SNN108040 - Roman extramural settlement along the Watling Street, Towcester, Northamptonshire August 2011

Excavations investigated a small enclosure immediately beyond the former Roman Watling Street frontage to the north of the Roman town. The topographic levels indicated that the frontage had been lost to modern roadside landscaping. The enclosure was roughly rectangular, formed by a subdivision of longer continuous ditches that lay perpendicular to the Watling Street. The impression was of a property backage, perhaps one of several extending along the roadside. Within the enclosure lay a possible ancillary yard building such as a pig sty. A neonate piglet was recovered nearby. The principal pits in the immediate vicinity contained fairly large unabraded Roman pottery sherds in utilitarian forms, suggestive of food consumption, which date predominantly from the late 1st to 2nd centuries AD. The pottery was accompanied by an equal quantity of animal bone, likely to be the product of food preparation. Soil samples indicated little in the way of food processing but highlighted the presence of coal and the probable mixing of industrial or craft waste with other clearance deposits that included a disturbed inhumation, represented by disarticulated human bone from a ditch fill. A possible rear boundary plot ditch was identified, and on its immediate west were two human cremation burials in urns, roughly contemporary with the disuse of the enclosure. The central portion of the site produced no archaeological remains and the former Central Woolgrowers building lay upon an artificial terrace, cut into the original hillside.