‘Romans on the Range’ (High Ham, Somerset) | Series 18 Episode 3 | Time Team

back in the days of queen victoria an amateur archaeologist made an intriguing discovery underneath these somerset fields two roman mosaics have a look at this drawing see the detail in that rose pattern there classic evidence of a roman villa but that's not all experts think there could be even better mosaics still down there although there's a very good reason why they haven't tried to look for the last hundred years this whole area has been an army firing range so for three days the guns are going to fall silent allowing us to finish a job that started 150 years ago [Music] this week we're in somerset and it's time team to the rescue 150 years ago archaeologists stumbled across two mosaics in fields near high ham which they assumed were the remains of a roman villa but a lot happened since then and when these fields aren't being used for plowing they're now the fallout zone for an army firing range so the ministry of defense have called us in to see if the mosaics have survived mind you someone might have to put a gun to mcgaston's head to get him fired up about roman archaeology mick these aren't bad are they they're not bad but they're they're not as good as they could be well i said not bad that was supposed to be english understatement they're really very good no they're not like the others that have turned up in the middle of summerset in recent years i think these are an indication that there's something far more spectacular on this site and this is just the tip of the iceberg martin you're the archaeologist for the mod you're the landowner as it were do we know that these are still down there no we know that these were found in the 19th century near sam's cross which is where we are but because some other things were found in this field after it was plowed a few years ago we did some rather nice geophysical survey and got these really rather nice and strong results here which look a little bit like the signature you get for a roman building a villa so yes there's something here yes it might be roman that might be where these are so it's pretty promising isn't it it is but we need a bit more clarity than this so you know we need to do some more geophysics on here see if we can pick out walls a bit more clearly and then put some trenches in see what condition it's in and indeed whether these things are still there in the ground but by the end of today we should know if they're still there you can look forward to that although our primary mission is to rescue the mosaics we'll also explore the rest of the villa well all villa really means a lot in his house helping us will be roman expert neil holbrook what he doesn't know about villas isn't worth knowing it actually encompasses an awful lot of different things ranging from very humble houses up to almost quite palatial lavish structures which is just as well because larger villas can be a daunting challenge to unravel with a jumble of rooms bath houses and underfloor heating systems and the victorian plan and the mod survey hint at exactly that so despite the cold weather we're keen to get stuck in straight away [Music] but fussy old gfis need to do their own radar survey first yeah but it takes you two thousand years to do the survey doesn't it and that hasn't gone down well with one archaeologist straining to be led off the leash why don't we just dig a hole any idea who how much more you gotta do well um if you stop talking to me i'll be done in about five minutes oh come on he's hardly rocket science pushing that thing up and down a grass field make it look easy see now look you're holding up the other piece another one i'll put another probe on the end right here hey better oh no he really doesn't get technology does he fortunately the geophys is worth the wait what we've done is we've re-surveyed a small area and i mean the results are just so clearly it just has to be villa building all the wall lines corridors rooms a whole massive responses how deep down do you reckon this stuff is i think it's pretty shallow probably not more than you know half a metre the geophys hints at dozens of rooms any of which could hold the mosaics but one spot in the corner looks particularly promising so in goes trench one and oh look someone's happy less and almost immediately phil and neal find something rather special oh well even you know what that is that's part of a mosaic floor that was quick tiny bits of stone like these are called tesserai the building blocks of a mosaic let's hope that's a good omen of things to come oh ooh it's not bad is it for the first bit of the first trench we've got test three and we've got a coin you know there's only 12 coins recorded from this site so far from the antiquarian so lucky 13. so a piece of tessera a roman coin and also a lot of demolition rubble all good signs of a villa knocking around somewhere phil how's your trench coming along really well tony is this all stuff that was excavated in 1861 that is the really good news all this material looks so structured in other words we think it it's undisturbed we don't think it's ever been dug before and the really nice thing is it's got these really big stones in the plow will have bounced over that if there are floors underneath here they should be really well preserved any fines absolutely we've got our first coins third and fourth century coins we really are on the money fantastic well that's the good news the bad news is that the weather's getting worse and the forecast is absolutely terrible but then it would be this is time to welcome back to mid-somerset where we're looking for two lost roman mosaics which were originally found here in the mid-1800s and of course we're looking for the roman villa that would have been associated with them and look at this glorious geo fizz we've got walls corridors possibly rooms here looks like a roman villa doesn't it and if you look in this trench you can see plenty of what it's apparently roman stuff there's roman coins to go with it but none of what we've got here would appear to have the mosaics underneath it because it's all been undisturbed so mick when are we going to put in our second trench to find the mosaic whoa whoa whoa slow down a bit slow down slow down there's a lot of work to be done here and i think if you don't want me saying we shouldn't be pursuing where the 19th century wars or mosaics were they are an indication of what there is in this field but the geophysics shows us there's a big site here which we need to look at we shouldn't really be pursuing what they found earlier we should start again with our new information looking for well looking for walls dating material pottery stuff like that rather than a 26-foot roman mosaic yeah we almost certainly will find more mosaics i'm sure they are not the only two on the site but we need some context and data material to go with it you could bear to be here for three days without finding those mosaics at all wouldn't you absolutely if we found fifth century pottery that would be fantastic and more and better mosaics and more of the fifth century pottery and more and better mosaics [Music] actually as mick says we're not just chasing mosaics we want to build up a complete picture of this house what did it look like when was it built and did it end along with the roman occupation of britain in the 5th century well the good news is that phil's found our first wall the bad news that is not a classic wall of a roman villa is it ain't pretty it's not made out of well-dressed masonry it's actually a fairly crude herringbone yeah but you've got to think about all the other walls and what might be around it because look i've been tidying up down here yeah and it looks for all the world as i've actually got another wall there with the eye of faith there is an edge coming along like that yeah now granted that edge is at right angles to that wall with the gravelly stuff underneath it so the gravelly stuff is earlier and the gravelly stuff is sitting on the top of this wall so i think that wall is later than if this is a war than this war i i know you think i go on about this all the time yeah you do but why can't we be looking at a whole series of late or post-roman rather shoddily built timber patchwork stuff you know for late late in the life of the site phil's discovery has got us scratching our heads do we have an early villa with a later or even post-roman one on top the answer as always is in the dirt and the little details look at that wow it's a really nice brooch can you date it yeah it's first or second century it's quite an early brooch it's it's what's known as a dolphin brooch because of the shape of it yeah some of the finds are helping us to date the buildings like this second century brooch from the time of the emperor hadrian but others aren't quite so straightforward [Music] it's a classic roman type knife is that yeah quite a late one because you've got a little rise just there above the tank but it isn't a bit unusual for that the tang to be doing that rather than widening out on the other plate which brings to mind another interpretation okay it's one half of a pair of shears yeah you're right alan so it's not a late classic roman knife well that line is just like the late roman classic knife i'm going to dig my heels in on that right but i reserve the right to change my mind the only way to narrow down the date of our villa or should it be villas is to investigate a wider area john thinks he's identified another set of rooms which might also be where the victorians dug my thoughts were if we put the trench that went over that boundary ditch and across this range of rooms here and this corridor because we know we've got that early plan yeah and it fits in somewhere along this line we don't know exactly where so we might pick up the earlier excavation as well on this one you think that's the chance yeah and the way i like it is we've got this very clearly defined corridor with these white lines which is the walls but it kind of stops here almost as if the corridor is leading into a big room here and just imagine a larger room here you have this fantastic southward view wouldn't it over the hill straight over the valley down that direction yeah so our second trench goes in just a few meters away from our first to see if we've got a high status room in the middle of the villa with one of the mosaics in it and bang on target guess what we find tracy there are excited whispers from the other trench that you've found a little bit of mosaic we have tony yeah i mean you can see we've got a little bit in here and then a bit beyond where rachel's working a little bit of a mosaic come on tony it's carrying on underneath here so i think we're gonna have to extend the trench back this way there's a gap in the middle there do you think you've accidentally hit it no we didn't hit it um it's most probably power damage if you actually look at the section we're not that far from the top at all so john's looking pretty pleased with his geophysics but it turns out that the mosaic isn't quite where he thought it should be i don't understand i thought geophys was saying that this area here was outside the building that's right we wouldn't have a mosaic outside a building would you nope so they're all oh yeah it could be a patio hmm back to the drawing board still it is a mosaic but is it one of the ones we're looking for this morning mick promised me that by the end of the day we'd have found the two long lost roman mosaics well the threatened reigns coming in it's time to knock off and we still haven't found them instead we found something much better our own previously undiscovered mosaic it seems to be part of a corridor which goes in that direction and a long way in that direction into some rooms and what's in the rooms we'll find out tomorrow welcome to sunny somerset where we're looking for two lost roman mosaics and the exciting news last night was that we've discovered a third previously undiscovered one at least that's what some of the archaeologists are saying yesterday evening you were adamant that this mosaic was one that hadn't been seen since roman times and it wasn't one of the ones that were rediscovered in the 19th century but this is one of the two that were found by the antiquarian yeah and this one is blue and white that one is blue and white that one has got a lot of long blue lines in it this one has got a lot of long blue lines in it this one has got rectangles that one has got rectangles do i need to say any more yeah but the thing is the blue and white is the local geology right the lions occurs as blue liars or white liars so they're getting this locally and my guess is that all the corridors in the villa are filled up with this stuff because they can they can do this very quickly and easily maybe but that doesn't answer the question why that one isn't this one well it's it's certain tony because overlying the mosaic this is demolition cue the smashing up of the roof of the actual taking apart of the villa this stuff has never been disturbed before yeah that's what intrigues me i thought you would be really excited by the mosaic but it's all the rubbish or the detritus on top of it that's really exercising your imagination's why it's the story of the end of the villa it's a story after the mosaic floor was laid down i mean look see that burning there it's like someone's setting a bonfire into their expensive mosaic but you know 50 100 years later they don't bother anymore stop worrying about the end of the villa chaps we haven't even worked out how it started yet or what happened in between come to think of it [Music] it's time to step up again our first task for day two is to find where the corridor mosaic leads to because at the end of it could be a room with the posh mosaics we've been asked to track down 5.18 meters on one axis right yep so landscape investigator stuart ainsworth is trying to align our corridor with the victorian plans so he could drop that against the geophysics in the background a highly technical approach known as guesswork just see if that fits along in between i mean that shows that range we're actually fitting the gap that we haven't dug in right right between the two trenches [Music] over in our other trench phil's testing his theory that we've actually got two walls from two villas this wall we're saying is later than everything on this side if we can confirm that it's later than everything on that side as well that'll be very useful but we haven't really found any rooms yet and the bad weather is starting to close in this morning even phil's starting to get on a bit of a downer neil what we've been we've been digging here i mean we are talking about this being a villa aren't we yeah for sure well now according to the checklist that i've got on villas i mean i expect to find nice painted wall plaster nice floors maybe underfloor central heating and all the rest of it we haven't got any of those sorts of things on this side does this mean that this is not a villa oh it's definitely a villa field because you know it's got mosaic floors it's got stone walls but yeah it hasn't got painted plaster so far i mean there's no evidence of hyper coarse or bath houses at all is there so i guess this is a kind of middle range villa not at the really top end the really opulent but not in the cow shed either well let's put that into modern day speak i mean the people who are going to be living here are they going to be like management middle management senior management chief executive it ain't going to be joe who plays the fields is it no ain't gonna be joe you know the top two percent of the country feel think about that oh it's a senior manager so you would be living in a building like this i'd be living in a roundhouse that is exactly how it would be so while our villa owners weren't short of a bob or two it's possible they didn't have quite enough money for top of the range mod cons like underfloor heating even the local stone used in the mosaic seems a bit cut price i love these things what are they they're actually spoon handles um but if the villa was built on the cheap some of the possessions inside were at least meant to look expensive they've got this lovely metal coating on them so originally they'd have looked like they were silver they're also really nicely decorated and they've got a sharp point at one end so you could break open an egg with them what's your favorite find well as i'm a coin specialist i always like to look at the coins first and there's a really nice fourth century roman nummus and it depicts romulus and remus being fed by the she-wolf and they were the twins who founded rome yep the founders of rome and the other really interesting thing about this find is that um it shows where it was made just underneath romulus and remus there's the mint mark and in this instance it's one from siskiyou which is in modern croatia what do you think of this collection of fines is it what you'd have expected us to get yeah for me this is a typical villa assemblage you've got this hint of early roman activity but most of the finds come from the third and fourth century why then well in the fourth century there was an explosion in the growth of villas in britain so this is exactly what we'd expect for much of the roman empire the 4th century was a time of turmoil with rampaging barbarians and rival emperors across the channel britain was doing pretty well upper middle class families on the make were earning money and spending it on villas and mosaics [Music] and stuart finished cross-referencing the geophys and the victorian plans and now reckons the mosaics should be right between our two trenches at the western end of the corridor well let's hope he's right the cold wind is now really starting to bite and everybody's crossing their fingers that the mosaics will turn up soon that's what you're looking for i think you'll find that look at that right on the money oh this is great news another mosaic but is this one of the two we're looking for you've got the dog tooth pattern which you've got there then the band of interlacing to not work with the red with the red tesserie picking out the strand so the only place we can be the big star is just about there although it's still very muddy this must be one of the mosaics we've been asked to look for this is a smaller room here with this mosaic in the division between the rooms should be about here in this train and like buses you wait for ages in the cold for one mosaic and two come along at once so what have you got down there well you've got this kind of brickwork pattern then a gray band coming along and turning a corner well that looks they pretty much like this stuff here you see this that's where you were in the other one down there and you should be just coming into that area there yeah we're coming across at that angle well here it is stuart look it's he's got one grave block here and we've got white and another band of grey where tracy is the whole thing looks to be intact as if it's not been eaten two at all so at last we've got our two mosaics sitting next to each other but how much has actually survived another hour's digging brings some worrying news there's a bit missing all this bit here yeah we seem to have lost its end since you know 150 years ago it looks remarkably neat doesn't it that line just this cut here it does look a bit suspicious almost as if a monkton actually took it up and took it home put on his mantle piece it's still a beautiful thing though imagine all the hundreds of posh sandal feet that must have walked over that yeah and not just the posh guys because there's a whole army of slaves and servants that were needed to keep a house of this style and status running bringing all those essential functions that we kind of take for granted today would the slaves have been english people or would they have been shipped here from abroad i think almost certainly locals really because you know people were born into slavery it's hereditary it's not their choice there's still always that essentially you are the slave and i am the master and then you have the choice of always life and death over them and that was quite a brutalizing relationship really in order to demonstrate just how vital apart roman slaves would have played in the economy around here we're going to do an experiment we are creating our own slave who for 24 hours will do what we tell him to do we've got a volunteer can you come out volunteer matt thank you for saying you'll do this here are your clothes you're smiling now but actually we're going to take this very seriously in fact we're going to be quite tough slave masters as a lot of them were you are not allowed to speak to any of us unless we speak to you okay and that goes for everyone everyone anybody asks you to do anything you just do it all right okay off you go you're still laughing blessing not for much longer very good very good indeed thank you quite sure about the boots on the uh socks but uh well that's it really i've got a couple questions actually before what did i say what did i say you don't speak unless you're spoken to permission to you to speak to me sir no permission denied off you go i couldn't quite get into this it's likely villa slaves would have had specific functions some to work in the house some out in the cold on the farm [Music] but we've only got one so he's going to have to do everything [Music] his first task is to wash the mud off our motorized chariot [Music] before serving tea to a bunch of cold and soggy archaeologists they're wet what is that hey slave stop eating the cake i'm sure he's not meant to do that back outside geophys have now surveyed a huge area we've got lots of unusual features and maybe a second range of buildings to the southwest well the thing that strikes me about the geophysics mick is that there's a very clearly defined rectangular block here right and then it seems to reduce slightly in thickness before carrying on which suggests to me that there's more than one phase this could be an add-on so you think we might have an earlier building there and yeah yeah so we'd not only get the condition we get some chronology into it as well right also the question is what's the status of this range is this a village it's like l shape with both wings of equal status yeah or is this the working range so i think if we do do a trench we should try and look inside one of these rooms to try and get everything to chronology status and function yeah so trench three goes in to see if we've got an l-shaped villa with a western range all villas would have had a farm and as punishment for cake stealing matt's going to be banished to work on ours but as we haven't actually got a farm we've lent him to the next door villa owners aren't we generous [Music] all right get to work there's always someone better off than the slave isn't there matt it's now nearly the end of the day and our work on the corridor mosaic is almost done how's this coming i think we're pretty well finished with this trench now i think we've got a little bit of cleaning up to do and some drawing and then and then i think we backfill it close it up again our lovely mosaic yeah well obviously that's got to be protected with some term and sand and stuff like that but i think we've learned all we can from it have we learned that much yeah what we have shown is it's actually pretty trashed in this trench really yeah the mosaic is you know pretty bitty this wall here you look in that section there they've pinched every useful bit of stone out of it i think we understand the story here which is actually basically one of robbing and plowing and collapse it's a shame so much of our corridor mosaics missing but we've found enough to say that it ran along the front of the northern range [Music] even though the weather has been pretty dreadful and freezing cold it's been a good day for us with little bits of mosaic popping up all over the place but as the day's gone on our archaeologists have become more and more interested in something which i'd hardly even noticed on the 1861 drawing it's this circle here and it says it well filled up with rubbish and that well would be over there somewhere and apparently it's roman rubbish that's in it and we all know what the romans put in the bottom of their wells sacred objects so who knows what we might find tomorrow thirsty work hey phil oh two right slave oh got some from me and the sun's coming out again what a lovely day salute absolutely 10 am day 3 and something's not quite right the diggers have fallen silent and the only sign of movement is matt our slave carrying a portable heater with a bit of wind chill factor of almost -10 we've called everything to a halt right thanks for coming down as you know it's quite freezing out there we've lost nearly two hours digging everyone's stopped i mean as far as i don't see a bit that l-shaped trenches that's the only one isn't it you're saying that's the only one that's one of the big problems comes in because it is too cold to go out that's that's what you're gonna get a shelter i will if not some form of wind break for you and at least try and stop the cold getting to you until we get a win break we ain't digging out there okay that's fair enough for even phil to down tools for the first time in 18 years things must be bad it's turning out to be one of the toughest digs we've ever had to save our strength we've decided not to open any more trenches which is just as well because there's a heck of a lot to resolve today we need to clean up our mosaics nail down whether we've got two building phases in trench one and see if we've got a western range we've also got to put up tents to protect the delicate archaeology from the elements and bring in wind breaks for the not so fragile digging team that's one hell of a parasol turtle you managed to do some digging at last that's quite cozy in here tony please it's not so bad when the wind drops no but it's very very nice to be in the shade of that van so what have we got well what we've managed to find now is this main wall here which is the end wall of this main villa complex that's coming down here and you can see that it's actually made of these pitch stones which is exactly the same construction that we had the slightly later wall entrenched one so have you any idea at all what period this wall could be only very loosely we know that the earliest war that we've got up there was probably second century and we know the mosaics of the fourth century so i guess this wall is going to be somewhere in between or maybe fourth century itself and what's all this stuff on either side of it what we can see one of the things we've got is a lot of burning and we wonder whether or not these walls here are actually just foundation walls for timber frame building you can build perfectly good timber frame village um that will stand up perfectly good roof this is probably a lot of this is going to be probably roofing slates it's going to be a really substantial building [Music] so we've definitely got an l-shaped villa with a western range which looks like it was built in the third or fourth century [Music] that's the period we think our mosaics date from and we're now busy scraping and sponging away centuries of mud to reveal the patterns underneath the design would have been bright [Music] but basic on the first day i was saying to tony that i thought these mosaics found in the 19th century with a bit ordinary really i can see what you're driving at yes at first glance they are sort of you know just blue and white yeah but these look like mosaics a very good competent execution and style yeah what i find fascinating is that this range is producing a large number of mosaics and i think it says something about the wealth yeah these are people who are almost certainly romanized britons living right on the edge of empire so they're not romans at all really no but they are consciously commissioning and displaying for all that come that they are buying into this part of the roman dream someone else who's living the roman dream is our silent slave for 24 hours matthias williams he's been up early boiling water and cleaning the muddy toilet floor [Music] and if that wasn't bad enough by mid-morning he's quite frankly being exploited by the more unscrupulous members of the team [Music] yeah back [Music] yeah and back back again that's no good jimmy he's got magnetic boots on get those boots off [Music] but what happened to the slaves and all the other people living in the villa after rome abandoned britain in the 5th century nice big chunky rim shirts though it seems they at least tried to keep on living here we've got three shirds here including a conjoining pair of this black burnish were that's been identified as the very latest product yeah it dates to the fifth century that's right this is stuff that's still being produced in the opening decades after 400 leds and you can see it's got decoration just slightly burnished in one direction and it's from quite a squat jar with a big inverted room but the lovely thing is that we can now say that we we recognize roman type pottery that's still continuing into the opening decades of the fifth century yeah well i've got a coin here which dates from right at the end of the fourth century it was probably in circulation into the fifth yeah um it's a numbers and it's of the emperor theodosius oh yeah so it's really nice to get one of the latest coins that was supplied to britain here on this site that's good isn't it coin pot and we're going beyond the end of roman britain here in the opening years of the fifth century it's lovely the coin and the fifth century pottery suggest that life carried on in our villa after the roman empire is supposed to have collapsed traditionally that's the year 410 when the goths sacked rome the news of that event would have reverberated around the empire your sac rome read all about it even as far away as our villa in chile somerset so what do you think the effect would have been on all the people who lived in the villas in somerset and gloucester when they realized that the romans weren't coming back i think at one level it would have been quite a psychological blow but i think in this part of the world they would still view themselves as part of the latin world the roman world they may even have thought this is only a temporary break and soon there will be a new set of roman administrators so you've had all these people desperately trying to keep up roman appearances even though the very roman stuff that supported them was gradually dribbling away yeah all those skills that went with it that you could support mosaicists and things like that people are going to be looking more and more at subsistence really surviving and getting through but still with this echo of a roman heritage probably lasting for another 150 years it's wonderful to think that people in our villa might have been clinging on to the roman way of life against the odds just like matt our experimental slave whose final official task is to prepare the dining room for lunch service thank you sir whilst you're at it can you comb my hair in a bit of a steak and the boots will want cleaning see to it pretty good set [Music] oh come on get on with it i've got work to do a bit more like it right boy i want you to sort this mop out please you start from the the bottom up [Music] i've got nowhere left [Music] lunch and a good boot wash have given phil the time to mull things over i think this part of this trench is actually crucially important to the whole story here because we've actually got two walls yeah of two different dates we've got that wall down there which is the earliest one this is the one with the square corner crucially we've got some pottery from that and it's second century oh crackers that's well early on absolutely right but what i think it can say is that maybe this wall may well go with this cobbled surface because this this yard surface goes underneath this wall there but what like i say what is crucial is that it does stretch the life of the vehicle and actually that's that's not uncommon around here that you start with a smaller villa building simpler and then bolt other stuff onto it to make a big complex phil's confirmed that we've got a second century house which was remodeled and expanded into an l-shaped villa in the fourth century all along we've assumed that the northern building came first and that the early wall in trench one belonged to it but then phil makes a surprising discovery in the western range paul what you've got there alan what's face of a wall that's good yeah those facing stones are flat again and that's exactly the same building technique that we had up there in the first trench that we owe i'm convinced that if you've got these flat slabs it's the early war and if it's pitched it's the later one the two second century walls appear to be part of the same building and it makes us realize that we've been looking at the villa the wrong way round we now know it began life as a simple stone building not in the north but in the west sometime in the second century then as the owners social fortunes improved they added a second range which was half timbered to the north in the third or fourth centuries and that was the one which included the mosaics but the renovation seems to have been done on the cheap the walls were of rough pitch stone even the mosaics were made from local material and it's possible that the plain old wing became the servant's quarters [Music] talking of servants it's time to give our slave his freedom matt you've still got your slaves costume on yeah the 24 hours is over i'm free yeah oh great you're right that's better what was it like well to be honest the physical work wasn't too bad it was no worse than the digging i do every time we do a time team so what did get under your skin um i think i think what i noticed the most was a kind of loneliness you couldn't have a chat at lunch time you couldn't even say hello to people when they walked past you so i was silent all the time and you kind of felt very isolated after a while how did people treat you i was obviously briefed on how to be a slave but um that meant everyone else had to act like slave owners towards me and i think that's quite difficult i found it really easy to shout at you yeah i noticed as the day draws to an end the sun and the color in the mosaics are starting to shine through sadly they've deteriorated since they were last seen 150 years ago probably from plowing but at least we've ensured that they'll be protected in future is this one room or two rooms or what yes it's both it's what's called a bipartite room two rooms that operate as one you've got like your entrance hall almost with this lovely mosaic that's really sort of vibrant with its colors now that it's been sponged down then you can see here that we've got this semicircular footing yeah what we might have here is like half column actually attached to the wall rising up with a nice big decorative capital in which case we're looking at a grand double doorway through the steps into here or it's the pedestal base for a statue either way we're looking at a very very grand room what would the walls have been like almost certainly richly decorated painted wall plaster but of course we haven't found much here because this has already been cleared out by moncton in the 1860s and that's not all curiously we appear to have post holes driven into the mosaic floor this act of vandalism is perhaps more evidence that life here struggled on after the end of roman britain it's been quite an odd exercise for me because we came here trying to find some grand aristocratic villa but what we actually discovered was the end of a grand aristocratic villa yeah we have i mean we've almost looked at his final ghasts of life of this building what actually happens when that economy that underpins the existence of this house starts to fail so you mean that when the roman bureaucracy collapsed there was nothing to support it no that's right money becomes worthless so in the end you can't actually afford to repair your house you haven't got a means of doing it what had been some great status symbol ends up just as a albatross around your neck absolutely right and so i think what also might happen is you can't pay your servants or keep your slaves anymore they might actually sort of run off i mean there are some latin authors that talk about a group called the gundy which are a ban of runaway slaves and brigands roaming around britain and ghoul and sacking and just nicking things so actually in in rubble and burning we're seeing the last days of rome in britain absolutely it's really about the end of the roman way of life which is funded by the roman [Music] economy over the past three days we've unearthed a villa which mirrors the rise and fall of roman britain [Music] a modest house which ended up with pretensions of grandeur [Music] in its heyday cheap blue and white elias mosaic corridors would have led into a large summer dining room without two mosaic floors and on a fine day views across the valley beyond on the dining room table perhaps the fake silver spoons we found all in all dare we say it just a little bit chav home to a minor aristocrat his or her family and of course keeping the whole thing going in the background servants and slaves [Music] but the good times weren't to last it struggled on into the fifth century but the villa along with roman britain was past its cell by date [Music] it's nice to think that at the end of the roman empire the local brits were still keeping up standards with their beautiful mosaic floors and their reasonably well appointed villas and of course that essential of roman life the slaves mind you by the end of the empire those guys are already heading for the hills to ensure you catch all the latest updates please do subscribe to this channel follow us on social media and sign up to our newsletter and join us on patreon [Music]

Channel: Time Team Classics

Views: 490,504

Keywords: Archaeology, History, Education, Educational, British TV, British History, Tony Robinson, Phil Harding, John Gater, Stewart Ainsworth, Mick Aston, archeological dig, Channel 4, Time Team Full Episodes, Full Episode, time team, roman history, time team somerset, high ham somerset, time team roman history, dig sites, english history, time team series 18 episode 3, Time Team

Id: sn0zrbDsKfk

Length: 47min 36sec (2856 seconds)

Published: Sun May 15 2022