Is There A Roman Mausoleum Buried In Binchester? | Time Team | Odyssey

in my hand is a piece of roman brick it's not very smart we've probably seen hundreds of bits of brick like this before except when you turn it over you can see that nearly 2 000 years ago someone scrawled a list of names in it there's vincente there mourinho there they were probably some of the thousand or so soldiers who were stationed here at vinovia one of the largest roman forts in northern england for these common soldiers life in the fort without food warm clothes and entertainment would have been impossible they had to rely on the attached vehicus a civilian settlement that depended on and provided for all the soldiers needs but until very recently these settlements have been almost entirely overlooked by archaeologists so we're stepping outside the fort's imposing ramparts to uncover the lost world of vinovius vikas the bars the shops and beyond them the cemeteries which would have been such an essential part of life and death for vincentes and co we've never had the opportunity to dig an entire vehicus before probably because it's such a massive undertaking and we've got just three days to do it [Music] [Music] vinovia or binchester as it's known today lies on deer street the major roman road that ran from york through hadrian's wall to the far north of the empire this strategic route was lined with forts the backbone of the roman military presence in britain and the one at vinovia is a fantastic excavated example it's a classic layout of barracks for up to a thousand men kitchens and stables and a common dance house complete with a luxurious bath house all surrounded by a massive stone wall and beyond that wall was the vehicus the civilian settlement on which the fort depended but so far archaeologists have almost completely ignored it there have been loads of people digging inside the fort but actually only one person has ever had a look outside in the vegas area it's this chap the reverend hoople in 1891 and he produced this very interesting plan of buildings here and we've got sketches of what he found now these are really substantial bits of masonry lots of different phases they do look like illustrations in a late 19th century children's book don't they and we have been ripped off by antiquarians before who've come up with all these fantasies which you actually can't substantiate is this stuff real well we've got something that can help us decide because look at that i mean this is sensational here we've got dsg and look what looks exactly like these buildings very clearly here i mean you can even see it that looks like the long building there i mean it just looks wonderful it looks like this is a really accurate plan yes but whenever we're on a site that's been dug before i know what always happens and it makes me so depressed which is rather than looking at new archaeology we go for where the other bloke dug are we going to have to do that this time we are and with reason too because when hoople dug here i mean we don't actually know what he found we've got a few sketches and and a probably pretty inaccurate plan so what we need to do is to stick a trench in here test the accuracy of the walls and actually see how much deposit he took out and and if he left any how much he left so just go around the outside and then we'll do crisscross it with the lions coming so we're opening our first trench over the area dug by huppel in the 19th century and it should contain substantial stone buildings belonging to the vehicus but all this area including the fort is a scheduled ancient monument and that means our digging options here are very limited that shouldn't be too much of a problem though as we suspect the vegas extends well outside the scheduled area and that means geofiz have begun one of the biggest surveys they've ever attempted on time team starting in the large field to the east of the fort the entire area on that side of this fence is scheduled so we can only put in one trench there but given how big that fort was we think the vehicus might extend over here which is unscheduled where we can put in as many trenches as we like if we get the evidence stew any joy so far well this field looks rather interesting tony because we've got some aerial photographs there's the fault that's the fence you've just walked along can you see that angle there that looks like it might be an annex a ditch feature or something an nx onto the fort either that or it's even a remnant of an earlier fort or something of that sort of order and there's another aerial photograph which shows a road coming out of the entrance to the fort heading over that way so yeah there's a possibility of lots in here i mean there's no doubt from my point of view that it's full of archaeology there's your curving feature on the aerial photograph and there it is on the geophysics and look at all these pits and all the other archaeology inside i mean one target we're definitely going to have to go for is is this ditch to see what its relationship is to the main fort i mean as regards the area and whole i mean presumably as you go away it looks like it's thinning right out you wish oh you you tell you you definitely oh that's not fair this is where it gets exciting good [Music] dig it [Laughter] late morning on day one and it looks like geophysics leg work has already paid off with two intriguing targets we open our second trench over what appears to be two parallel ditches to the north of the fort where's gotta be then down the line of the tape you're just walking over the bank you're just about to cross the first ditch and there's a probable second ditch behind me and down the bottom at the tape if these are ditches we want to find out whether they were part of the vehicus or an annex to the fort and almost immediately we've got our first find roman our first piece of salmon oh there he is that nice red shiny extra fishlet do you have a pattern on it can we tell ah oh no no no it would have been decorated look because you got through the middle look is that little raised area which is where the pattern would have been fantastic so it is pattern pattern simon while phil works his way through the plow soil our resident historian has been casting his somewhat skeptical eyes over our geo fizz i've never been in an experience before where we showed the archaeologists this geophys and they all immediately went it's a temple it's temple they're normally so cautious now this is the radar that john's done look at that face do you see that face how long did it take you to look at that you old cynic bear with me that's the roadway which is on the far side of the fence we think this here is our temple and that was the blob in the middle well i don't think it's a temple because a romano celtic temple wouldn't normally turn up here that which is that kind of shape i think it's much more likely to be a mausoleum why do you say that well it reminds me of a mausoleum just outside rome on the appian way which consists of an enclosure wall and then with the central tomb in the middle so what's the difference between a temple and a mausoleum a mausoleum is a place that's dedicated to the memory of a deceased person you might actually worship there religiously you know you go and perhaps um offer sacrifices to the spirits of your departed but i guess i'd guess that's more likely to turn out to be the mausoleum of maybe a commanding officer of this fall well finding the last resting place of a roman commander doesn't happen every day and i have to admit the geophysics results are some of the most striking we've ever seen on time team so with a strong sense of anticipation we open our third trench over what looks like one of the walls of our possible mausoleum [Music] that's almost exactly the line of the wall where that sheep track is [Laughter] you know what i said almost exactly ah almost exactly yeah i've never known a sheep walk in a straight line a bit like yourself isn't it it never ends [Music] we've had our fingers burnt before never more so than when re-excavating antiquarian trenches and so far our first trench over the site of a 19th century dig hasn't delivered the stone buildings we'd hoped for just a confusing scatter of rubble but our second trench looks more promising [Music] we put this rather long trench in here because earlier today john did some geophys here and he came up with two things which looks suspiciously like ditches naomi can i come in your trench can have you got the ditch we have got ditch we are in one of them where is it okay if we come over here we can see this light patch and this dark patch this is the edge of one of our ditches this is the ditch fill okay and if we come this way yeah where this lighter patch is this is our other edge so it's quite a wide ditch that is a heck of a big ditch isn't it yeah is that there well here it's just something we're just uncovering it looks like a nice piece of mortaria which is which is kind of like a pestle and mortar for grinding food and this stuff here again just another nice chunky vessel both roman it's definitely looking that way so does that mean that we can date this ditch as roman i should say so yeah and the other fish is over here tracy have you got that ditch head nice yeah we've got one end of it here yeah which i'm just working on and then the other side of it all the way down to about here i'm sorry i'm not really concentrating i've just noticed this down here what's that oh that's nice isn't it yeah that's a roman greyware pot wow could it be a burial land it could be yeah could well be it's going to be really difficult to get out though isn't it we'll have to block lift it i think it's just to keep it together it's fantastic the fines are really starting to come up already so we can be confident these ditches are roman but we're still not sure when and why they were dug or whether they're part of the vecus we believe the fort was built to guard the point where deer street crosses the river where and stuart thinks the landscape may help us to understand the relationship between the vegas and the fort i built up the basic topography of the landscape as it is now and on top of it i've dropped what would have been the fort the first thing you'll notice is half the fort's hanging off the landscape there is a very good reason for that because this side of the fort has actually slipped away there's been a big land slip on this side here by the river and it literally is gone so it looks rather nice but you're gonna have to lose that that side of it okay but what that illustrates really well is this high ground that the fort sits on because it actually sits on effectively a raised island doesn't it the river on one side the valley down here that's a really dramatic piece of topography for dominating this major crossing of the river here very distinct isn't it it is the roman writer ptolemy who's writing during the roman period about ad120 actually mentions vinovia as being a brigantian city as if there might actually have been an iron age fort or settlement here before the roman fort we know the vikas extended along the road to the east of the fort so there's a possibility it continued on the other side too but the substantial stone buildings we were expecting to find along the road to the east are missing the more i'm cleaning them up the more they just look like a bit of a pile really there's tops all in and around them yes it's just kind of bits of it's a rubble nothing really it's beginning to look like whatever was found here in the 19th century has gone late on day one and there's still no sign anywhere of the shops and houses we'd expect to find in a vehicus so we extend our survey even further over to the west of the fort in search of the lost settlement and we continue to survey the area to the north to see what happens to the double ditches for everyone especially geophysics it's been a long day but just as we're getting ready to leave for the night there's a dramatic discovery in our possible mausoleum trench it's a base now does that mean it's inverted we may just have found evidence of a burial because this pot looks like a cremation urn yeah it is injection it is inverted in it i can feel it it goes right the way around incredibly thin walled i mean i'm amazed at just how well thrown it is i mean look at the thinness of those walls it's way for a thin it's it's a beautiful piece of pot and it really is i mean do you reckon if we got this roadside mausoleum job is this going to be a cremation well to have a complete vessel placed upside down in this kind of position the most obvious thing is that you would have a clinical burial in it but you can't actually see anything at the moment i reckon we might have to cut the trench back a bit yeah we'll have to box it if this is a cremation it lends weight to guys theory that this is a mausoleum but it's a long shot we've never found a roman mausoleum on time team before it's been an extraordinary day and right at the end geophysics have come up with another curveball the continuing survey of the site shows that the double ditches we've been excavating extend around the fort and that suggests these ditches look less like an annex or part of the vehicus and more like a huge earlier fort if we're right that would push the history of vinovia back towards the very beginning of roman occupation in the north of england it looks like we're in for another busy day tomorrow [Music] beginning of day two in our search for the roman settlement around the big fort here in binchester in the northeast and yesterday afternoon john came up with some extraordinary geophys here where we expected to see shops and houses john has found this which he thinks is a new fort which is quite extraordinary but that provides us with a bit of a dilemma do we continue to investigate inside this new fort do we go outside to search for the settlement or vehicus as the romans called it or do we dig in both remember we've only got two days left mick that's what we're thinking it's a tough order isn't it it is it is and we've got we've got a lot to do already so adding extra sort of interesting projects is something we're a bit wary of we don't really want one little hole because it might not tell us very much so you know we're not quite sure yes well thank you very much for two developing telling them about what's the solution what's the solution i think we've we've got to try and well we do have to try and resolve it we i mean thankfully we have got two well we do we've got two days that's amazing they've told me absolutely nothing john why do you think that this is a thought why couldn't it be medieval or anything there's a couple of things without getting too complicated look at these earlier results we've got clear stone buildings showing in the geophysics you don't have these these look like timber slots and pits within these defenses so that says to me barrett blocks earlier fought all right guy what's the significance of that look this is very exciting we've concentrated all our attention up till now on the later stone fort but what i'm convinced we've got here is an early timber fault that probably pushes us right back into the first century and that big roman push into the north okay so where do we dig well phil and i reckon our best bet is probably to extend this into that area there yeah but remember that in addition to that we've got two possible cremation burials yeah we've got a whole flipping mausoleum there which everyone was really excited about yesterday are we going to be able to empty up there what the one that the old antiquarian originally done yes a lot of work to do can we do all of that well i think so if we only extend this rather than doing something new if we didn't think it was possible we wouldn't do it so you reckon we can do what we need to do but yeah we're stretching ourselves yeah but just don't come up with anything else nothing else to [Music] so we extend trench two into the area we hopes an early fort and continue to excavate our possible mausoleum trench we've now uncovered this fantastic wall and we need to work out how it relates to our potential cremation urn so that's clean up really nicely now isn't it without that should be the inner face according to the juices of whatever we've got here i'll take your word for that with not one but two discoveries of potentially national significance our hunt for the vegas takes a back seat with only matt left scraping away in search of the substantial stone buildings recorded in the 19th century matt we've got a mausoleum down there we've got cremation burials we've got a brand new roman fort that no one's ever seen before what have you got in your tree well apart from all this stone rubble we've got hope and we've got a day and a half as well so we'll see how it goes can you hold the end of it and then go through what's left of that so far we've found very little archaeological evidence of the living but we do have plenty of evidence of the dead in our long trench bridge is excavating what could be a cremation burial she's found a coin next to the pot and suspects it was originally placed inside there could be more stuff in there i guess well that's i mean the nice thing would be if we could find some created bone something like that and in our trench over the possible mausoleum jack is still excavating what we hope is another cremation jackie what have you been doing almost a day ago you said you were going to lift that pot and it's still there yeah a slight change of plan because if you look behind you we thought we were outside this building we're actually inside it because we've got the return wall that's some fantastic archaeology how many times on time team have you shown me something which you tell me as a structure but it just looks like three stones to me even i can see what a robust wall that is well three stones make a wall and we've got a lot more than three so that's good down there so what we're going to do now we've we've got this vessel here in fact we've got slightly more than one vessel we've actually got two cool things they're placed inside this building so what we want to do is see how they relate to that return wall as it runs along there so we're going to strip away a little bit more of the ground to that side so you're going to take this part of the trench from here back this way yeah so it's going to go out about two meters in that direction so we can find where that wall is and exactly how they sit in relationship to it this new one looks even better nick than the other one and much bigger too so what do you think the story of this trench is so far well this is starting to look like a possible mausoleum so we've got a standing building in which will have been there for quite a long time inside which um potentially burials have been made cremation burials which is what this may be but we don't quite know how they relate to each other date-wise it's very exciting it is jolly exciting we're becoming more and more confident that this is a mausoleum and we want to see more of it so we're extending the trench yet again the mausoleum alone would be a major discovery but we also think we might have discovered a huge earlier fort we know the fort that's visible today was built around 130 a.d so to prove this one's earlier we need dateable evidence so now you've got some decent edges to the ditch you get down into it now we suppose yeah it'd be nice to see how deep this goes now oh rank is going to actually come a fair old way down i hope so have you got anything coming out of it yeah we've got some nice bits um this is lovely samian bowl oh nice nice in it you've got a date on that late first early second century and you're not you're well you're nowhere near the bottom of the day so if we get in first century stuff this far up makes you wonder what you got from lower down oh hopefully lots more what you got in this bit of a bit of bubble wrap i mean look [Laughter] roman beaker of some sort it's gorgeous sewing it eh is that colouring isn't it the way it catches the light and that's well and truly stratified in the dish as well yeah that is from the same context as the samia and that's the second one down here so actually let's hope we get some more bits as we go further down it's a promising start these late first century finds take us back before the construction of the stone fort in around 130 a.d [Music] but there's no dating evidence in our first trench in fact despite matt's earlier optimism there's little sign of the stone buildings we'd expected to find so have you sorted this out now matt yep we've got it that is the bottom of hupel's trench finally right you can see though there's none of this lovely masonry left and we know that's the bottom of his trench because look the most exciting find of trench one so far oh well that's not roman is he's at all you're getting good at this yeah been a 19th century willow and that was from right well it's from down there in the backfield so that's confirmed that it's victorian so once he'd done those nice drawings of all that nice masonry somebody must have pinched the stonework in fact while there's no dating evidence in trench one bridge is hoping the coin from the pot in trench two could provide us with a date for the ditches you can see the original surface of it is completely gone you can see how knobbly that is but i have managed to pick out of the corrosion some letters coming up around here yeah and i can see the face of a man looking to the right yes but who is he and what does it say well i can tell from the the size of the coin straight away that it's first or second century but do you see how on the man's face there's no beard okay bare face now that puts it pretty well into the first century because most of the second century emperors have beards oh great and i can tell you straight away looking at his face this is the emperor vespasian you can just tell from the profile now that means that this coin was deposited sometime in the late 1st century or possibly on into the early 2nd century when that would have circulated so you know it's pretty good sort of date for us it's quite early and you know and it goes nicely for the dating of that trench or trench number two yeah it does this coin is the strongest evidence yet that the ditches in trench two belong to an early fort we're getting lots of finds from this trench but the truth is none of them are exclusively military to confirm our theory that this is an earlier fort we need to find evidence of military activity such as a barracks or granaries i knew that we were going to extend this trench in that direction because jackie wanted to sort out her cremation burials but now we've extended it all the way up to here even though this morning the archaeologists said to me they didn't want to do any more archaeology other than what was already on their plates and they didn't want to find anything new but they have and now i name these three guilty men thought you were gonna come at us about this why look at the geophysics well not only look at the geophysics look at the trench when jackie extended she got the main wall of the mausoleum and she got that second wall and if you look at the radar we've got these fantastic results there's the main mausoleum wall here's the second wall cutting across here turning through a right angle and you see we were debating earlier whether we've got one or more mausoleums or mausolea along here or indeed whether we've got part of a temple complex now it looks from the geophysics if we've got a series of these mausoleums going down the road that's fantastically interesting it's not sort of thing we get a lot of in this country so if we've got lots of mausoleums in a long line what does that tell us it's a classic bit of roman culture if you go off to italy today and you visit the port of roma dostia you can see the tomb still laid out one by one besides this road if you go to rome and walk down the appian way there's tombs all the way along if you go to pompeii you can walk through the street of tombs one final question what do we think this is well that's why we're going to excavate that we thought this was so interesting we ought to look at it and open it up and so that's what we're doing so in a year hour or two time we'll be able to tell you that when you've dug it when we've dug it like you weren't going to do any more digging this morning get lost god clear off you'll be glad we were talking yeah exactly this is the first row of mausoleums to be found in britain for 150 years and only the second ever to be discovered it's a find of national significance and with the strange circular feature and jackie's pots this trench promises to get better and better jackie this is the longest running story in the history of time team 26 hours later you still haven't lifted those parts yeah unfortunately the story keeps changing and it's changed yet again believe it or not this rather pale material you can see here yeah that's somebody's skull or at least what's left of it this is very very acid soil so it's more or less dissolving and those are bits of tooth that are in there and i can just about see the cut of a grave going through here now so it looks like we've got a burial an animation burial that's been made with a head here and the pots have been placed up by the head so those pots have been placed as grave goods in with this individual any idea how old that person would have been well one of the teeth that i've got out here that's a premolar tooth and it's slightly worn so that i know that that person must be at least over 16. that might be all i can say so what happens now well i want to extend down here and see if i can find the rest of the grave outline and see if there's anything else in with this individual so those pots are unfortunately going to be there a little bit longer i was hoping that as the sun set you'd lift the pots and i'd do my end of day piece to camera well you'll just have to adapt it slightly dear i'm sure you can manage it in fact on this dig it seems we're constantly adapting and the more the story changes the more questions we encounter was the mausoleum built for this person when was our newly discovered fort constructed and what's this mysterious circular feature we've now got just one day left to find the answers [Music] it's the beginning of day three at our vinovia roman fort in county durham and we're making an early start because this is turning out to be one of our most productive digs ever so far we've uncovered what could be a huge earlier roman fort and not one but a whole row of mausoleums the first to be excavated for over 150 years we're bracing ourselves for another busy day and with such a wealth of archaeology we've got our work cut out if we're going to make sense of it all do you remember from the geophysics there was that circular response in the center i'm just wondering if this is the building then this perhaps well i'm only going i'm only going on the evidence of meows late yesterday afternoon geophysics came up with a strange circular feature next to our mausoleums but making sense of the layouts proving tricky i thought we had a big one with some dividing walls within it well perhaps what you thought was not right perhaps i can't believe that [Music] in trench two over what we hope is an earlier fort we're looking for evidence of military activity such as barrett blocks excavating this is no easy task instead of large stone blocks we're looking for traces of timber and subtle changes in the soil marking the bottom of the ditches see i don't know if that's natural or a primary silt that's fallen into the bottom of the ditch yeah it's a lot cleaner down here nice absolutely and it's soft as butter but the trench is producing some good finds guys we've got a fair bit of pottery that's been coming out of here we've got a nice piece of amp for us some interesting pieces of gray wear but this is a real star find look at that and those three all join together i can tell it's samia and i expect you can tell me a lot more than that well it's south gorgeish samia and i can tell from the decoration which we've got so much of that this is going to be about 70 to 90 a.d we do know about individual potters that's what you can tell from decorated salmon it's very tightly associated with individuals also we've got these key historical events where samia has been found and the classic example is pompeii it's august 79 a.d vesuvius erupts and one of the uh casualties is a crate of fresh saiyan that's just arrived in the city and that's been excavated so we know exactly which potters were working in southgall at that time but the best thing about it is that we've got so much of the decoration we can definitely get this reconstructed late morning on day three and an exhausted geophys team finally pack up their magnetometers they've surveyed an area the size of 18 football pitches it's one of the largest areas ever surveyed on a time team but it's been worth it this has got to be some of the most spectacular geophys we've ever had on time team isn't it it really is i mean we've taken mark knoll's earlier survey he did it for geoquest and we've combined them with ours and so we've got this whole landscape picture now just in the geophysics i mean it's actually the patterning within that that's so important you know you can see different parts of the site you can see that the vecus is on both sides of the fort for example and that's important because it tells us the main axis of the thought and that's exactly what they'd expect to vegas on either side of that exit oh that's fine but you've got to admit when we came here we said we would look at the settlement the vehicus then when we found the first mausoleum suddenly we all became so captivated by that that we poured all our resources in here i mean we've done virtually no trenches elsewhere if we've been digging this site and we've found the vegas and hadn't found a mausoleum we'd have put all the trenches in the beakers absolutely the fact that that turned up and that's actually relatively unusual it's almost what happens in archaeology you know you you set out with with one thing we've answered actually the question about the settlement from the geophysics i think that's quite revealing what you've just said though basically you wanted to dig it not for me i did and it's looking more and more like it was the right decision with yet another surprise in our mausoleum trench jack has discovered a handful of iron nails which means the person was probably buried in a wooden coffin with the bowls placed on top it appears the grave was cut into the mausoleum sometime after its construction perhaps for a descendant of the mausoleum's original occupant it's a window into the rituals and beliefs of the lost world of innovia a world we're beginning to piece together just glancing across this we've got some massive things like these huge great bits of tile yeah those are bound to have been made locally because of course tile is very fragile if you have to carry that long distance it's bound to get broken but there's a single little tiny piece of pottery over here oh yeah which i think is the most interesting bit of all even though it's almost the smallest piece we have now that is off the side wall of an early form of decorated samian bowl and its profile is rather like the rim is here a little vertical wall here and then it curves right down like that okay and there's just enough of the decoration for me to say that it's probably been made between the years 70 to 85 a.d and that takes us right back to a governorship of somebody called patilius curialis in the early 70s potentially right at the beginning of when the romans are up here that's exactly right now that that of all the pieces here to my mind is the most interesting because it gives us that very early day this tiny piece of pot from trench two is powerful evidence of an early previously unknown fort at venovia dating to the very beginning of the roman invasion of the north yesterday we all got really excited about this area here with this mausoleum and jackie's pot then we found another mausoleum here but then towards the end of the day john started to get really excited about an area over here where he found this mysterious circular thing so phil have we found our mysterious circular feature we have but it's not circular it's square this is it well why does it look circular on the geophysics well i think the fact is that the inside of it does look circular but actually when you look at the geophysics too you see look you've got that straight edge there and there's another straight edge there i think you could interpret that as a square mausoleum i'm mausoleum for a very small person or a pet no not at all i mean it's perfectly feasible to have a cremation in there and you can actually get a burial in there i mean when you look at the size of ian against that the inside thing you could actually squeeze a human body in there and get it in there no problem so there could still be a burial there there could well be a burial in there bridge a nice piece of masonry over there yeah i'm glad you noticed it it is indeed it looks to be part of um a column you see this curved edge around here that would have been the front of it why is it flat on the other side well it's really been put up for aesthetic reasons rather than structural so of course as it was standing there this flat side would have been flush against the wall of the mausoleum and then you would have just seen that curved column on the front so there was no need to actually build a round column yeah but this is only half the story isn't it you've got something fairly small over there but you've got this massive building here you've got a wall there a return there a wall there a return that is huge ah but you see you're taking the obvious interpretation which was exactly the interpretation that i came to when i first came here and thinking that you did have this one big building but you see what we've got on the geophysics is this which actually contradicts that that there's going to be a wall across there literally going across there and we have no archaeological evidence for it so we're going to continue digging for the wall that geophys says is here while extending our trench to see if these two outer walls do join up the truth is it's mid-afternoon on day three and the layout of the mausoleum is still a puzzle ray san and guy are looking at possible models guys suspects each mausoleum was made up of a central chamber surrounded by a walled enclosure but to confirm this we need to find all four walls that is there in it yeah there look there's there it is there's pig grits so you've got this oh look yeah that's the door socket yeah round round on there so you can turn the door what's this going to do look it's close up against that threshold there right until you've got the the threshold jam there blocking it and then here you've got the brilliant wall coming out back here starts again excellent that was worth doing that we'll move on back ian i'll just take it around a couple times and then i'll start taking away the soil down the side in the mausoleum next door excavating the pots has reached a critical stage what do you think the chances are it's going to come out in one piece i'm not really a betting woman you know so is the idea that both of these will be emptied in the lab yeah i mean this one looking at it from this side hasn't got a lot in it which is this slight makes it slightly more difficult because it's not supported from the other side just give it a little wobble yep yeah okay jolly good well done extending the trench has produced not only the return wall as hoped but a beautifully preserved door socket bearing in my oh you got metal toe caps wave your machine over that plug door plug and see if it's there's a metal plug in there that's a big metal plug in there then it's fine yeah it's really fast well i can but it's a piece of engineering too you think with all these raised bits around here flush it all off i don't know how the devil they do that and then they gotta put a plug in there just for a door for for a mausoleum i mean that's an incredible amount of work that really is we're ready to lift the second bowl it looks almost perfect and we're hoping it'll stay that way when we lift it it's very hard up against some stones isn't it yeah well i think what it's done is i think they've been on top of the coffin and have slid off yes as it's rotted yeah to one side which is why it's wedged up against that edge i'm just gonna is that moving yes it is tears yes all right okay here we go look at that oh it's a crack down this side but that's it otherwise oh yes few the two parts date the late second or early third centuries and were probably filled with offerings to the deceased scented oils or wine inside the central mausoleum we found the wall we were looking for it seems that this was an internal wall and not a separate mausoleum with a beautifully crafted entrance columns and fine stone work it's becoming clear this was built for a very important person possibly for a general late on day three and trench three just keeps on surprising us but our trench in search of the early fort has been almost the opposite with ditches and pottery but little signs so far of buildings or military activity yesterday we put this trench in here because there was what seemed to be a big double ditch which we thought was the outside defenses of a roman fort that no one had ever found before and sure enough we've got the pottery dating and it is roman so then mick decided he wanted to extend it to see if he could find any evidence of that fort in the ground buildings and paths and roads and whatnot have we done and it's worked out extremely well because you just walked over the side of the rampart running in that direction which would have been made of turf and timber and clay and so on big great wall across there and at the back of that you see this orangey clay area this is probably either an oven or the base of another or burning associated with ovens because there were often ovens in the back of the rampart guy why would you put an oven in the back of a rampart well this is a timber fault so your barrett blocks are made out of wood the last thing you want them to do is to burn down so you have your bread up and over here safely behind the rampart they're the other side the road because we've actually got the road look see all these cobbles here it's the roads running in this direction behind the rampart and then the other side of the road we're starting to get the foundation for the timber buildings we've got timber slots we've got rows of nails where the beginning of the fronts of the barracks or other military buildings were going off into the fort that direction but one of the reasons that we wanted to dig this trench guy was because we wanted some dating yep we have had some very useful bits of pottery out of here and one little piece in particular takes us back to the 70s a.d and that's great because historically we know that in the early 70s there's a governor called patilius kerialis who has brought the roman army up from the north midlands right into this part of england to wipe out this troublesome northern tribe called the brigantes now we may well have one of the forts from that campaign which is brilliant and there's probably a series of early forts like that to control northern britain [Music] this has been a truly remarkable dig we came to this hill in search of a vehicus the civilian settlement that supported the roman fort and in the process we uncovered an entire lost landscape we located the vehicus along the road on either side of the fort but we also discovered a huge earlier fort which pushes the history of venovia back to the very beginning of roman occupation in the north and a row of three mausolea the first group to be discovered in britain for 150 years we came here in search of the living but found a city of the dead a street lined with grand tombs a little piece of the roman world in the far north of the empire and at its heart perhaps the grandest mausoleum of all okay antonius my brother and fellow comrade soldier at the mighty fort of vinovira up there we've come down the street of tombs to venerate the memory of our great ancestor our great great grandfather the mighty general who once acted as a soldier here and we've come down to his tomb and we've got to go through the vast mighty door that would have once been here pivoting there on iron and then we come to the mausoleum area and towering above us here is his grave with an inscription that records his name his mighty exploits and around here other graves of his brother and his cousins other members of the family and these are the men who make you and me important people in the fort today and our great hope one day is that we'll be buried here too as great chaps and as part of that we brought down a meal of chicken and wine so that our great ancestor could share in that meal with us after an amazing three days it's time for a celebration of our own we've set up a roman taverna the kind that undoubtedly flourished in the vehicus complete with authentic roman style ale you got something for me basic ingredients there's wheat barley and oats that's the grains there's water nothing could be simpler a bit of bread to make it give it the yeast and then to make it bitter sting in that one it's got to be good for summer and it really goes yeah get it down at [Laughter] [Applause] to the fort or should i say the forts of vinovia [Music]

Channel: Odyssey - Ancient History Documentaries

Views: 97,594

Keywords: ancient history, classical history, ancient civilisations, classical antiquity, history documentary, classical documentary, ancient britain, roman mausoleum, roman burial rituals, roman afterlife, ancient rome, ancient roman history, roman britain, tomb of the unknown soldier, roman fort, roman ruins

Id: 0HqxvcPauOc

Length: 47min 8sec (2828 seconds)

Published: Fri Oct 01 2021