Tim Tatton-Brown
Current Archaeology, November 1975
On 1 April 1976 the Archaeological Committee for Canterbury became the Canterbury Archaeological Trust, and with our tiny DoE grant (£6,000 for 1976-7) we were launched as yet another 'unit'. We have already carried out two major excavations, one in Canterbury itself, and one at a place called Highstead near Reculver. Apart from myself, the only other full-time member of the unit is Paul Bennett (ex-Chelmsford, and a friend of mine from our Benghazi excavation) who is in charge of excavation work, while I finish my implications survey for the DoE and do a sites and monuments record for the whole district. The DoE want me to do rescue archaeology in the whole of the new local government district of Canterbury with its acres of gravel that are being gobbled up all the time.
In Canterbury our first major excavation (at the Cakebread Robey Site, 77-9 Castle Street) is just in its final few weeks. It has been a most successful excavation in every way, because apart from sectioning the main north-east to south-west Roman street through Canterbury, which was over 30 feet wide, we have got the robber trenches on a monumental scale for the south-west corner of Canterbury's large Roman theatre. North-west of the road, in the area we are just doing now, we have got two very large parallel Roman walls with, beyond them, an open courtyard. Is this the hitherto unknown Roman forum? The only other possibility seems to be a very large temple precinct next to the theatre! Above the Roman we spent four months excavating a fine sequence of medieval and post-medieval buildings, and below the Roman are some interesting Iron Age layers. There is also quite a lot of 'Anglo-Frisian' pottery in the top 'Roman' layers. Apart from all this, we have done a very brief excavation on one of the medieval towers on the city wall and a very hectic recording of a GPO trench down the High Street of Canterbury. It produced a mosaic and several other opus signinum floors and a mass of Roman walls, as well as a medieval church and graveyard that were in the centre of the High Street until the mid-18th century.
On 2 June we start work on our main summer excavation, which is the old Canterbury Gasworks site – soon to be redeveloped as a multi-storey car park. It is right next to the Norman keep and should give us what survives of the outer bailey with wall and large ditch of Canterbury Castle. This is certainly quite a change from London, but even more hectic!
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