In July 2013, we undertook an excavation on land off Newport, Lincoln. The site was surrounded by an overgrown area of allotments and gardens but it lay approximately 750m north of Newport Arch, the former north gate to the defended area of the Roman colonia of Lindum, and adjacent to Ermine Street, the road running from London to York. The site also lay next to the scheduled defences of the medieval suburb of Newport.

Trial trenching which preceded the excavation identified Romano-British ditches and quarry pits. The fills of these produced a large and unusual assemblage of Roman mortaria (the precursor to our modern mortar and pestle). The burnt and misfired condition of many of the vessels, together with lumps of shaped and heated clay from a kiln, tells us that these pots were made on or very near this site.

This discovery is of some considerable significance as it locates the workplace of a group of previously ‘lost’ Lincolnshire potters. The mortaria were stamped by each workshop to help the potters to retrieve their vessels from the kiln and act like a modern day ‘brand name’. One potter who was working in the area of the site is SENICO, whose mortaria have been found as far afield as Scotland and Lancashire.

A large part of the site’s southeast corner was heavily disturbed by early Roman quarry pits, excavated to obtain limestone for building. The archaeological evidence reveals a landscape of Roman enclosures, separated by boundary ditches. Sometime in the later Roman period, the area was used for burial.

Of the eight burials, three were prone (lying on their front). A tall and robust male had been buried beneath a pile of stones whilst another had been buried in a coffin, a group of hobnails around his feet suggest he was wearing boots. Three individuals in the northeast corner of the site had been buried so closely together that their graves cut one another. It is possible that they represent burial in a ‘family’ plot or the burial of a group of socially-related individuals. Placing the body face down in the grave might be seen as a way of preventing the spirit or ghost of the individual from walking and ethnographic parallels suggest that prone burial may be related to the concept of a ‘bad death’ and that this might include those who die in childbirth, from specific infectious diseases or by unusual occurrences such as lightning strikes.

A rectangular, dry stone structure several courses high on three sides may be a robbed-out Roman mausoleum.

Towards the end of the Roman period some of the boundary ditches were reinstated and another phase of quarrying took place. Much of the area reverted to agriculture during the medieval period, although a large, keyhole-shaped bread oven was also exposed on the site.