SNN100291 - Archaeological Recording Of A Roman Villa At Wootton Fields, Northampton, January-February 1999 Asse

A previously unknown Roman villa was located during the monitoring of groundworks on a new housing development. The exposed building remains were cleaned and planned before they were backfilled for long-term preservation. An adjacent area containing cut features of both Iron Age and Roman date was excavated prior to road construction. A roundhouse ring gully and a scatter of pits are dated from the mid-first century BC to the mid-first century AD. They suggest that there may have been continuity of occupation from the late Iron Age. The main villa building was probably a simple strip building with front and rear corridors. A room at the northern end contained a channelled hypocaust and had been decorated with painted wall plaster. At the opposite end a pillared hypocaust had supported the opus signinum floor of a hot room, but the remainder of this small bath suite was not exposed. The pottery and coins spanned the later first to fourth centuries, but second and third century material predominated. The size of the building and the paucity of domestic and personal items suggests that the villa was not of exceptionally high status. Geophysical survey and limited excavation demonstrated that the main building stood within a 70m square ditched enclosure with a number of phases of recutting; the earliest including a timber palisade. A series of hearths and ovens/furnaces to the immediate north of the villa represent a final phase of industrial usage following the abandonment of at least parts of the main building. Some inhumation burials of uncertain date were recovered to both the north and west of the building.