucidation. A new trench, XIII, was started in 2002 to the south of the dividing wall with the aim of understanding the sequence of arena fills, but little progress was made.
In 2002, Trench X revealed that there had been a masonry building on the site before the construction of the amphitheatre c 100. It was associated with a feature carrying rapidly flowing water that appears to have been in use in the 70s and 80s. Further work is necessary in this area to see if the nature of these structures can be elucidated and to confirm the chronology.
It is proposed to continue the excavation of Trench XIII in the northern part of the garden of Dee House. This would target the post-Roman fills of the arena as well as locating the Roman arena deposits. It is hoped that elements of the timber structure at the centre of the arena will also be found and that it will be possible to fit them into their correct stratigraphic relationship with the Roman deposits.
The proposed project is limited in scale and arises from the unfinished nature of the 2001-2 investigations. It addresses directly some of the questions about the post-Roman history of the site raised in the Research Agenda (Matthews 2000) and now recognised as important in amphitheatre studies (Bomgardner 2000, 222).