In places, the floors of the house were heavily scorched red and deep brown, and overlying them was a layer of burnt debris up to a foot or so deep. The debris consisted of crushed and broken fragments of burnt walls lying between the stumps of walls which were still in their original positions. The absence of substantial chunks of collapsed wall on the floors suggests that the building was still standing after the fire, but as a roofless burnt-out shell. This is typical of all the burnt houses found in Colchester so far. Sometimes, remains of burnt furniture are found in the debris, but this is rare.
Bodies too are quite exceptional, with only one possible example known from the town so far.
So it was at Head Street, where there were no traces of bodies or furniture. It is as if the Roman settlers had time to clear away their possessions and seek safety elsewhere. This makes sense because the Roman historian Tacitus tells us how the colonists at Colchester took shelter in the Temple of Claudius. The absence of furniture is more problematic, since it could easily have been destroyed without trace in the fire. In fact, one of the burnt houses excavated at Lion Walk in the 1970s did contain the remains of a bed in one room and a shelf or other piece of furniture in another.