Turrets of this type would have been part of the city’s defensive wall system, providing elevated positions from which defenders could observe approaches to the gate and engage attackers with projectiles.

By Late Roman standards, the turret was not a large structure.

But what the excavation team found within it was anything but ordinary.

The layers of soil and debris that archaeologists carefully remove at Roman sites represent the accumulated deposit of everything that happened at a location after it was abandoned or destroyed.

At Deultum’s western gate turret, those layers included the remnants of destruction and burning — ash, charcoal, collapsed building material, blackened surfaces — and within that destruction layer, the dolium.

The jar was already unusual.