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Roman cremation cemetery on the Abbey Field

The tile tomb as found on the Abbey Field after removing the capping brick, the shallow bowl, and inverted deeper bowl which was used as a lid.

Reconstruction based on veiwing the tomb from the right.

Written by Carl Crossan

• Location Plan

An excavation in 2000 on the Abbey Field revealed part of a Roman cremation cemetery dating from the 2nd to the 4th centuries.Of the 70+ cremations, most took the form of cremated bones in a single upright pot. The more elaborate cremations included several in wooden boxes (but the wood has long decayed) and one in a tomb made of brick (above). As in Roman towns generally, most of the cemeteries of Roman Colchester lay immediately outside the built-up area. In this case, the cemetery was south of the walled town.

If you want to find out more about the excavation, please download an article from The Colchester Archaeologist number 14. The file is 0.65 Mb in size. It should take two to three minutes to download with a 56K modem.

(Note that you will need Adobe's Acrobat Reader to read the file. If it is not installed on your computer already, you can download it from adobe.com.)