A Journey Through Scotland's Past: The Age of Invasion

ok ladies and gentlemen welcome everybody to those of you who are here for the first time in those years we've been here for the last few lectures so as part of the year of history heritage in archaeology 2017 historic environment Scotland are presenting a series of lectures to tell Scotland's story from the deepest pass through to the present day the purpose of this series is to share and celebrate the wealth and knowledge of our organization and to give people a chance to learn about the archaeology and history of Scotland our speakers will provide you with an introduction to the period and insight into the works which ignites their passion for their subject area and also give you a little bit of a flavour of the sort of work the historic environment Scotland undertakes which relates to this particular period so tonight speak to the speaker is dr. Rebecca Jones and she is going to focus on Roman Scotland specifically looking at the mid-second century when Antonius Pius attempted to conquer Scotland as many of you all know and may have seen in the press recently the 18th of April was World Heritage Day and the Antonine wall is one of Scotland's six World Heritage Sites so this is a very well timed lecture so dr. Rebecca Jones is head of archaeology and world heritage at historic environments Scotland which is the team that I work in and her academic interests focus on the Roman army and Roman frontiers particularly in Scotland but also wider afield she is co-chair of the International Congress of Roman frontier studies and led the team in undertaking the mapping of the Antonine wall in Scotland and as part was part of the successful nomination for the Antonine wall as a world heritage site so she's recently published monographs on Roman camps and one current archaeology's Book of the Year in 2013 and she is an acknowledged worldwide expert on Roman camps and you can see her pulling her face because I'm really begging her up I should also mention that Sir Rebecca is also my line manager so just so that you're aware this evenings lecture will be on YouTube eventually when we've got it all nicely tarted-up and we'll also for going out via Facebook live because we did the last lecture via Facebook live and just fantastic successfully reached thousands of people by doing it that way because you already have figured out we have limited tickets for this venue we can only fit about 50 people into this room so it's really great we've got this opportunity so hello to our Facebook live viewers as well so without further ado I'd like to introduce dr. Rebecca Jones thank you very much well as Kirstie said one of our roles is to provide you with an introduction to the period and as you could tell from the title and possibly from aspects of music you may have may have heard at various stages I'm a bit of a Star Wars fan as well so I'm afraid the introduction and the history will be fairly irreverent irreverent so this is my nerves gambling streamed live so I thought I would start off with a little bit of background to the history of the Romans in Britain for copyright reasons we can't be playing any tunes in here so you can just imagine them in your mind as you're doing this for those of you that are aware that there were a couple of expeditions by julius caesar in the fifties bc coming into southern Britain and where he actually came to is still a subject of debate but then after that there was quite a hiatus with other activities going on until we very slowly got the full-blown attack of the Romans in AD 43 and this actually saw a series of troops arriving in southeast England and then gradually spreading across the rest of Britain from the southeast with various successes and and resistance along the way now in AD II sixty they were up in Wales desecrating the sacred groves up on anglesey when Boudicca revolted so we got the Buddakan revolt in eighty sixty and one of the things that's been quite interesting and looking at the archaeology across Britain and certainly our knowledge of the of the historical sources as well and I'll come back to both of those later is actually the resistance of the Welsh tribes which was actually quite a a strong feature and bore I think a certain level of similarities to what they started to encounter when they came further north some areas of Britain were far more receptive to Roman rule than others so this is when you're going to be really glad that any seven films as a like anniversary now in AD 68 69 is known as the year of for Empress after the suicide of the Emperor Nero we had four Emperor's and very quick succession Galba ofoh Vitellius and then latterly Vespasian and I'll be talking a bit more about this Bayesian later on in the lecture because he is critical from a Scottish perspective this one's obviously the title of this lecture so I have taken a little bit of artistic license with my language here in the previous one when that we have no knowledge that the rebels stole the plans to a Legionnaire fortress but it fitted kind of whisper with the Deathstar kind of relation I was trying to work out what was closer to the death star from the Roman perspective um but actually Vespasian then this Bayesian had previously been in Britain and so he had an interest in the country and he dispatched a gribbler up into the north and certainly were aware of activities in northern Britain and up into Scotland and we're quite fortunate with a gribbler that his that his daughter married the Roman writer Tacitus so we have a wonderful biography of him the downside is it's rather skewed the way we look at the archaeology we know that a griddle had a set to battle with the Caledonians we don't know how big it was well we've got what the sources tell us how big it was but there may have been a little bit of massaging of the facts at a place called man's graph Mons gracias which is still not been found but the emperor Domitian then had to recall a legion from Britain and Scotland was temporarily abandoned if I now move off and then move on to the meat of the lecture so sorry that was a slightly irreverent introduction to Roman Scotland or to Roman Britain but in terms of what our knowledge is and I'll start off with the historical sources and then move on to the archaeology we start off with we know that the Romans were in southern Scotland we can't pinpoint the exact date we've got tantalizing pieces of evidence from various sites but they were in in southern Scotland certainly by the by the seventies ad I've mentioned a gribbler who was governor of Britain from 77 to 83 which is quite a long tenure you'll see different people agreeing with the actual dates but that's a fairly standard date we've got this Battle of Mons Gracias and then as I say a gradual pulling back from Scotland and an abandonment by the 90s then into the second century obviously Hadrian's Wall was a major feature when the Emperor Hadrian came in he basically drew a ring around the empire but after his death his successor Antoninus Pius the reasons for this are debated but one of which being that he probably needed a victory in order to cement his position as Emperor and it may be that Scotland had been a bit troublesome so at that point they moved north and in effect abandoned the Hadrian's Wall and built a new wall the Antonine wall which I'll talk a bit more about later that was only held for about a generation there was a retreat south in the 160s and Hadrian's Wall then became the frontier again and then we've got tantalizing hints and literary sources of camp in the north by opers Marcellus a bios of local tribes in the north and we have got some archaeological evidence for that and then the Emperor septimius severus in the early third century came back into Scotland he bought his two sons Keira Keller and Geeta who were basically being seen possibly as being a bit lazy he wanted to get him away from the luxuries of Rome and actually come up here and he had I think when you start reading the literary sources what can only be described in modern terms as genocide all tendencies towards towards Scotland but he died in York in February to 11 and his sons felt that Rome was a bigger prize than Scotland and so it wasn't then subsequently held with any longevity then we get campaigns against the pics reference and couple with the picks and Pictish Wars almost like it's becoming a stock phrase in some of the literature and then obviously the abandonment of Roman Britain in the early fifth century but then moving on to what archaeology can tell us well in terms of what we know we've got a number of sites that survived really well as upstanding earthwork remains and a number of them are are actually ones who are in the care of historical varmints cotton that can be visited we've got quite a large number that we've only known from aerial survey so they've only really been discovered from the mid 20th century onwards more recently we've got geophysical survey telling us more and in some instances finding new sites excavation we're still finding new sites on occasions for excavation and other remote sensing techniques we're extremely fortunate in that there's been a very very long history of research so starting off with Roy's military survey in the 18th century actually William Roy was very very interested in the remains of the Roman army and recorded and mapped a huge number of them and for those of you not familiar with William Roy he's generally regarded as the founding father of the Ordnance Survey so we've got somebody's very interested in roman remains and interested in mapping and quite a number of sites that he recorded have since been lost as earthworks to the plow and only now recorded from the air so that's very beneficial we've got the research of antiquarians and this is the very first roman fort excavation in scotland in the late 19th century by the Society of Antiquaries of Scotland at the request of the Dumfries and Galloway Society aerial survey the very first survey in Scotland was done by OGS Crawford in 1930 and he was they are logical officers the Ordnance Survey and he was another person with very strong interest in Roman archaeology and what he did was then his his effective successor an aerial survey in Britain was Kenneth st. Joseph at Cambridge University another Romanist so he had a lot of flights in Scotland from 1946 onwards and then in 1976 one of the predecessor bodies to historic environment Scotland set up its own recording program and that was led by Gordon Maxwell another Romanist so in terms of our aerial record a huge amount has been recorded by Romanist so we've actually had got a certain bias in it but it's a bias that's of benefit to those of us who are studying Roman archaeology and as I say more recently we've got techniques of remote sensing like this multi sensor array geophysics lidar data that's rough castle in the Antonine wall and an excavations are usually a bit bigger than this but that's one of the ones from the 1960s now I thought I'd explain a little bit about some of the terms I'll be using today apologize for those who don't know all of these in terms of a hierarchy so in effect the the most substantial basis that that the Romans built were their legionary fortresses and these can be quite huge in size 20 hectares or more and they these were the big headquarter bases across Britain and one was built in Scotland and in the 1st century at Instituto misses it here we then got vex elation fortresses which are a little trickier to actually identify with any confidence but they essentially hold mixed forces they're usually quite big and this is the crop mark of one down in southwest Scotland now we've got Roman forth which are in many ways of the backbone of Roman army accommodation and these are the garrison posters that we find in quite a lot of places across northern Britain because anywhere where you need a strong military presence you need how's the soldiers then we have smaller ones in terms of fort lots and these would have hold smaller units and you quite often get them in networks in areas which are perhaps not that secure and then actually you get them on frontier fortification so on Hadrian's Wall you get these every mile so they're known as mile castles and we've got a number of them on the Antonine wall as well towers I say these are usually freestanding although obviously in the case of this one this is one of the reconstructions in southern Germany which would have been on attached to the wall the linear barrier there and then we have camps which as Cathy's already mentioned is my particular specialist area and these were the temporary housing structures for soldiers and in Scotland's most of the ones that we've got we can identify as being soldiers on the March so it's troops who are away mostly on campaigning probably only occupied for a few nights or weeks at best so the arc illogical evidence they leave is not a massive amount because as you can imagine a bunch of people camped in a in a space for a week is not going to leave the same amount of material left we found nearly two millennia later by archaeologists than a garrison stationed in a fort for 20 years but we have got some I always like these literary references but gts writing in the late Roman period basically referring to a camp as a walled city that they carry around with them and then we've got one from just Josephus who is a contemporary of the Jewish war in the 1st century AD talking about refusing battle till they fortified their camp having the engineers with them but interestingly he wrote that they fire the camp which they can easily reconstructive we required lest it might someday be useful to the enemy or given the amount that have actually survived in the landscape they can't have fired all of them and obviously they're built with different materials the materials they used to build them in the near East is very different to what they had at their disposal in Scotland so moving on I've mentioned that Vespasian and this is when you hear reference to the Flavian period who these are the Flavian emperors Vespasian and his son Titus and Domitian now this Bayesian ordered the conquest of Scotland and that was continued by his sons he died in 1879 he was succeeded by Titus who died in 81 and his couple years later and then the mission was the next Emperor and the mission had not been regarded well by the literary sources I think it's fair to say I think he was damned and assassinated indeed one of the things that you learn with Roman emperors is actually if you want to live a long life being a Roman Emperor is probably not the way to go about it now in terms of the archaeology that's been left from this period as I've mentioned the fortress an inch to fill up in Persia which I hope you can see down the crop marks but also we've got some very well dated sites like this is the falta elgin hawk which is near Dalkeith and we've got foundation deposits and dating evidence in terms of coins and various aspects that suggests that this was constructed really quite and occupied in quite a timescale from about 77 to about 86 AD so quite a small timeframe and that had a huge amount of excavations which was funded by historical vomit Scotland's predecessor back in the 70s and and that's told us huge amount about the Roman army in the first century and then bringing us right up to date to a site blood knock which is near wick tomb which was only discovered through aerial photographs about six years ago and I don't know if you can see a very subtle feature here this is Tessa Paula from Glasgow University under to your physical survey and we've got a very nice fault look there which there's been no excavation work done on it but comparisons with others and what we know about the area we think that was probably first century as well I want to also mention the fact that we have got references to sailors and the fleet but obviously finding evidence for that is very very difficult but we've got these wonderful references as I say Tacitus wrote a biography of his father-in-law Agricola and he makes references to you know the Roman fleet sailing round Britain and then it depends on how you translate the latin but i love the idea of infantry cavalry and means mingling and joyously sharing the same meals and basically boasting about their achievements and you can imagine the kind of camaraderie that you may have got in some of these things just sort of in tantalizing hints other first-century sites this is one that was surveyed by stroke Obama has gotten surveyors about a decade ago at Rabin foot in s del Muir and every time I go to s del mu It's Always Sunny I gather it's got the highest precipitation in Scotland but it's always nice when I get there and we've got particular gateways on this particular camp which are only used we believe in in Britain in the first century AD so although again we've got lots of science because got huge numbers of science you can't excavate everything and indeed nor would you necessarily wish to do you need to leave things for subsequent generations but what we can do is try and find out as much as we can through non-invasive methods in this case this was actually doing a topographic survey but obviously geophysical surveys another way of finding things out and you can see how subtly earth work is here so we believe that's the first century camp and you just it's just certain expense there's an aspect I've moved on to many an s element of jigsaw going on with some of these in terms of trying to put things together and this is another site that's had partial excavation at Delft Swinton Dan and Dan freesia and and it's one of these four sites up here with another fort of some description down here and surrounded by a number of camps and you tend to find the Romans obviously had itineraries of some sort and they go back time and time again to the same sites so quite a number of these sites you see occupied in the first century and indeed in the second century in the subsequent conquest which of course was some 60 years later so what that actually tells us and it's all that evidence combined that then actually gives us enables us to produce maps like these and this one here is thoughts and portlets that we believe to date to the first century and here is one of the camps that we currently think are first century and date some we've got very strong dating for and others are more by analogy looking at the gates and that's of things I wanted to mention also before I leave the first century the gasps courage and I don't know if any of you have ever visited the gasps courage but a couple of the sites are actually in properties in care and Storen Scotland so you can actually they've got good display boards and they're nicely laid out yeah today we walk along along a track to get them but they're well worth a visit and this one is nearer fold and and it is four of you it's always worth standing and trying to be a watchtower because the fence essentially you've got four wooden post this is the crop mark of one unfortunate can't see the post too well but you hadn't had these things meet they would have had these timber towers going up and they're watching the road that runs across along the gas bridge between in effect from dune up through to purse I've said obviously a legion was pulled out of Britain by Domitian because of he had other battles to fight and so there's a gradual withdrawal the northern conquest has gotten to given up the fortress that introduced elated and 'end and there's a gradual pulling back and then Domitian's successor is the emperor trajan now Trajan is obviously very famous for the column in Rome but he's a this actually depicts his campaigns in Asia which is modern-day Romania and so his focus was elsewhere and it was only after his death that Hadrian his successor who had very much in a desire to limit the Empire and draw a ring around it and that's on with all the construction of Hadrian's Wall the Hitchens wall has had a huge amount of everyone knows but haters all some of them talk about it but what I want to point out in relation to Hadrian's Wall is there's the wall itself but you will see quite a network of force going down you don't just stick a line of forts along the frontier you need that garrison in debt to support that and that's also then reflected when we move on to the second into the Antonine period so Hadrian successor was Antoninus Pius and mentioned whether he was looking for a quick victory but he ordered lolly acerbic as' who was the governor were sent to Scotland and the most notable amendment that we have from that is the Antonine wall now there's been quite a lot of work recently at a site called burnt walk down indem freesia and the current research that they're doing when it comes up by the Tremonti entrust and of recent Galloway Council is they are undertaking targeted metal detecting and excavation to try and identify dating evidence and try and work out whether this is a genuine siege or not now not everybody is convinced but the evidence that they are gathering now is starting to point to it being the site of a genuine siege and they are starting to narrow down the dating as potentially the early Antonine period so at the moment they're speculating which will I put various question marks on there but speculating that actually this was undertaken by lolly acerbic us when he first came to Scotland it's probably a bit overkill in fairness but there's a huge amount of ballista bolts and various missiles that have now been located from the hill and at the moment they're doing a lot of work on the metals to try and work establish the sort source as well as the date but then that brings me on to the Antonine wall now the construction of the Antonine wall started in roughly 142 AD and as I've mentioned it was occupied for a generation and it runs from old Kilpatrick on the north side of the Clyde across Central Scotland to the south side of the forth and we've got the terminus board at Carolyn we don't know exactly where it runs in its Eastern location but we do know where it runs for most of its length and parts of it it survives incredibly well which is quite remarkable given how have densely populated this part of Scotland is one of the sites that you can visit is the bath house that beers been where a series of excavations were done in the 70s and 80s as a result of various development changes going on by David breezes delighted in the audience tonight and the bathhouse is one of our properties and care and can be visited and it's always nice to show people enjoying themselves business they're not quite Roman helmets a mrs. ruff castle on the out of my wall and I don't know how many of you have been to the answer my wall but I do encourage listing it because this is when you really start to appreciate the power might and the majesty ruff castle is one of the best surviving areas of rampart here and because it was a turf wall built on a stone foundation it doesn't have the survival rate that obvious stone wall like Hadrian's does but the thing that survives in most places is the ditch this vast ditch hewn across central Scotland which even in places where it doesn't survive as as a feature you can descend in the landscape sometimes when you're walking through you can see dips in hedge lines where we're fence lines sit on there on the wall these days one of the unique features of the wall is there's a set of camps running along it which we and a couple of them have been dated to the second century the camps are really quite a they're quite a special feature of the wall because we've got a range of them that are similar sizes and they're at fairly regular intervals along the wall and we think they almost certainly would have housed the troops who were involved in the construction of the wall and most other frontiers can't actually do that with any certainty so obviously I'm a camp specialist so I'm going to be biased but we do actually have a particularly special set of camps here on the Antonine wall the next slide is actually showing the Antonine wall and all the thoughts in the hinterlands because as I mentioned as you saw the map with Hadrian's Wall with all sorts that ran that ran to the south the Antonine wall they've quite a dense occupation of southern Scotland in the second century and quite a network of thought says dear Street going up what is now the modern a68 and then there's various sites running across central Scotland and then into eastern Dumfriesshire we've got quite a range of sites and then there's the outpost fort to the north and in fact they've got forts going up as far north as Perth basically controlling that that flank so although it's a frontier it's a frontier that's very much about trol it's not just you can't cross here because there is a crossing point and there is a road that goes up to the north continue with the second century the next line I was going to show you is the Roman fort RDoc and I don't know if any of you have been there it's just outside the village of Rico in Perth sure and that was another one of these early excavations by the Society of Antiquaries Gotland at the very tail end of the 19th century and we're fortunate that the archive from that is actually in the we've actually got most of the archive in our other building in John Sinclair house and quite a lot of images have been scanned we've got a lovely one of other gentlemen basically standing at the base of a of a rampart and they've cut through the rampart and it just goes to show that health and safety in the 19th century was very different to today the other things say about our doctors just it's another one of these sites the Roman Romans went back to Italy it was first built in the first century they went back to in the second century it there's a succession of camps on the plain to the north and a couple of them survived as upstanding earthwork features and again their properties and care and with display boards and you can visit them the only thing I would say is it's quite a treacherous walk along the road to get to it so take care when you visit it but again well worth visiting because it gives you an idea of some of these sites and when you start looking at when you start walking along some of these camps you realise the scale of them and I'll come back to the scale of them later the next thing I wanted to talk to you about in relation to two Antonine Scotland was the Southwest where we've got a series we've got two Roman roads running up the main river valleys in southwest Scotland and we've got Roman Road coming up both of them coming together up into Nanuk sure with a network of fort le'ts going up there and one of somebody I work with Matt Simmons who's a faultless specialist his view on fort lots is that they're only ever constructed in areas that are where that weather omens are concerned so one of the interesting aspects of this part of southern Scotland and Southwest Scotland is that you have got this dent next in dense networks of thought that suggests it wasn't an area that was the Romans felt confident about they didn't feel confident about it enough to just have a couple of forts and be done with it so they have got this this this dense network of portlets we've also got quite a number of camps down there some of which we can date with a certain level of confidence for the second century so for example at be took just a wee bit down from BTech summit where you've got the Evan water flowing through there was about 15-20 years ago there was a study of the pally environmental evidence there and they look at the movement and the creation of river terraces and it's a site where you've got one camp on one side with these funny gateways that we think relate to the first century and four camps or at least four camps on the other side and that Terrace on the other side was only formed in the second century so we think we have a series of camps there that potentially date to the Antonine period so in essence if you've got four and nine camps that's showing an awful lot of movement and an awful lot of occupation happening in the southwest again reinforcing the notion of the fort 'lets that you know the Romans were keeping a close eye on what was happening in them freesia as I mentioned the Antonine wall was abandoned we know Hadrian's Wall was started rebuilding there in the late 140s so certainly by the early 160s the Antonine wall was broadly abandoned and there was a pulling back and a Hadrian's Wall then became the de facto frontier and I've mentioned septimius severus who was from what is now modern-day Libya so he's known as the African Emperor and he and he came into Scotland carried on a litter he must have been quite a sight and we've got little pieces of evidence for the third century occupation as I say it was potentially quite short because of his premature death in February to ten and one of his sons Caracalla lovely chap murdered his brother so that he could claim me and power for himself so lovely lovely family but we've got the fulcrum and of which aspects are visible just outside kram and Kirk which you can go and visit has got is one of those sites with third century occupation and then there's another one that's only known as crop marks which is that car poo on me on the south side of the River Tay and actually one of the things that's always quite nice about this one is it's got a stone built headquarters building I hope you can see some of the details there and that's one of the rare occasions where we actually get in effective parching because most of the sites that that we deal with it's the ditches we see and in this case it's actually the buildings that we can see and they're the two main bases that we have and then we have a whole series of camps which which have been located in southern scotland it looks like most of it seems to be in the southeast so we've got more counts coming up dr3 district in essence in the same place as some of the other ones and then again going through Angus and we're told that Severus reached the ends of the earth well he may have reached what he probably reached is somewhere close to the Montrose Basin and up that way we don't think it got as far north as Aberdeen in the first century we believe they got further north and there have been suggestions that Severus got further north but the evidence isn't there at present so we've got a suite of camps and the interesting thing about both sets of camps is they are by far the biggest camps that you get anywhere in Scotland and indeed anywhere in Britain and the ones that come up deer Street we've got four of them now are 165 to 170 acres in size so these are vast and most of them are predominately known from crop markings err photographed for their varied features that are showing up where you've got this varied ditch with the growth of crops above it marking some things you can see that from the air and we've got one in the borders Coulson Leonard's is 170 acres in size and actually until relatively recently it was a largest known camp anywhere in the Roman Empire we I can now say it's the largest known camp in Europe because because of the situation in Syria one of the academics at Leicester has been looking at satellite imagery of Syria and has found some larger ones they were focusing on terrestrial fields work up until that point hence the ditch running through a field it takes about 16 photographs to actually create that man because it's such a vast site going back to for that so we've got this beautiful and also the site of trim on tiem Newsted near Melrose and the Scottish Borders has got one of these very very large camps again no dating evidence from it but the excavations have demonstrated it's the latest feature on that site which again is helping us to then say well that could be severe and and the fact that they're huge and the largest ant army that we ever had campaigning in Scotland because you can imagine severus was actually up here he was running the Empire from a series of fields in southern Scotland which is always nice when you're actually standing on the matching point of the mountain people are saying you know Roman Emperor was here and as I say at our dog we've got a very large these 130 acres so the ones you get north of north of the fourth or a little bit larger in size but this one here is hundred thirty acres and this area here is a safe Black Hill wood which is which is visible and it's a property in care and this is the latest feature on this site so again we can't we don't have anything that says all this is definitely third century and date but what we do see is it's later than everything else there and most of the other stuff is first or second century so that's what we use for our dating evidence what that actually means is we've got a series of sites running up the east coast so it's that it's the triangles so there's four of them and then we have a further series running up up to here through first year and Angus and we think that's the movement of Severus and his sons in the early third century per se after his death his sons abandoned Scotland and there's a pulling back to Hadrian's Wall and a lot of rebuilding work then went on and just an element of outpost forts and connections heading up through so that brings me on to the last part of my talk so this is one of the maps you missed earlier but you've got it now and this is the frontage the Roman Empire and as we've mentioned the Antony mall is a world heritage site but you can see the scale of the Empire that we're dealing with and of course one of the interesting things about studying the Roman army is you've got soldiers moving around so we've got a huge amount of movement of troops from one end of the Empire to the other and a massive amount of mobility and they were incredible bureaucrats so we've got wonderful documentary references and diplomas that from it was discharged from the Army and places places where they wrote things on pieces of pottery and various things that actually tell us a huge amount now the world heritage site beyond our wall was inscribed in 2008 and it joined a World Heritage Site the Hadrian's Wall was inscribed at the World Heritage Site in 1987 very early on because World Heritage Sites only started being inscribed in Britain in 86 and then in 2005 the German raishin Leamas joined it and that's this area here as part of the same world culture site and then we joined in 2008 we have ambitions for a wider world heritage site but global diplomacy and bureaucracy being as it is UNESCO have changed the rules since we set this up so we're now having to find a new approach but the process of creating a world heritage site is not to be underestimated it's a mammoth task David Brie's led it it takes years it takes a huge amount of work you have to get everybody with an a vested interest engaged and behind you and that's everything from the local politicians to the national politicians I've bought one of these one of the nomination documents is next door so you can have a look at it after after this talk and this is the world heritage site as it currently stands Hadrian's Wall the Antonine walls and the upper German ration limits needless to say that is a reconstruction their survival is not that good so this is our World Heritage Site now in terms of actually how we run that in Scotland the wall runs through five local authority areas and these are Eastern Barton Council Falkirk Glasgow City Council North nanoq sure on Western Berkshire so we have a steering group that in effect runs all the activities you want to do on the Antonine wall which is our thousand the five local authorities now to give you an idea yes this is bureaucratic management fun I think the best way of putting it we lives us in 80s and we sit on the anti-war steering group which of the five local authorities we have a full-time coordinator who's based here who works in punches across them we have various groups that then report to the steering group delivering various aspects of the management for wealth every site the coordinators for the current three existing World Heritage Sites are sit on the Hexen group and they discuss the management we have an intergovernmental committee because that's how you run World Tour science which and multinational they're advised by a specialist research group they called the Bratislava group because they were in Bratislava when they first met ditto with hexam so we have sort of names names of places we obviously report into the culture historic environment division of the Scottish government but world heritage is the only aspect of culture that isn't devolved so we then have a relationship through DCMS who then outsource their advice to historic England so we have a relationship a very strong relationship I will say with historic England about how this all works and then they report up to UNESCO World Heritage Committee who are advised by echo Moss who then also have very most UK clear but we make it work because we all meet and we all get on and we all have a shared goal and that's where the management plans are critical because it actually says this is what we want to do you get everybody behind you and you do it and so what does the actual management plan actually mean for us well that's what it looks like there's a copy next door in recent years there's been a lot of effort in terms of footpaths signage new interpretation for the wall new museum displays at the museum's that run on the wall have their collections we're doing lots of activities for kids we've got colouring in sheets and if you really want to spend hours you can make it look like this we've been photographing and scanning artifacts from the museum's because we're conscious that the site is in one place and the objects are elsewhere in the various museums and then last autumn we launched an app where there's still more and more content coming and you can again find out more information in the leaflet next door so you can visit the Antonine wall with an app and actually see some of the museum objects while you're standing on this and who's got a smartphone its GPS enabled and it goes ping when you're going over bits the site I've done it it's quite fun there's other activities going on folkert council a few years ago got the ridge ness slab which is in the nationalism and edinburgh scanned and then use that to create to painstakingly create a full-scale replica which is now on display in Bowness and it absolutely fantastic display and we're working with the partners to look at getting funding to do more of these replicas along the line of the wall and do more accessible information whether it's in digital form whether it's I mean one suggestion that's been taken forward is the idea of Roman themed play parks which I'm certainly looking forward to using but obviously that's the that's the national context we've then got the international context we are managing an international World Heritage Site with numerous partners wanting to join those ten countries across Europe that the frontier runs through there is a series of booklets which David Brees has been masterminding which are in multi multiple languages telling people more about it and and I and my colleague Trisha weeks who's the antiwar coordinator occasionally go off to meetings in Europe and people always think that I if I do go to glamorous locations and then I sit in rooms that look like this so it's not as glamorous as it sounds but and one of the things that that has delivered right now is we've got funding from Creative Europe to actually deliver enhanced content for these apps and the app indeed that we that we've got is a agreement with our colleagues in Bavaria who developed the app first and they agreed that we could basically use the same platforms we can have to develop the technology from scratch so we've got a whole series of activities happening over the course of the next year and a half two years in terms of enhancing the content and again there's leaflets on it next door and sorry for those of you watching remotely there's a lot of information online about this and there will be websites at the end so as I say it's got we've got a series of digital models 3d scans I always love the idea of a bunch of Roman soldiers standing in the ditch the anti-war looking at tablet but which is 21st century Romans and then these are aspects of what we're planning on deliver and as I say this is the app so any of you with smartphones please do download it and please have a play with it but do you remember we are improving it all the time there's content content being added you can get it on the Android and iPhone and then these an example of some of the information that we're looking at some of the things that we're trying to put together and others at the moment is a partnership between ourselves and the Germans and the development team who are based in Austria and we've got various scanning and applications and indeed there's a Roman game that's going to be going live in the summer called go Roman so look out for that if you've got family and friends who are interested in in gaming I must admit I'm not a gamer we've got wonderful VR headsets they make me feel sick but they are fantastic I think if you are more imbued in the gaming culture they are really a fabulous immersive experience and here are some images from the app the purple ones that our app and the orange ones are the German apps you'll see the similarities by using the benefits of using the same platform is that we haven't had to develop everything from scratch we've just piggyback on German development work and then and no doubt there will be other partners wanting to come on board with this at the end of the process there's a whole series of promotional information that's available and as I say and a website that takes me back to the International Corporation the world heritage site as that we want to see runs through as I say 10 countries in Europe we have an international collaboration going to try and achieve the aim of World Heritage Site status for all of these the Near East and North Africa is a different challenge so we're focusing on Europe for the time being and what we have got is some really quite advanced nominations there'll be a nomination for this part of the Danube so it comes down to here that will go in next year with an extension some years later to encompass these countries this will go in in a couple years time to be another World Heritage Site under the front of the Roman Empire umbrella and then Romania will then follow and that's what we're currently proposing as our strategy for nominating the frontiers of Roman Empire to UNESCO so you can see you know it's a very very ambitious World Heritage Site it's going to require an awful lot of cooperation but actually I go to these meetings and my colleague goes these meetings and there's a huge amount of goodwill we're all working in the same direction so that's actually really gratifying when we've got lots of partners with the same goal going in the same direction and then I thought I'd finish off with some fun Kirsty mentioned World Heritage Day this is actually the event we ran in the National Museum last year for world heritage day and this year we did an event a week before World Heritage Day in the kelvingrove because we wanted to have it still in the school holders we wanted to tell people about all six World Heritage Sites has got and find out more about it you've got the Antonine wall stand there in amongst all the other ones to show how well we actually work together across the World Heritage Sites in Scotland and then this year following on from the event we had at the kelvingrove dig it which initiative but run by archaeologists got in Santa Monica Scotland ran a series of events called Scotland in six it had quite good media coverage but unfortunately we were dumped by the announcement of a general election on the same day so we weren't trending as high on twitter as we'd hoped but from a from an anti-war perspective we had a romans versus pix 5k fun run where the pigs were really quite rude and the Romans were stood very proud and that was the race as it as it went both Kirsty and I ran it and I'm pleased to say we both won Kirsty won Best Dressed picked and I won Best Dressed Roman which shows that we take our job very seriously and then one of the other things that that diggit has done is created a green screen where you can dress up obviously I'm just going to show you the Roman website you can dress up and have yourself portrayed in the past but here's one of our colleagues on the reconstruction of the fort at bar Hill here - who ants too keen on the Romans I think it's fair to say and here's myself and the Varian Lemos coordinator who who was too polite to pretend to be picking a sword at my throat even though I was in a tartan dress so just to say we do have fun as well thank you very much you mentioned everyone who have cemetery road does that mean there of you yes potentially if everyone who did a new biggest we go about the business that was the the aerial Surveyors in particular yes there's a wonderful reference from a 1930 paper that was written by OGS Crawford where he was talking about the excitement of his first flight in Scotland oh no my visa 1939 flight because in 1930 he flew over Scotland and didn't take a camera with him and I think it was eight years and so he came back and it's in that one that he said you know there were just so many sights there were too numerous to record them all so he focused on the Romans however yes we have benefited from the bias but the bias has been quite comprehensively attempted to be redressed over the last twenty to thirty years so although yes there has been a strong focus and when you are when you look at the sortie plots for the flight routes in those early flights they are very focused on on flying the Roman roads but the very interesting was when we started flying off the Roman roads we then started find and finding the Roman sites that weren't when we expected them so you know that there's a sort of serendipitous thing but no about 15-20 years ago we we massively expanded to start flying in the islands as well significantly so I think we have probably tried to fill a lotta gaps but the thing that aerial survey is you've got to have the right kind of crop over in a dry summer and have to be flying over it so but actually we you know that there was a massive growth when Aero survey first took off probably the wrong thread but a massive growth in our understanding and it has tapered off in terms of the numbers of new sites recorded what we're finding was were quite often using different techniques to find out more about out known sites and actually finding a little bit more information but it's all dependent on what the agricultural practices are in a given area so areas where you've got broadly pastoral conditions if the site has been plowed out you can't necessarily see it which is where some of the other remote sensing techniques are starting to to play a part because things like lidar can detect very very subtle earthworks features that aren't so clear and that's airborne minor that's done from from a plane so although from my research I would love the fact that all the early pioneers were Roman II I think I would say the balance has been reduced so that the long answer to your question imagine the seventy cans suggesting of course of so hiraman progression going to the north by this kind of several last poachers in England so presumably your suggestions have being this pacifier of Juvenal that I plants as large as this forest and mainly well if you consider that in effect Hadrian's Wall was the frontier and to say you had a network of thoughts thoughts below it then really I mean southern England was by and large romanized definitely I mean you can see where some of the areas where they often still had concern where they had their legionary bases but no I would say that that southern England wasn't wasn't the issue by the time your into the third century not at all but I think what Severus actually wanted to do was not have a wall running across Scotland to just conquer the whole island he couldn't see why we didn't just conquer the whole thing but the other thing with the severan campaigns as we've got some literary sources for them but you have to take them with a pinch of salt because some of the stuff that he says that cassis Dyer who's our literary source is laughable I think in terms of the evidence so but the fact that they refer to they refer to the numbers of our NH peoples in Scotland who were who were killed probably exaggerated but again it's an Indy the mindset and actually when you read biographies of Severus he was quite a austere and quite ferocious man and not to be messed with so I think that the reason why that you know he had very very strong ambitions but yes I mean the North the north of England and Scotland was always the military zone so the South was by and large broadly broadly Peter once once the they'd got over the Iceni trouble of the Budokan revolt in the mid first century we get very little evidence for trouble until you start getting much later on and you get continental Heaven flow through time fleets and so just like quite a long time and Romans were caught by the council it was find again that's decades later and maybe most burglars also very uses yeah I they they must have had I mean I think I would use the phrase itineraries rather the maps because we do have one or two itineraries that survived which give place names but they must have had really quite detailed geographical description I mean some of them will be very easy to find again so the sight of you stet as I say outside Melrose it's just by the three hills which are a very significant feature in the landscape some of them are quite straightforward to find be if they must have had very good at the sermon we know from what has survived that they had very strong records they were very bureaucratic so the idea that they would have had I don't think it would be something that we would currently then say is obviously obviously a map but they would have had something some form of geographical descriptor that enabled them to come back to these sites and say you know you know after long after the sites have been lost occupied aa million-dollar question can't answer that in one sorry in terms of the rnh people or the number of soldiers on the wall I don't think we've got anything like enough evidence to be able to answer that question I can't think of what was a big spark we've got I mean we've got quite a number of sites which would have had where we've got quite a lot of round houses together but unless you're excavate then you can't tell how contemporary they are so we've got I mean like a North East Fife is littered with what we see is probably later on age settlement but how contemporary at all is with one another and whether we're actually seeing what looks to us like an effect an Iron Age village or whether we're actually talking about settlements that moved is difficult to tell we've obviously got we've got a handful of sites where you've got where you know you've got quite a lot of occupation together the walls are made possible by well I think no I mean there were plenty of people to the north the wall because obviously we've got I mean when you start getting further north you have got plenty of evidence for Iron Age but the volume I can't I can't tell you I mean obviously when you start getting out to the north and west where the survival is very very good you've got a huge number of RH sites so we know that there's you know populations and communities but actually once you're into the lowland there's areas where the Romans got that's actually harder and one of the things that's always vexed us with regards to the Antonine wall it's because although geographically it's a logical place to put it because you've got think that Hadrian's Wall runs between the time and the Solway and it's roughly 80 miles long whereas the Antonine walls forty miles long has half the length ranging the fourth and the Clyde and you stand a bits of it you look out the can't see fells well it's quite possible that the camp see fells had communities living on them but we haven't detected them yet and I mean I think it's largely because we probably haven't applied the right technique and as techniques of developing than we might sort of see more of that but there are aspects where people are quite regularly saying well what's it doing here why have we got it here other than the fact that you've got an isthmus to put it so so sorry I can't really answer the question in terms of how many there were and where they were but there have been projects the Grohmann gask project has been trying to look specifically at the roman Arnage interaction having some success is there in terms of determining but then trying to determine that something's contemporary with an occupation at only 20 years long very difficult any classes doing so um we have actually got a collaborative PhD student between historical varmint Scotland and can't be university at the moment who's looking at the lidar data for the wall and obviously he I think he done in his second year so we still got some way to go because we collected lidar data for the whole wall as part of the Scottish ten project and I think if there are any other ones that survived in any form of likely form that could be detected through that and he will identify them they as you probably know they tend to occur in tears the idea that they're used for some form of signalling transverse signalling across the wall is still the best explanation that most people have particularly as one or two of them are actually sighted in very good places to actually view down to the nearby to the nearby fort and then enable that cross cross the side and but one of the other options is is actually may have been to do with the construction of the wall when they were first building it they may have been critical in that early stage of building it but at the moment we don't know and we'll see as I say if the work of the lidar PhD student actually produces anything that actually helps us but I mean if you think that at least one of them has been well one of the enclosures has been excavated and we're still none the wiser so we wouldn't necessarily argue that the excavation is the natural recourse but yeah they're still debated big 30 somebody fix the signal stations oh there's been lots of modeling with yeah no there's been lots of that side of that side of things which is why we know that the visibility in some areas is good but in other but what I mean I think one of one of them are come of which one it is you kind of stand on it and go why why here where's one of the other ones you standing clearly I can see why here because I can see where I can see in both directions and I can see the back Fortinet board so sorry cannot for that question with a confident answer to my room wants to catch up with me at all well I'm going to answer I think I'll start by giving you my Magnus Magnusson answer which is I've started so I'll finish I think that that's that's a part of it I mean other thing is if you think about it once they once the decision has been taken to come into Britain you either lose face and retreat and in very mind Britain did have quite a lot of mineral resources yeah but that was there was a political thing going on there Britain wasn't what he was after I think I think hmm yes we're not get political but no I think but there were I mean you know there are the gold mines in South Wales there are some minerals that would have been done but you could argue obviously with northern Britain that there was less of the economic benefit than they got from other from other countries but conversely once you're holding a country once you're holding an area you have to hold it and that means putting troops in and so in theory if you'd conquered the whole of Britain they have if you think they conquered the whole of Spain and they had one Legion in Spain in Britain you generally had a minimum of three legions plus the whole after Exeter is expensive to hold but do you want to be the Emperor that loses face probably not but as I say there was mineral resources and by that stage I mean by the time you get you know only a generation or so in you've got a romanized community there who see themselves as being part of Roman Empire they are they are part of that they don't want you to pull out either but the north whole different ballgame [Applause]

Channel: Historic Environment Scotland

Views: 13,380

Keywords: scotland, historic scotland, historic environment scotland, archaeology, history, Romans, Antonine Wall

Id: bQyRSalTnKE

Length: 60min 2sec (3602 seconds)

Published: Tue May 16 2017