This sections provides overview summaries for the Amphitheatre Site as a whole. Every major time period is covered: Roman, Saxon, Medieval and Post Medieval.
The Roman finds from the amphitheatre overwhelmingly consisted of pottery and ceramic building materials of the late first and earlier second centuries, from the period of use of the first amphitheatre. There were relatively few items such as coins, brooches or objects of worked bone. This is perhaps what is to be expected in a public building, where people spent only short amounts of time, as opposed to houses or workshops. If there were stalls around the outside of the amphitheatre, we might have expected more coins to have been lost, but at this time there was relatively little small change in circulation, so any coins that were dropped would have been fairly valuable and their owners would have taken care to retrieve them!
Most of the pottery was locally produced kitchen wares, many from the legionary kilns at Holt, 12 kms south of Chester. Fine table wares were rare but samian was common. As usual in this period there were mortaria (mixing bowls) from the St Albans area and north Gaul and amphorae from southern Spain for carrying olive oil and fish sauce. At the moment we don’t know why this pottery was disposed of at the amphitheatre.
We also found a large quantity of roofing tiles. They may be debris from other buildings nearby and disposed of on the amphitheatre site, or possibly they were used in the construction of the amphitheatre in a way that we do not yet understand?
As well as the pottery and tile we have recovered there are many other finds. These help us to understand more about what life was like in Roman Chester – such as the small blue glass beads from a necklace, a brooch with a sunburst pattern, fragments of glass bottles and flasks and brightly-coloured mosaic glass. A very exciting find early on in the dig was part of a bone sword handle. We have recovered various items of Roman arms and armour in Chester, but these have tended to be the metal parts such as daggers and scabbards. The bone fittings tend to be rarer. In the last week of the excavation a small intaglio or gem dating to the second century was found in Area A. Engraved on the stone, which would have been set into a ring, was a satyr (a god of the woodlands) holding a stick in one hand and possibly a bird in the other. These rings would have been worn by both men and women and as well as being jewels they were used like a seal to witness important documents.
Next Page: Saxon and Medieval Period summaries