Roman village found under Flintshire housing estate in Mancot
Homes have now been built over the excavation site on Gladstone Way, but not before dozens of items including pottery, coins and the jewellery were removed.
The area was also mapped and showed the settlement extended underneath the village of Mancot, which sits between Hawarden and Queensferry.
Matthews said, in spite of its position overlooking the important Roman city of Chester, very little associated archaeology had been found in north-east Wales until recently.
He said it meant that archaeologists and historians in the area had long debated whether it reflected a “poor relationship” between the Romans and the native population of the time.
But finds such as this one and others in Greenfield and Rossett, Wrexham, were making them realise it “probably wasn’t the case”.
Mathews said the Mancot site “possibly” originated in the Iron Age period, before the arrival of the Romans, and “continued to have successive occupation for a very long period of time”.
This idea was strengthened by two coins found there – one from the reign of the emperor Commodus, who was in power from AD 177 to 192, and another depicting Constantine, who reigned about 200 years later.
