BBC - Britains Lost Colosseum
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00:00The Colosseum, the most notorious building in the Roman Empire. From 80 AD, it was home to
00:13the bloodiest spectacles ever devised as entertainment for the masses. Displays of
00:23warlike courage as men fought to the death, and executions, with criminals burned, crucified,
00:30or exposed to ferocious beasts. This was what the Roman people demanded of their emperors,
00:38in return for their loyalty. But not just in Rome. Wherever the Romans conquered,
00:46they built amphitheatres. From the searing deserts of North Africa, to the freezing hills of Wales.
00:53One of the key locations in Roman Britain was Chester. Here, buried in the modern city,
01:04lie the remains of the most elaborate amphitheatre in the country. Did Emperor Vespasian,
01:11the man who built the Colosseum, leave us this legacy? This is the story of a massive
01:21archaeological project to bring the Chester Amphitheatre to life. The two men in charge
01:26face hard graft, and painstaking analysis. We've sieved every bloody atom of this stuff.
01:35There will be highs, and there will be lows.
01:43Over a long season of urban archaeology, they're determined to discover what happened here,
01:54when the amphitheatre was built, and what exactly it looked like. The secrets of Britain's lost Colosseum.
02:04The excavation begins in mid-June. There are 20 skilled archaeologists.
02:32There are surveyors, builders, geophysicists and archivists, Romanists and medievalists.
02:50They're led by two experts on Roman archaeology, Tony Wilmott from English Heritage,
02:59and Dan Garner from Chester City Council.
03:02The team Tony and Dan have gathered together will be working seven days a week, for 15 weeks,
03:13right in the middle of the city centre. And it's all on view to the public.
03:23It's going to be hard manual labour, digging down until they reach Roman level,
03:28to reveal the buried amphitheatre.
03:32The layers and structures that we've got on site, we peel off in reverse chronological order,
03:37because obviously the uppermost is the latest. So I've got 19th century pottery in the top layer,
03:42that's likely to be a 19th century layer. As we go down, we will get earlier material
03:46contained in the deeper layers, that will give us the dating of us for those layers,
03:50and the relationships between the layers gives a nice dated sequence
03:54through the sort of layer cake that we have on the site.
04:03Chester prides itself on its Roman heritage, and its amphitheatre is a showpiece.
04:09In Roman Britain, it must have been an awesome sight. It was the largest amphitheatre in the
04:15country, a grand stone structure built to serve the largest fortress in Britain.
04:21It seems that Chester was destined for great things.
04:36In 43 AD, the vast Roman Empire was still expanding,
04:40and Britain was an irresistible prize at the edge of the known world.
04:46Julius Caesar had failed to capture Britain a century before,
04:50and now Emperor Claudius wanted its gold and its grain.
05:01He landed four legions, 20,000 men, at Richborough on the southeast coast.
05:07They marched and fought their way west and north, capturing territory from British warrior kings
05:12and queens. For three decades, many of the British resisted the Romans, and for Roman soldiers,
05:20it was a notorious posting. Britain, in some ways, is seen as the armpit of the Roman Empire.
05:25I mean, it's wet, it's cold, it's barbaric, it has one of the largest needs throughout
05:32its history, one of the largest standing garrisons, because it's full of trouble and rebellion.
05:41It's the tough place, it's the place where you go to wear trousers and not have bare legs.
05:48Where the wine would be awful, because it's had to travel a long way,
05:52and where the natives, by and large, are absolutely pretty appalling.
05:59The Roman frontier advanced regardless, and by the 70s,
06:03most of present-day England was settled and peaceful.
06:08To guard the north and west frontiers, legionary fortresses were built at Chester, York and Killean,
06:16but there were plans afoot to go further, and Chester lay at the heart of them.
06:23Chester's fortress was built on the River Dee. It was a perfect seaport, with deep river access
06:29to the northwest coast. It could be the launch pad for expansion, not only into Scotland,
06:35but also Ireland. The evidence from the manuscripts which say that perhaps one legion
06:41would be enough to conquer Ireland, and certainly the Romans were in touch with Irish chieftains,
06:48and there's certainly plenty of evidence of trade.
06:53Vespasian was emperor in the 70s AD. He had been with Claudius at the invasion of Britain,
06:59and now he wanted fresh conquests. Vespasian is not aristocratic, he's a bluff good soldier,
07:08and he's wanting to make victories and make waves. I mean, you know, he builds a coliseum
07:16to restore Roman values. He wants conquests to show that he, like Caesar and Claudius,
07:21you know, is an emperor, however lowly, who can actually deliver and deliver glory to Rome.
07:28We know that at some stage there was talk in the Roman world of invading Ireland, and it makes sense.
07:41You'd then have a nice province consisting of Great Britain and Ireland, the British Isles.
07:48Chester is the obvious base from which to launch the invasion,
07:52and for reasons that are no longer particularly clear, that invasion never happens.
07:59The theory runs that Chester was not only a perfect invasion base,
08:03but the perfect capital of the new expanded Britannia.
08:08It would be ideally placed, it's more or less central to that imagined province,
08:15and it would explain some of the peculiarities about the fortress. There are some buildings
08:21inside the fortress that have no parallels anywhere else in Roman military archaeology.
08:29The magnificent buildings are now hidden under streets which follow the original Roman plan.
08:37Chester's fortress was 20% bigger than any other in Britain.
08:41Some of its monumental walls still stand, as grand as those of any Roman capital.
08:47I mean, Londinium doesn't exist. London doesn't really exist at this stage.
08:52I mean, it's just a sort of rather muddy place by the Thames,
08:56and Chester could well have been intended as the capital of the new provinces.
09:07A capital of the new provinces would deserve a fine amphitheatre.
09:11Emperor Vespasian built the Colosseum in Rome. Did he build an amphitheatre here in Chester,
09:18or was it built much later, under a different emperor altogether?
09:23Tony and Dan have to work that out during their excavation.
09:30The amphitheatre was discovered in 1929, but it was excavated partially in the 1960s
09:37by the late Hugh Thompson, then curator of Chester's museum.
09:43The Thompson report revealed a magnificent stone building with 72 buttresses.
09:48It would have held 7,000 to 8,000 spectators.
09:52It had 12 entrances, and its arena wall was painted bright red.
09:57He also found that before the stone amphitheatre existed,
10:01there was a smaller amphitheatre on the same site, built entirely of timber.
10:07In the last few years, the Thompson theory has been severely questioned.
10:12That's why the new excavation is taking place.
10:18It's up to Tony and Dan to uncover the truth.
10:21I think we approach the existing report with an open mind.
10:26We're digging for the story. We're digging for the story,
10:28and when we've got the story, we want to tell people the story.
10:31That's what archaeology really is all about.
10:35Tony and Dan have decided to dig two areas of the site.
10:39A curved section of seating bank, Trench A, which Thompson dug in the 1960s.
10:44The second area is a wedge of seating bank and arena, Trench B, which is virgin ground.
10:54The diggers have their work cut out if they're to find answers in the next 15 weeks.
11:00It's only day two of the dig, but already they're onto something exciting in Trench A.
11:05They picked stuff on the metal to text, so they put a tag in for it.
11:10You normally don't find one coin in a whole excavation, so this is great.
11:15You can tell a little about it from its size.
11:19It's likely to be earlier rather than later.
11:22It's going to be first or second century, rather than third or fourth, but we'll see.
11:27But it's not so great to realise that Thompson's team must have put the Roman coin back by mistake
11:32when they refilled the site in the 1960s.
11:37In those days, archaeology was less professional than today.
11:41Unskilled labourers did much of the digging, and even schoolboys.
11:45One of them was Di Morgan Evans.
11:48He was a young man who had just finished his first year of school.
11:51He was a young man who had just finished his first year of school.
11:54One of them was Di Morgan Evans.
11:57I think I was a bit blasé about it, I'm afraid.
12:00A ghastly 16-year-old, rather cocky and full of himself.
12:07The problem wasn't only untrained diggers.
12:10In the 1960s, bulldozers were used to save time.
12:14Today, small hand tools are used to sift through every inch of earth.
12:19It's slow, painstaking work.
12:22It's vital that every metre is methodically recorded for the archive.
12:29Archaeology is an unrepeatable experiment.
12:32When you've removed it, it's gone, you know.
12:34It's archaeological stratigraphy now.
12:37It'll be hauled off in skips in due course, or some of it will.
12:41The objects they find in the debris are taken to the finds room in the nearby visitor centre.
12:48Here, they are cleaned, catalogued and studied by a team of experts.
12:54We were staggered when these started coming out, actually,
12:57because they came out of one of the pits which Thomson excavated
13:00and then dug up the rest of the ground.
13:02It was a bit of a mess, actually.
13:04It was a bit of a mess, actually.
13:06It was a bit of a mess, actually.
13:08...in some of the pits which Thomson excavated and then backfilled.
13:12Same in where, with, say, scenes of wild beast hunts or gladiatorial scenes
13:18were sold as souvenirs around amphitheaters.
13:22Though important finds were missed in the 1960s,
13:25Tony and Dan's team have retrieved them
13:27because Thomson refilled the site with the earth he had taken out.
13:32It was a surprise on the quantity and the quality of what we've recovered.
13:36We knew that Thompson had removed a lot of the top of the excavation area with
13:41the bulldozer in the 60s and then presumably all that stuff just got
13:44shoved back in as backfill, so we suspected he would have missed things
13:47and that certainly seems to be the case. We've got some really good quality
13:51Roman artifacts which include this really great southern Gaulish Samian
13:56wood pottery, it's very highly decorated, there's a recurring scene of a lion
14:00probably part of a wild beast hunt here which was we know popularly reenacted in
14:05amphitheatres so that might be relevant, glass beads which would have been off a
14:09necklace, they've come up from various parts of the site so I don't think
14:13they're off the same necklace, we've you know presumably got several necklaces
14:16represented there and then if we move forward in time we've got medieval
14:20pottery, 17th century clay tobacco pipe, 18th century drinking glass, 18th or 19th
14:29century paint pot, then going almost to the ridiculous we've got 1960s artifacts
14:37including a milk bottle, possibly one of Thompson's men's shovels and a KP nut
14:44packet. This is obviously stuff that was either being consumed or used by the
14:48excavators in the 1960s so we know where they got their milk, we know somebody had
14:53a ponchon for peanuts and this was the sort of shovel they were using.
15:04It's early July and the excavation is going well. The team has emptied the area
15:10close to the arena where Thompson dug in the 1960s. Further out towards the road
15:16lie the stone foundations of two great amphitheatre walls but they're not easy
15:21to get at because they lie beneath a sewage system from recent housing.
15:25There's just pipes going everywhere actually, obviously you know the houses on the site
15:42needed their services but there's a real network, this is a main sewer and then
15:47you've got the offshoots to the individual properties going off in all different
15:50directions. I've done a lot of destruction to the actual fabric of the amphitheatre.
15:54That's urban archaeology then, that's where it goes. The order is destroyed. I've seen it all now, I don't want to see them any more.
16:04There's little hope of digging down methodically layer by layer. Apart from the sewer pipes there
16:23are also vast pits to be dug out. These were medieval cesspits which filled up with rubbish
16:30over the centuries. I don't think, I think, I think it may be the continuation of the
16:34Butcher's Foundation. Interpreting this pockmarked site is like playing three-dimensional chess and
16:43it's increasingly difficult to work on. A month into the dig there are some significant finds.
17:02This is really good actually, fantastic. It's bone, it's got these little ridges on it and what it is,
17:13it's part of the actual grip of a Roman gladius, a sword handle. Nothing else in the Roman world
17:19made of bone looks like that. The ridges are specially made so you get your fingers into it
17:25and I can just about get my fingers in to the exact places there. I have a replica here that
17:31is based on an archaeological find from another site. That's the gladius handle and if we compare
17:38they're almost identical. Because this is based on complete examples which have been found, not
17:44not just fragmentary ones like this, so we do, yeah, we do know that that is exactly what this
17:49is. It tells us that's still good stuff to be found here, I mean in finds terms and stuff that
17:55relates directly to the use of the amphitheatre. The next job is to open up trench B.