# Calleva Atrebatum

Romano-British town at Silchester, United Kingdom

Silchester, United Kingdom

Settlement. Roman Empire

## Story

• Calleva Atrebatum, east of Silchester in Hampshire, was the Iron Age centre of the Atrebates and then a walled Roman town on a crossroads of southern Britain.
• Commius, who served and then fought Julius Caesar, issued coins here, and the flight of his successor Verica gave Claudius a pretext for the conquest of AD 43.
• The Roman town had a street grid, baths, a forum basilica, a mansio, temples and an amphitheatre, and from about AD 270 a flint wall about 2.4 kilometres long.
• One reading ends organised town life by about 450, and another places the abandonment between about 550 and 650, so the streets were left under pasture.
• The wall circuit and the amphitheatre still stand, and digging from 1866 through the campaigns of 1997 to 2014 uncovered the Iron Age town beneath the Roman plan.

## Visiting

Entry is free, the site is open any reasonable time during daylight hours, and smoking, vaping, barbecues and naked flames are not permitted.

## History

Calleva Atrebatum lies under pasture east of Silchester in Hampshire, with the church of St Mary just inside a Roman wall and an amphitheatre beyond the circuit to the north-east. The name was read as the woody place of the Atrebates, on a gravel terrace of the Kennet between the chalk downs and the Thames. The Roman streets and the timber town beneath them survived because the site was never rebuilt as a medieval city.

The Atrebates were a Belgic people whose Gaulish homeland lay around the later Arras. In 57 BC they fought Julius Caesar, who then made Commius their king. Commius served Rome in the British expeditions, joined Vercingetorix, and after the defeat at Alesia fled to Britain, where coins in his name were struck at Calleva.

Tincomarus, Eppillus and Verica, calling themselves sons of Commius, ruled after him, with Calleva as the northern centre. Pressure from the Catuvellauni under Cunobelinus, Epaticcus and Caratacus broke the kingdom, and Verica’s flight to Rome gave Claudius a pretext for the conquest of AD 43. The same ground became the capital of the civitas of the Atrebates inside the Roman Empire, a town of about 40 hectares on a new street grid.

Before that conquest the place was already taking in wine, olive oil, fish sauce, and, on the evidence of the seeds, celery, coriander and olives. A timber hall in the area later called Insula IX measured 47.5 metres, and the datings of the Iron Age town run from a suggested foundation around 50 BC to occupation placed no earlier than about 10 BC. Baths, a forum basilica, a mansio and temples followed the conquest, and tiles stamped for Nero link the early Roman building to imperial kilns at Little London.

An amphitheatre outside the walls is dated both to the years between AD 55 and 75 and to about AD 70 to 80, with room for several thousand spectators. Earth ramparts of about AD 200 were faced in stone about AD 270. The flint and stone circuit runs for about 2.4 kilometres and still stands, in places, about 4.5 metres high.

Human bone inside the town falls into two groups, one around the conquest and one in the late fourth and early fifth centuries. A young man buried in the Iron Age ditch had ancestry linked to northern Spain and a childhood consistent with southern England, and he may have died in AD 43 or 44. The town’s ending is placed by one judgement no later than about 450, and by another between about 550 and 650.

Ogham inscriptions, one of them a column thrown into a well, are the clearest early medieval traces. A medieval village near the amphitheatre was deserted around 1400, and the present village stands to the west. The Reverend James Joyce found the Silchester eagle in 1866, and excavation from the 1890s through the Reading campaigns of 1997 to 2014 recovered the timber town under the Roman plan.

## Photographs

- [The Roman walls of the city of Calleva Atrebatum, Silchester, Hampshire, England. — Simon Burchell](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/5/58/Silchester_Roman_city_walls_21.jpg)
- [The Roman walls of the city of Calleva Atrebatum, Silchester, Hampshire, England. Photo taken in autumn 2002. — Simon Burchell](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/b/b2/Silchester_Roman_city_walls_63.jpg)
- [Calleva Atrebatum — Wikimedia Commons](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/9/9f/Calleva_Atrebatum_plan.png)
- [Calleva Atrebatum (Silchester Roman Town) North West wall. — Ash User:Ash](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/9/9e/Calleva_Atrebatum_North_West_wall.jpg)
- [Illustration from 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica, article BASILICA. Fig. 7.—Plan of Basilica adjoining the Forum of the Roman city at Silchester, Hants. — Project Gutenberg Distributed Proofreaders](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/4/4e/Basilica_7.png)
- [Illustration from 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica, article BASILICA. Fig. 21.—Plan of early Christian Basilica of about the 4th century at Silchester, Hants. — Project Gutenberg Distributed Proofreaders](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/b/b7/Basilica_21.png)
- [Calleva Town. Calleva Town - The site is approx 1km in circumference, and spans this and its neighbouring westerly square. — Colin Bates](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/6/61/Calleva_Town_-_geograph.org.uk_-_56052.jpg)
- [Calleva Town Wall. Calleva Town Wall built almost 2000 years ago by the romans, it's about 20 ft high at this point. — Colin Bates](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/e/ea/Calleva_Town_Wall_-_geograph.org.uk_-_56051.jpg)
- [Calleva Atrebatvm: Silchester. A view of the farmland now in the centre of the old Roman Town site near Silchester. This section is on a bearing of more or — Pam Brophy](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/f/fa/Calleva_Atrebatvm%2C_Silchester_-_geograph.org.uk_-_78373.jpg)
- [Amphitheatre at Calleva The Roman amphitheatre at Calleva, near Silchester. — Alan Burke](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/8/8e/Amphitheatre_at_Calleva_-_geograph.org.uk_-_918246.jpg)

## Sources

- [Calleva Atrebatum](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Calleva_Atrebatum) — Wikipedia
- [Atrebates](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atrebates) — Wikipedia
- [Roman Empire](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roman_Empire) — Wikipedia
- [Ellen Joyce](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ellen_Joyce) — Wikipedia
- [Michael Fulford](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Fulford) — Wikipedia
- [Lisa Lodwick](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lisa_Lodwick) — Wikipedia
- [Hella Eckardt](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hella_Eckardt) — Wikipedia
- [J. M. Dent](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J._M._Dent) — Wikipedia
- [History of Silchester Roman City Walls and Amphitheatre](https://www.english-heritage.org.uk/visit/places/silchester-roman-city-walls-and-amphitheatre/history/) — English Heritage
- [Description of Silchester Roman City Walls and Amphitheatre](https://www.english-heritage.org.uk/visit/places/silchester-roman-city-walls-and-amphitheatre/history/description/) — English Heritage
- [Silchester Roman City Walls and Amphitheatre](https://www.english-heritage.org.uk/visit/places/silchester-roman-city-walls-and-amphitheatre/) — English Heritage
- [Silchester Iron Age finds reveal secrets of pre-Roman Britain](https://www.theguardian.com/uk/2012/jul/31/silchester-iron-age-roman-britain) — The Guardian
- [Late Iron Age Calleva: The Pre-Conquest Occupation at Silchester Insula IX](https://archaeologydataservice.ac.uk/archives/view/calleva_reading_2018/index.cfm) — Archaeology Data Service
- [New evidence for Nero’s links to Roman Silchester](https://archaeology.co.uk/articles/news/new-evidence-neros-links-roman-silchester.htm) — Current Archaeology
- [Discoveries at Silchester](https://research.reading.ac.uk/silchester/discoveries/) — University of Reading
- [Insula IX: the late Roman town and abandonment](https://research.reading.ac.uk/silchester/insula-ix-late-roman-town-and-abandonment/) — University of Reading
- [The People of Silchester](https://www.readingmuseum.org.uk/blog/people-silchester) — Reading Museum
- [Silchester Roman city walls 21.jpg](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Silchester_Roman_city_walls_21.jpg) — Wikimedia Commons
- [Silchester Roman city walls 63.jpg](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Silchester_Roman_city_walls_63.jpg) — Wikimedia Commons
- [Calleva Atrebatum plan.png](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Calleva_Atrebatum_plan.png) — Wikimedia Commons
- [Calleva Atrebatum North West wall.jpg](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Calleva_Atrebatum_North_West_wall.jpg) — Wikimedia Commons
- [Basilica 7.png](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Basilica_7.png) — Wikimedia Commons
- [Basilica 21.png](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Basilica_21.png) — Wikimedia Commons
- [Calleva Town - geograph.org.uk - 56052.jpg](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Calleva_Town_-_geograph.org.uk_-_56052.jpg) — Wikimedia Commons
- [Calleva Town Wall - geograph.org.uk - 56051.jpg](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Calleva_Town_Wall_-_geograph.org.uk_-_56051.jpg) — Wikimedia Commons
- [Calleva Atrebatvm, Silchester - geograph.org.uk - 78373.jpg](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Calleva_Atrebatvm,_Silchester_-_geograph.org.uk_-_78373.jpg) — Wikimedia Commons
- [Amphitheatre at Calleva - geograph.org.uk - 918246.jpg](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Amphitheatre_at_Calleva_-_geograph.org.uk_-_918246.jpg) — Wikimedia Commons

## Detailed history

Calleva Atrebatum is the Roman town under the pasture east of Silchester in Hampshire, and before that the Iron Age centre of the Atrebates. The modern village lies about a mile to the west. Most of the walled ground is in the civil parish of Silchester, the amphitheatre is in Mortimer West End, and the whole place is in the district of Basingstoke and Deane. The church of St Mary stands just inside the circuit. Above ground a visitor meets the Roman wall, the grass banks of the amphitheatre, and fields. Beneath them the gravel streets, stone footings and earlier timber buildings remain, because this town was not rebuilt as a medieval city and was not buried under a later one.

The Romanised Celtic name Calleva was read as a woody place, and the full name means Calleva of the Atrebates. The ground is a gravel terrace of the Kennet, between the Hampshire chalk and the floodplain of the Thames. The soil over the clay and sand is thin. Ploughed without heavy manuring it gives a poor return of grain, and it has often been kept as pasture, orchard or wood. A spring rises inside the walls near the baths and runs south-east to Silchester Brook. Pollen from the early Iron Age shows the land already largely cleared, with heath developing afterwards. Waterlogged wells later preserved traces of stabling, hay meadows, and heath plants such as heather and gorse. The woods that gave the place its name also supplied fuel and timber, and most of its buildings were of wood.

The Atrebates were a Belgic people. Their name, a Latin form of a Gaulish word, means dwellers or possessors of the soil, and it survived in the names of Arras and Artois. In Gaul they lived in the country of the Scarpe, with a centre that in the Roman period moved to Nemetocennae, the later Arras. In 57 BC they joined a Belgic alliance against Julius Caesar and were reckoned to have contributed 15,000 men. Caesar broke the alliance without a decisive battle, and the Atrebates then fought beside the Nervii and the Viromandui at the battle of the Sabis, where they were defeated. Caesar appointed one of their own, Commius, as king. Commius served Rome in the expeditions to Britain in 55 and 54 BC, negotiated the surrender of Cassivellaunus, and was given authority over the Morini. He then turned against Rome and joined Vercingetorix in 52 BC. After the defeat at Alesia he fought on, made a truce with Mark Antony, and fled to Britain with a group of followers. Coins struck after the conquest of Gaul still carry his name beside Garmanos or Carsicios, who may have been sons or regents, so some influence at home seems to have remained.

In Britain the Atrebates held a territory understood as Hampshire, West Sussex and Berkshire, with the Dobunni and the Catuvellauni to the north, the Regni to the east and the Belgae to the south. Their centre was Calleva. The archaeologist Barry Cunliffe read this as something other than a mass migration: a series of indigenous tribes, perhaps with some Belgic newcomers, given coherence by Commius. The tribal name may have meant the ruling house rather than a whole people. Commius may already have had kin in Britain in 55 BC. When Caesar’s cavalry could not cross the Channel, Commius produced a small body of horsemen from his own people. Coins with his name were issued from Calleva from about 30 to 20 BC. Some read the legend COM COMMIOS as Commius son of Commius, and the length of the reign has suggested two kings of the same name, father and son. The king list used for the dynasty runs from Commius in 57 BC to about 20 BC.

Three later kings call themselves sons of Commius on their coins: Tincomarus, also spelled Tincommius, then Eppillus, then Verica. Tincomarus seems to have ruled with his father from about 25 BC and, after Commius’s death around 20 BC, to have held the northern half from Calleva while Eppillus held the south from Noviomagus, at Chichester. John Creighton argues from the imagery of the coins that Tincomarus had been brought up in Rome as a diplomatic hostage under Augustus, and the coinage is read as more pro-Roman than his father’s. The Res Gestae of Augustus names two British kings who came to him as suppliants around AD 7. The passage is damaged. One is probably Tincomarus, and the other Dubnovellaunus of the Trinovantes or the Cantiaci. Tincomarus appears to have been pushed out by his brother. From that point Eppillus’s coins carry the title rex, a king recognised by Rome. About AD 15 Verica succeeded him. In Kent another ruler of the name Eppillus appears among the Cantiaci at about the same time.

Verica’s kingdom was squeezed by the Catuvellauni under Cunobelinus. Calleva fell to Cunobelinus’s brother Epaticcus, also spelled Epatticus, by about AD 25. After Epaticcus died around AD 35, Verica recovered some ground, but Cunobelinus’s son Caratacus took up the war, and by the early 40s the Atrebates had been conquered. Verica fled to Rome. That flight gave the new emperor Claudius a pretext for the Roman conquest of Britain in AD 43. After the conquest, part of the old lands became the pro-Roman kingdom of the Regni under Tiberius Claudius Cogidubnus, who may have been Verica’s son. The territory was later divided into civitates, the administrative districts of a Roman province: one of the Atrebates, with its capital at Calleva Atrebatum, one of the Belgae at Venta Belgarum, Winchester, and one of the Regni at Noviomagus, Chichester. A further account says that the Atrebates kept some autonomy until the late first century AD. All of this sat inside the Roman Empire. Augustus had secured sole rule in 27 BC, and the first two centuries of that empire were later remembered as a long peace.

The Iron Age town that received this dynasty is dated in more than one way, because the digging went on for decades and the earliest layers were reached late. A low bank is what remains of the defensive earthworks. The inner earthwork enclosed about 32 hectares, about 79 acres, and one account puts that circuit at about AD 1. Another places the establishment of the town between about 20 and 10 BC, and allows that it may have been a planned settlement of people from north-west Gaul, the country around Arras. Beneath the later forum, roundhouses, wells and pits in a north-east to south-west line belong to about 25 to 15 BC, and metalled streets, rubbish pits and palisaded enclosures belong to about 15 BC through AD 40 or 50. A great boundary ditch is placed at about 40 to 20 BC, and a large rectangular hall somewhere between 25 BC and AD 10. The finished excavation of the block later called Insula IX covered about 3,025 square metres, only about one percent of the 32.5 hectares inside the inner earthwork. It found three compounds divided by lanes on a north-east to south-west and north-west to south-east alignment. One compound held a timber hall 47.5 metres long, with pits and smaller timber buildings around it, replaced in a last phase by a hall 22.5 metres long. Occupation in that block is placed no earlier than about 10 BC, running to the conquest of AD 43 or 44 and, with no clean break, on towards about AD 80 or 90. In 2012, while that dig was still going down, Michael Fulford was prepared to see a foundation around 50 BC by Commius, and to say that nothing earlier than 50 BC had yet been found. The published sequence for this insula is the later and tighter one.

What those layers contain is a town already tied to the Roman world before Claudius landed. Gallo-Belgic fine pottery, amphorae, and brooches of iron and copper alloy mark a high-status settlement, along with oyster shell, a large assemblage of briquetage, and jars for olive oil, fish sauce and wine. Lisa Lodwick’s study of the seeds from Insula IX showed celery, coriander and olives being eaten there before the Claudian conquest, and her work on the oppidum also took in flax, food and fodder. In 2012 Maev Kennedy reported a single charred olive stone from a well, then the earliest known in Britain, and a diet that already included shellfish, cattle, sheep, pigs, chicken, geese and wild birds, wheat, apples, blackberries, cherries and plums, with poppy, coriander, dill, fennel, onion and celery as flavourings. She reported plates, wine in amphorae and in barrels, olive oil, glass jugs, Irish gold, continental jewellery and weapons, and pottery from Germany and France. She also reported regular house plots along gravelled roads, aligned on the summer and winter solstices, and a ritual life of buried ravens and carefully buried dogs, one with an infant, one standing as if on guard, a tiny dog laid in the foundations of a house, and a cat packed into a clay jar. A folding knife of elephant ivory, carved with two dogs mating, was buried on purpose. The same object is described as a second-century piece, perhaps made in Germany, France or Italy, and as unique. Across the Roman town the staples were spelt, wheat and barley, with apple, fig, grape, celery, coriander, dill, Celtic bean and pea, and meat from cattle, sheep or goat, and pig. Many houses had their own rotary querns.

The trading account of the Iron Age town is that local horse and chariot gear was exchanged for metals, grain, slaves and other goods from southern Britain, and those in turn for luxury foods and manufactured goods from the Roman world. The 2012 season was also read as showing grain-drying on an industrial scale, hunting dogs, and, as a near certainty in that telling, slaves, with a further craft read from small flayed bones as cloaks of puppy fur. That winter Michael Fulford’s conclusion, startling even to him, was that the town stood at its height of people and wealth before the Romans arrived. A separate figure puts the population of the third and fourth centuries near 10,000. The Roman town that followed covered about 40 hectares, about 99 acres. It is unusual among the Iron Age tribal towns of Britain because the Roman town was laid out on the same spot.

The conquest did not erase the place. Light, short-lived buildings, possibly military, were identified at the earliest Roman level, including a cesspit so neatly cut that it was read as the work of soldiers. Within about twenty years, large parts of the town were burned. That burning has been linked, as a possibility rather than a certainty, with Boudica’s rebellion of AD 60 to 61. Baths, temples, a forum and a basilica followed. One account says it took another two centuries before the older street grid was wholly given up for the Roman compass points. Another says a rectilinear grid of gravelled streets, north to south and east to west, was laid out in the later first century and stayed in use for the life of the town. The main east to west street, lined with shops and workshops, was the principal road from London toward the west country. The Devil’s Highway linked Calleva to Londinium. From the town, roads ran toward Aquae Sulis at Bath, by the Ermin Way to Glevum at Gloucester, and by the Port Way to Sorviodunum at Old Sarum. Wealthier houses stood back from the crowded principal streets. The people are described as mostly British, with some foreign merchants and immigrants.

Public buildings gathered at the centre and in the south-east. A second-century forum basilica combined a market with the halls used for administration and justice. A mansio, a rest house for travellers on imperial business, stood in Insula VIII near the south gate, three wings around a courtyard. The public baths in the south-east are among the earliest stone buildings, perhaps of about AD 50, and they do not share the alignment of the later grid. They began with a portico, a palaestra and the bathing rooms. The portico was later removed and the rooms divided, presumably so that men and women bathed apart. The entrance was rebuilt to meet the new streets. A possible nymphaeum lay near the amphitheatre. A fragment of Purbeck marble inscribed with the letters BA matches a fragment found in 1891 reading AT, and together they have been read as Atrebatum, of the Atrebates, from a monumental inscription broken up in the middle or later first century AD.

Nero’s name is stamped on tiles from the town and from kilns at Little London, a little over a mile to the south-west. Four fragments from Insula III have been described as found nowhere else in Britain, and they prompted a wider search. In the autumn of 2017 a temple in Insula XXX, on the east side, produced four stamped fragments from a ritual pit, the largest number from any single context in the town. The same work identified Little London as the brickworks that supplied the tiles, and as the only other place in Britain then known to have yielded a Nero tile. A finds list adds six further stamped tiles from the temple and the kilns. Those counts come from different tellings and are not one total. The temple is one of a group of three. The other two were found in 1890. Its building is placed between AD 50 and 70, inside the reign of Nero, who ruled from AD 54 to 68, and it has been suggested that the whole group may have been built then, possibly with imperial support. Michael Fulford treated the stamps as evidence that Nero used the town for extravagant building meant to inspire awe. A copper as of Nero, minted at Lyon between AD 66 and 69, was also found in the town. Three Romano-Celtic temples just inside the east gate, in Insula XXX, are placed in the middle of the first century and out of use after about AD 200. Another, in Insula XXXV, carries a dedication by a guild of peregrini, people who were not Roman citizens. A limestone head of Serapis was found in 1899 on Silchester Common.

A possible church stands south-east of the forum in Insula IV. Its apsed plan can be compared with early churches in the western Roman Empire, but the date is thought to fall before Constantine, who ruled from 306 to 337 and was the first Christian emperor of that empire. The third century, when the town was walled in stone, was also the century in which the Roman Empire nearly came apart. Civil war, plague and invasion filled about fifty years. A Gallic empire and a Palmyrene empire broke away. Aurelian, who ruled from 270 to 275, pulled the empire back together. Diocletian, from 284 to 305, set up separate courts in east and west. An earth and clay rampart with masonry gates was raised about AD 200, and a stone wall was added about AD 270. One reading links that strengthening to Saxon raids. Another describes the defences as general protection and, just as much, as a way to control everyone who entered or left. The stone circuit is about 2.4 kilometres long. At the base the wall was about 3 metres wide. Its outer face was hammer-dressed flint and stone. What remains is mostly the mortared core. The levelling courses are greensand and limestone brought from the Bath and Cirencester region, not the ceramic tile that local clay could have supplied, and that choice has been taken as a measure of the project’s prestige. The wall has been estimated at about 40,000 cubic metres of material, something like 150,000 cartloads. It stands about 4.5 metres high today, and it may once have reached about 7.8 metres with a wall-walk and a parapet.

Seven gates served the circuit, and four can still be seen: the single-carriageway north, south and amphitheatre gates, and a small postern to the south-east. The east and west gates were dual carriageways. The north gate, on the road to Dorchester on Thames, is the best preserved, with a recess where the leaf of the gate hung. Its carriageway was about 4 metres wide, enough for a single cart. The east gate led toward the London road.

Outside the north-east side of the town, the amphitheatre was cut into the ground. One account places the first building between AD 55 and 75, another at about AD 70 to 80. The arena was at first circular, with a wooden wall, and the spoil was thrown up into banks and terraces for the crowd. The capacity is given both as 3,500 to 7,250 and as about 7,000. In the third century the arena wall was rebuilt in stone and two new entrances were added, so that the plan became the usual ellipse. Shows named for this place include bear fighting and gladiatorial fighting, and buildings of this kind were used for gladiatorial combat, fights with wild beasts and public executions. Horse bones suggest equestrian events. A picture of a contest around AD 250 puts food stalls and souvenir shops, probably, along the road out from the town. After the Roman period the British and the Anglo-Saxons are said to have gone on using the amphitheatre. In the twelfth century an aisled hall was built in the arena and a palisade set on the banks. That fortification may be the Castellum de Silva, the small castle in the woods, which King Stephen took in 1147 during his wars with the Empress Matilda.

The dead were supposed to lie outside a Roman town. Infants were an exception, and at Calleva, as elsewhere, they are often found near hearths, in buildings, or in floors and foundations. Most died around birth and were buried simply, without grave goods. Older people inside the walls are harder to explain. Late Iron Age cremations were excavated at Latchmere Green and Windabout Copse. The Roman cemeteries are thought to lie north and west of the outer earthwork, and they have not been dug. A tombstone found in 1577 was read as the memorial of Flavia Victorina, set up by her husband Titus Tammonius. In July 2025 Michael Fulford set out a dating programme on the human bone found inside the town, drawing on older collections and on modern digs. The remains fall into an early group, around the Roman conquest, scattered across the town with a slight concentration at the centre, and a late group, of the fourth to early fifth century, limited to the north and west gates and the area of the baths.

One complete skeleton of a young man, aged about 25 to 30, lay in a shallow grave in a rubbish pit under the forum basilica, around the time of the conquest. A grave that shallow could be opened by dogs or foxes, and later foundations, wells and pits could scatter other bodies, which is one way to account for isolated bones elsewhere. Deep in the Iron Age ditch beside the later baths were the skull of another young man, of the same age, and part of the pelvis of an older woman. The skull had already lost its flesh and its lower jaw. It had been laid on a stretcher of woven roundwood, perhaps moved when the foundations of the first bath house were dug, and buried again near the bottom of the ditch soon after the conquest. The pottery is of the middle of the first century. The bone preserved DNA. The man’s ancestry read as south-west European, with close links to northern Spain and the Basque country. Isotopes in his teeth, for the years from about two and a half to eight, match southern England. He may have grown up in or very near Calleva, which would mean that his mother, and probably both parents, were in southern England, presumably here, when he was born. A death in AD 43 or 44 is called very plausible. If he died in 44 aged about 25 to 30, he was born around AD 15 to 20, in Verica’s time. Why people from northern Spain were here is left open. Broken vessels that had carried olive oil, wine and fish sauce from Spain are known from the Iron Age settlement, so traders are one guess, and a mercenary serving the local king is another. The young man under the forum had ancestry like the Iron Age populations of Britain and could have lived locally. Some of the early bones look more probably late Iron Age than Roman, so killings between tribes, before the conquest, are not ruled out. Caratacus, who carried the fight against the invasion, is said to have held Calleva then, and the people in the ditch may have been victims of a Roman assault. The two young men would have lived through the years when, on the evidence of the coins, Verica lost Calleva to Epaticcus, brother of Cunobelinus of the Catuvellauni at Camulodunum, and moved his own centre toward Chichester.

The late group tells a different story. At the gates the finds are mostly crania, skulls without lower jaws, and they have been read as heads displayed to people coming and going. They may be raiders, or people put to death by the town’s own authority. Decapitated burials, some of them executions by sword or axe, are widespread in town and country cemeteries of the fourth and early fifth centuries. Bone from around the bath house is taken as a further hint that urban authority was failing. Together the clusters are two episodes in which people were not given the ordinary burial outside the town. One belongs to the time around the conquest of southern Britain. The other belongs to the later fourth century, as Roman authority in Britain began to break down.

Work went on in the same blocks as this scattered bone. Insula IX has produced working of bone and antler, of copper alloy, and of leather, and imported whetstones recut for further use. Around the middle of the third century the existing houses in that block, including House 1, were demolished and the wells filled in. A new east to west boundary crossed the site of House 1, and the ground to the north was divided into equal plots facing the streets. South of the boundary, two properties carried buildings of two storeys, in masonry or part masonry, with cesspits behind them. One of those pits held a rich organic trace of the daily food. In the fourth century the southern house gained a new front, with projecting wings linked by a verandah, and the two properties seem by then to have been joined and served by a single well. At the street corner to the north, a smithy left a scatter of hammerscale around its hearth. Other finds from the town include a copper-alloy figure of Harpocrates, the god of silence, made in Campania in the early first century as the foot of a household vessel, one of fewer than ten such images known in Britain. There is a carnelian intaglio of Minerva with spear, shield and serpent, cut to seal wax. A mortarium is stamped MATVGE FECIT, meaning Matugenus made it. He worked at Verulamium between about AD 80 and 125 and was probably the son of Albinus, whose mortaria are widespread and include pieces from this town. A clasp from a baldric is of the conquest years. A Hod Hill brooch, a bone die whose opposite faces add to seven, a hairpin in the form of a hand picking a fruit, and a jug handle cast as a human leg, probably made in Gaul and only the fourth of its kind found in Britain, all come from the occupied town. A surgical instrument, scalpel at one end and a blunt dissector at the other, matches tools known from Roman Italy.

The end of the town is an open argument, and the dates in use do not agree. Major buildings were still used from about 400 to 430, and occupation falls away sharply after about 450. Daniel G. Russo judged the idea of a sixth-century town, living on behind strong walls, attractive but largely guesswork, with no firm written or archaeological evidence of organised urban life at Calleva beyond about 450 at the latest. On that reading Calleva is one of six Roman towns in Britain that did not survive the sub-Roman centuries and vanished in the Middle Ages. Another account says that Rome lost control of Britain at the beginning of the fifth century, while Silchester was still flourishing, and that the town was likely abandoned between about 550 and 650, not until the sixth or seventh century. A third places the ending sometime between the fifth and the seventh centuries. David Nash Ford has identified the site with Cair Celemion in the list of twenty-eight cities of sub-Roman Britain attached to the name of Nennius. If that identification holds, something of the place was still known in the early Middle Ages. One hypothesis has the Saxons avoiding the empty town on purpose and keeping to Winchester and Dorchester, with a gap of perhaps a century before Basing and Reading grew up on rivers to either side.

Two objects carrying ogham, a script from the south of Ireland, sit in that interval. A stone inscribed in ogham was found in the excavations of 1893 and has been called the only evidence of early medieval activity here. The script is placed at about AD 400. From the modern excavation of Insula IX comes a separate piece: a dwarf column of the sort that carried the verandah of Building 1, buried in the rubble fill of a well and also inscribed in ogham. On that reading the script developed perhaps toward the end of the fourth century, and the column may not have gone into the well until the later fifth or the sixth. Two of the three or four wells still open in that block in the fourth century were deliberately packed with building rubble. The date is hard to fix, but it seems to fall in the fifth or sixth century. If the same filling happened across Calleva, the inhabitants would have lost their water. There is no river through the site. Amanda Clarke, after seasons in wells up to six metres deep that had turned into latrines, wondered whether the water itself had failed. One excavator on the same project held that people left as the Roman Empire came apart, with only a few squatters after them. Distance from a great river, the Thames or the Kennet and the Loddon, has been offered as a cause and also doubted, because other towns failed beside rivers and others grew without one. The Anglo-Saxon kingdom of Wessex, centred on Winchester from the middle of the seventh century, is a further suggested setting for a forced end. Winchester, like Calleva, had been the capital of a Roman civitas.

Later centuries used the ruins without making a town of them again. Domesday Book in 1086 lists a village called Silcestre. There is a record of a visit by King John in the thirteenth century. The only medieval building still standing inside the Roman line is the twelfth-century church of St Mary, close to the east gate. It has been suggested that this church stands on a Roman temple, a separate suggestion from the possible church beside the forum. The medieval village seems to have lain between the amphitheatre and the south gate, and to have been deserted around 1400, perhaps in the aftermath of the Black Death of 1348 to 1349. The present village was founded to the west, and its earliest houses are of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Apart from one small medieval manor, now part of a farm, and the church, the street grid was left under grass. Windblown soil filled the ditches. Mosaic floors, already scorched, were buried when the walls of civic buildings, by then workshops or cattle sheds, were pushed in. Pots with holes punched through them have been read as vessels deliberately spoiled so that nobody else would live among the ruins.

The plan was recovered long before the latest digging. The Reverend James Gerald Joyce, rector of Stratfield Saye from 1855 until his death in 1878, led excavations with the backing of his landlord, the Duke of Wellington, and with local farm labourers. His wife was Ellen Joyce, born Ellen Rice in 1832. They married in 1855. She later organised the emigration of women from Britain and in 1884 founded the association that, within a few years, took the name of the United British Women’s Emigration Association. She was appointed a CBE in the New Year Honours of 1920 and died in 1924. The excavation was his work, not hers. On 6 October 1866 he found the bronze eagle now called the Silchester eagle, and he recorded the finds in watercolours. He understood the bird as a legionary standard, buried to save it from whatever disaster left a burned layer above it. A later reading by Michael Fulford takes the eagle as part of a monumental sculpture of a god or an emperor, kept from the melting pot when the basilica had become a scrapyard and a workshop. Another reading places it on a statue of Jupiter in the forum. The eagle is shown in the gallery devoted to Calleva at the museum in Reading. Joyce’s aim was a complete plan of the Roman town. From 1890 to 1909 the Society of Antiquaries followed the stone buildings by cutting trenches. Timber was still poorly understood, so the wooden town was missed, and those trenches did not reach the earliest Iron Age levels. When the possible church was examined again in 1961, some eighty to ninety percent of that masonry plan had already been traced. Molly Cotton examined the defences in 1938 and 1939.

From the 1970s Michael Fulford directed a new cycle of excavation for the University of Reading. He joined that university in 1974, was made Professor of Archaeology in 1993, and in the New Year Honours of 2011 was appointed a Commander of the Order of the British Empire. The town walls were examined from 1974 to 1980, the amphitheatre from 1979 to 1985, and the forum basilica in 1977 and again from 1980 to 1986. Those trenches found Iron Age and early Roman material remarkably well preserved. From 1997 to 2014 the Town Life Project, directed in the field with Amanda Clarke, excavated Insula IX each summer, from the late Roman houses down to the Iron Age hall. Hella Eckardt, a Roman archaeologist at Reading, joined Michael Fulford and Amanda Clarke in the 2006 account of life and labour in that late Roman block. The late Roman, middle Roman and late Iron Age phases have since been published, the pre-conquest volume in 2018. In 2013 work began in Insula III on a building the Victorian excavators had called a bath house. From 2018 the public baths were opened again, with a season in the summer of 2019, to see what earlier diggers had missed. Among the studies brought to the town is The Landscape of Towns, by Michael Aston and James Bond, issued in 1976 by J. M. Dent. The county council holds the ground. The wall circuit can be walked, the amphitheatre is in the open, and the interior, apart from the church and a single track, is farmland.

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