This year’s conference will be held on Saturday, 19th March 2022, 10.45am to 5pm via zoom.
The morning sessions are, as usual, dedicated to a series of papers covering recent major excavations. PCA’s Ireneo Grosso will be giving a talk at midday called ‘The Roman cemetery at Great Suffolk Street’. The afternoon sessions focus on excavations along the line of High Speed 2.
Click here for further details and a programme of the day’s talks.
Our excavation of a large basement at Suffolk House in Southwark revealed a Roman cemetery with 64 skeletons, including both adult and juvenile, men and women, and 5 cremations. This area of Londinium‘s southern cemetery lay near where two Roman roads, lined with funerary monuments, converged. The burials date from the 1st- to 4th-centuries and most of the graves had evidence of wooden coffins, with iron nails around the base of the graves. A broad range of burial rites was observed including a crouched burial, decapitated skeletons with the head placed next to the legs or beneath the torso, a grave lined with large sherds of a Dressel 20 amphora and skeletons with their hands tied behind their backs, as well as a number of disarticulated human remains.
The grave goods recovered included a spectacular complete 3rd-4th century glass bottle with decorative bands on the neck and body; its handles, applied at the shoulder and neck, form ‘dolphins’. Other complete vessels, some containing cremations, include an Alice Holt/Farnham ware ring-necked flagon with burnished decoration and a Nene Valley beaker with painted floral scrolls (pictured below). These wonderful finds feature on the front cover of the latest edition of London Archaeologist.
One of the burials during excavation 
Excavations at Suffolk House 
A 3rd-4th century glass bottle with ‘dolphin handles’ 
The cover of London Archaeologist
.
