Quick Links: Introduction | Area A | Area B | Area C
Area C has seen the least attention of the three main areas so far. It was originally excavated in 2003 - a year before the official start of the project - with the trench reaching down over 1.5m. The work, carried out by Keith Matthews in 2003, was part of the evaluative excavations by Chester Archaeology.
A huge amount of clay tobacco pipes were removed from 18th century garden deposits. Underneath these, deliberate dumps of soil were found that seem to have been placed to raise the ground level around 1700. Further down the deposits got much more complex, with what seems to be an old property boundary crossing diagonally through the trench.
During last years excavations little work was carried out in this area, however, this year the trench has been substantially extended. It was always the plan to excavate this trench down to the level of the amphitheatre arena floor, so the enlargement has been carried out to give the archaeologists enough room to work in.
We are hoping to sample the arena sands in order to recover evidence for the sort of things that were happening in the amphitheatre. We also hope to investigate a section of the axial drain - running from the north to the south entranceway. A section of this drain was excavated to the south of the amphitheatre in 2000 and produced fruit pips, corriander seeds and opium poppy seeds (the remains of someone’s lunch perhaps?)
We are also hoping to find more of the post-holes first found by Hugh Thompson in the 1960s, with a view to dating the timber structure in the centre of the arena.