SDO10055 - 'Roman Britain in 1987: 1. Sites explored' Britannia

Brief catalogue of archaeological works carried out on Roman sites in Britain during 1986. This includes a summary of discoveries in Dorchester, reproduced here in full: Dorchester (Durnovaria): (i) by-pass road: (a) at SY 7055 9025 a series of enclosures, field boundaries and post holes of the late Iron Age and Roman periods were examined before road construction. (b) At 704899 late Iron Age and Roman pits, burials and boundaries seemed to be outliers of the Alington Avenue settlement. (c) At 677894 a series of boundary-ditches, a cemetery and Roman buildings were examined (ii) At Southfield House (SY 6925 9030), immediately east of the assumed position of the South Gate, the line of the outermost defensive ditch and counterscarp bank was traced in several trenches. The ditch was 7 m wide and 3.2 m deep with a filling of uniform clean brown loam. The counterscarp bank was 23 m wide and survived 1.25 m high below modern garden soil. To south of it lay three inhumations in wooden coffins, one of them a decapitated female with head placed between the feet. The bank overlay an earlier Roman right-angled ditch with square-cut corner: it was 1.5 m deep with a filling of clay loam similar to that of the bank, and yielded a second-century samian sherd. The ditch may represent the layout of a redundant insula. (iii) At 6959 9056 Roman buildings on the E side of the Baths insula, the street itself and a number of buildings on its east side are to be sealed beneath a structural slab resting on bored piles, without detailed examination. (iv)Poundbury Cemetery (SY 6855 9112): 27 further burials were examined. All were in wooden coffins; one grave contained two coffins, the upper one holding a body much mutilated before burial. Only two burials yielded grave goods, one a bone comb and iron pin, the other a coin. [Report by P. J. Woodward in the Trust for Wessex Archaeology’s Project Summary Reports 1987-8.] [Excavation for the Trust for Wessex Archaeology was supervised by C. N. Thompson. Report by Susan Davies in op cit.] [Report by P. J. Woodward in ibid.] [Report by Susan Davies in ibid.