1,800 year-old evidence of Roman worship found in Leicester Cathedral dig

Some of the key discoveries of the project have been the burial ground itself, we've got Anglo-Saxon activity and then underneath that we've got Roman activity as well and how they all mesh together is going to prove really fascinating when we begin the analysis of the wealth of information we've gained from this very small excavation in Leicester. We began working with Leicester Cathedral back in October 2021 as we were commissioned to carry out the archaeological excavations that were going to precede this new construction. The footprint of the new Heritage Learning Centre here at Leicester Cathedral is tiny in the scale of the whole city but within it we've had over a thousand burials dating from the 11th century all the way through to the mid-19th century and that's a really rare opportunity to study the lives of the people of Leicester. Leicester Cathedral has been particularly pleased to work with you Les in order to undertake the very sensitive and important archaeological excavation for digging the basement for this new visitor and learning centre extension. So it's been a very valuable and important partnership to ensure that the project proceeds and does the necessary working to the highest possible standard. Our most recent burials here in the burial ground dated to 1855 and our earliest date all the way back to the 11th century and the artefacts and pottery we've really reflects that history. Our more recent stuff, Victorian pottery, we still have in our cupboards today and we still use today. We have medieval pottery, bits of jug handles that would have been thrown in as rubbish from the houses around the burial ground but underneath that we get a huge quantity of Roman artefacts because in the Roman period this was an area of residence and so we get a huge quantity of broken pottery and amongst all that we get some really nice little artefacts. A lovely intact hairpin for instance probably fallen from someone's head whilst they're wearing it. Coins being dropped, we drop coins today in Oxford and we don't pick them up and we get that with the Roman period. Coins are so frequent we get lots of dropped coins particularly in the 4th century and we get some lovely decorated imported pottery from France where you really get to see gladiators and mythical beasts and other mythical scenes being played out on the pottery. For us working in this part of Leicester within a conservation area which sees very little development it's really interesting because we don't get to look at the archaeology of this part of Leicester very often so it's really interesting to try and get that insight into this part of the city to add into the bigger picture really of all of the other work that we've been doing over the years. The earliest discovery of the Leicester Cathedral Revealed Project has been a Roman cellar. Now this is really exciting, the Roman cellar itself it has got painted walls, it's got a solid concrete floor, it's stone built, it's not the sort of thing that would perhaps be just used for storage it might have a more significant role on that perhaps a reception role within the house that it was part of and really excitingly from the demolition layer on the bottom of the floor we've recovered the fragment of a Roman altar and that might suggest that this cellar was used as a shrine that it might have been used for some private worship within the Roman city and because we've got the church on top of that we might be getting hints of a memory of that special use in the Roman period coming all the way through to Leicester Cathedral as a church and then more recently its role as a cathedral. So I imagine the results of the further analysis of this fantastic excavation will actually help rewrite our understanding of Leicester from the Roman period up until the 1850s when the cemetery stopped being used and that may also have a regional impact as well in our understanding of urbanisation during the Roman period but also continuity of use as well and the project here from the outset has been Leicester Cathedral Revealed and that's certainly the case here and this is why this is a very significant excavation. The Leicester Cathedral Revealed project while small is going to give us incredible new insight into the story of Leicester and through it the lives of its townsfolk.