An Incredible Discovery In Turkdean I Time Team

for centuries this gloucestershire field has been untouched apart from the sheep who graze here but we reckon that underneath it lies a big secret one of the largest roman villas yet to be excavated in this country and if we're right and there really is a roman villa here then we've got just three days to discover how big it was who lived here and when it was destroyed or abandoned and if that isn't enough for the weekend we're also covering the whole dig live in fact some of you may have seen the live shows which went out last august but as yet i haven't got a clue what's going to happen all i can promise you is that this weekend should be pretty exciting [Music] hi tony this is a wolf the farmer and roger here who took this this air picture roger this site the reason we're so confident there's a roman villa under this field is that two people have actually seen it in the dry summer of 1976 farmer wilf musto paced out and sketched a pattern that appeared on the grass in his field it's 297 feet long yes and the courtyard if we called it out on the bank there yeah is 257 feet long it's on the back of a tax return income tax private yes and just two years ago amateur archaeologist roger box took this photo of the same lines from a helicopter though it's a bit of a struggle to see them why do you think it's a roman villa rather than something else mate basically because it seems to be a series of ranges of buildings around a central core charting see these parallel lines white lines up each side and then you can see divisions within them marking out the rooms so it's it's a sort of classic roman villa plan and what exactly are the lines well they're patch marks they don't normally show up but it's been so dry that what we're actually seeing is the grass dying over the top of the walls that are buried in the ground and what is amazing is you can actually see today as well because it's been so dry recently in this field yeah i mean if you actually look over here a little bit there's a line across there can you see that yes again and then there's another one goes off up this way yeah across here and if you actually look at them closely what you've actually got is that it's greener there and greener there but the grass is actually dead in that line there look so that actually ought to be the foundation of a roman wall right under here [Music] as usual though mick wants to see some geophysics results before deciding where to dig they may be able to pick up walls and features not visible in the patch marks so john chris and the team have been surveying the field since crack of dawn and by 10 am they've got their first set of results absolutely absolutely fantastic absolutely astounding i mean what's one of the clearest ones ever we've got the three ranges yeah and possibly a gatehouse gardens in the middle corridors and rooms up here everything's so so clear yeah look at this size absolutely do you believe it there's definitely something there these are by miles from the clearest results we've had and everyone's now convinced we've got a large villa on our house mick immediately decides to dig two trenches here in the eastern range and here into what should be the main living quarters in the north range by 10 45 both trenches are underway [Music] and before they've even finished lifting the turf phil and karenza both start scraping oh look at that it's just underneath it eh but we're not just trying to find the walls of the villa we want to find out about its history as well when it was built who lived here and what life was like here 1600 years ago most of the answers we hope will come from the trenches but we can already tell a lot just from the geophysics results this is our villa yes how does it compare in size with other roman villas that have been found i think the easiest way is to say on a scale of one to ten we seem to be looking at one at about nine nine yes so this is really is a significant fine oh no doubt about it oh great well when you look at some of these other plans we've got here of sites that have been excavated in the past you can see that it's it's bigger than spoonley wood it's it's smaller than fishbowl but that's not that was just a palace but even so i mean it's probably the largest roman building that we've found and yeah with what two thirds of the size of that and it's not that much smaller than woodchester which is probably the largest villa that we know of in this country not only that but victor's already had a go at drawing what the villa might have looked like an elaborate gatehouse would have led into a courtyard with the main range of domestic rooms to the north and two wings to the east and west and so far this vision is matched by the archaeology the stonework in both trenches is developing into good solid walls it's a nice piece and that's your base or something so first pop a bit of pottery well it looks it looks like it's seven valley where the reason you can tell that is because it's got a very distinctive sandwich where it's got it's orange on the outside on both inside and outside but it's grey in the middle so this shows it's been actually fired in an oxidizing kiln and this sandwich effect is very typical of seven valley wear what sort of date do you reckon for that well everybody wears made from roman period but probably where we are now this is gonna be fourth century that's great because it means we can begin to place the villa in the context of the 400 years of roman britain whenever it was built our villa was still inhabited in the 4th century a.d the final the most glorious phase of roman occupation but can we tell who lived here a villa this size built pretty abruptly at the beginning of the fourth century which it appears to be there has to be the chance that it's built by a wealthy landowner coming in from outside of this region altogether possibly even from the other side of the channel but it could equally well be a local family a local member of the bunny family who'd made good made money out of crops or whatever and it was investing in the house absolutely yeah so how do we uh decide which of you is right well one of the things that the excavation might demonstrate over the next two days is if we find a villa that's built completely out of the blue no no previous history as it were it increases the chance that it's somebody coming in from outside why is that uh because if it's a family farm it will develop over a long period of time and you'll see that bits added on bits developed as they acquired more money and the family took off so you know it's a straight choice really whether the villa was built by keith's jet set continentals or mixed local brits it's in a very impressive location there are natural water springs to the southeast of the site great views to the north and south and a short chariot or helicopter right away is a major roman road a present we're flying over the line of the fast way which was one of the biggest roman roads in england and behind us is sirencester which was the biggest roman town after london and over there is chedworth which is probably the best known roman villa around here so mick we're really in the heart of rome and britain aren't we oh yeah one of the most important areas for villas in the country why why were there all these villas around here it's such good land i think that's the main reason it's good it's good land for sheep but also for corn but also it has lots of very attractive bits of scenery with you know the cotswolds well known for that and a lot of these villas are cited for aesthetic reasons as well as as well as practical reasons and big roads like the fast way mean that there was much military activity well yes the interesting thing about the fast ways it was almost certainly a frontier road and it was built about 1847 to our right down towards london and the south east seems to be the area that the romans are interested in conquering because it was the the wealthiest agricultural area and they probably regarded the seven valley and wales beyond it as hostile territory so this road is built along to feed all the forts that looking in that direction and then later on of course as the country is pacified uh it becomes a great artery between exeter and bath and silence esther and lincoln and york running right the way up through the country and then it's just a major motorway of the roman period and just a few hundred yards off it our villa is still visible as a network of patch marks you see the white lines running across this side of the trench yes i can yeah and you can see the corner where we were yesterday look at the rest oh look it's quite clearly laid out absolutely it hasn't disappeared and there's more stuff down here look and then there's a corner down there oh and look at these buildings down here look they're separate actually from the main building well it should be down towards and there's something there by the spring look but i hadn't noticed those on the ground it's spilling over the sides isn't it down this side here look there's still stuff down there and it's much more so down down the other side of this where the springs are which means our 9 out of 10 villa could be even larger but down in trench one phil is oblivious to this sudden potential expansion inside his wall he's scraping down into a room and he's in a world of his own until the arrival of bill oddie his apprentice for the weekend who wants a quick grounding in the basic rules of archaeology when your first rule is not on this section why is that from my protection um that is for the site's protection the important part of the trowel okay is that bit yeah and it's a simple procedure just keep scraping it back and you just simply keep working your way back keeping your eye looking out for a point use that one use that one your trowel girl might go for it all right how am i doing tip it a little flatter and then it will cut through the cut through that's more like it that's it beautiful a few yards away mick has decided to open our third trench he's put it here in the middle of the courtyard to see if he can find any remains of the villa's garden the plan is thwarted by a confused mass of stonework none of which looks like a garden feature so almost as soon as it's begun french 3 is closed the romans virtually invented uh meanwhile phil has abandoned bill in trench one to find out about a romano british speciality britain was apparently the roman empire's main producer of pewter what were they using it for tableware being um plates jugs spoons bowls that sort of thing and i mean were the raw materials available around here yes you had the tin from cornwall and the lead for the mendips are all very handy and phil's going to learn how the romans would have actually made a pewter bowl giles you're our stone mason hi and um you're apparently going to make us a a well an accurate mould so we can cast this bro a pewter bowl yeah that's the idea i don't know if we're going to pull it off though um you don't know yet but basically we want two pieces of stone one to sit inside another straight forward well it might be but we've got to get um an eighth of an eighth an eighth of an inch gap oh it's all around are you going to do this by hand yup it's all going to be uh done by hammer and chisel um so so i'll have to wait and see now i begin to see the problem um tom you're you're our pewter yeah i mean what is pewter well peter's an alloy of tin and lead this is tin and this is lead and you can see they're quite soft materials that's yeah and strength that's the amount about the amount of tin and the amount of lead will go into the bowl and they'll be melted together and then poured into the mold that giles is going to make and we're going to try and make this rather attractive looking bowl that is that is quite impressive because if we've got all these wonderful curves here and you've got to get come on what do i do you better tell me what i do then chip away just chip away just like that that's it i mean am i going to go too deep no not at the moment while phil chips away at the mold karenda and her team have been chipping away at a layer of rubble in trench two and have now reached the floor well it's rather nice we've got a nice slice here that goes from the outside because this sort of cobbled area that you can see is part of the courtyard across which you would have approached this end of the building then we've got a wall here that probably would have been fairly low and maybe had small columns supposing a lean-to roof that would have covered this broad swathe here which looks as if it's turning into a corridor yeah and then up here we have got an inner wall which has still got traces of plaster adhering to it and that would then lead us into the main range of rooms that run up in this direction these would have been the main domestic suites tell us what you think these rooms might have been used for um probably dining room reception rooms features such as that and we can see now that some of them would have perhaps been roofed rather like pan tiles you've got this ridge here which would have had a half round tile over the top just like you'd see in the mediterranean today and other parts of the building seem to be roofed with this sandstone some of it green some of it red i mean what's particularly nice on this um roof tail here look this is the dog's footprint where when it was being laid out to dry the dog would have walked on it and they really get you close to the to the actual people who live that is just so great but if we thought we were getting to grips with the layout of the villa we were wrong the geophysics team have spent the afternoon surveying where mick and i had seen the patch marks and at five o'clock john produces his next miracle okay this is the north range with the two wings coming down yes and then we thought we'd got this gatehouse in the middle with the courtyard here yes we've now extended the survey and we're still gathering results and it now looks to us as though we've got a third range coming across here so more walls down more walls a whole range of buildings which presumably would double the size of the villa yes i mean we've not just got one courtyard here we've got the second courtyard i mean i think once a council of war is called to discuss what this means for our next friend john wants to dig into the blob in the middle which he thinks is a gatehouse and which might yield valuable clues to the status and lifestyle of the occupants carrenza wants to dig down here to test whether this really is another range we originally thought the villa was this big one now saying it's twice as big all the readings look a bit different i'd really like to have a trench across this far end so we could find out whether it really is building ranges the same as what we've got here i think otherwise it could be gardens it could be something different it's going over the edge of the slope i i would just really like to know when you need the geophysics is clear at this end you know we can see on the geophysics that we've definitely got a second courtyard yeah the geophysics has proved right elsewhere why is it going to be proved wrong there eventually mick agrees with john first thing tomorrow trench four will go into the gatehouse there's a more relaxed atmosphere with the pewters giles has nearly finished the mould and it looks wonderfully smooth and symmetrical but will the two halves fit together dare i try it new here we go wow no then does that feel oh that is very impressive a little bit of movement there i congratulate you that is impressive but before we can knock off for the evening bill wants to show us a huge pot he's found in trench one yeah now you phil's cleaned this up for me but am i allowed to actually okay take it out don't ever take it out there's one more wow that's a bit rough it no so at the end of day one of our three day dig we're beginning to build a dauntingly complex picture of this roman villa we're well on the way to understanding how large it was and hopefully how important but what did it look like and what was life like here 1600 years ago when was it built and how long did it last we've got many more questions than answers at this stage but that's typical time team for you join us after the break nine o'clock day two and all the excitement and euphoria of yesterday has been completely dampened down by the rain hasn't just been raining it's been tipping it down all night nevertheless a few of our more plucky archaeologists have been persuaded to open up trench four which was the trench that mick decided he wanted to have a look at last thing last night meg is it going to be worth it it already is just taken what three or four inches of soil off yeah just literally wow straight up down onto it stone walls we've got one here one over there the one across the back and they've got plaster on them look oh you can definitely see that's picking up guys yeah and what's this big lumpy thing here well this is this is the wall coming through you see so these are stones in the wall yeah and then over here they've got it turning again where neil is look point with the trowel neil there's plaster on there look fantastic cool so we'd have a beautiful little room here it's fantastic to get so much so quickly but all these walls mean what we found is unlikely to be a gatehouse there would have been no room for anything to get through so mick immediately extends the trench to get a broader look at this mystery suite of rooms yesterday given the information that we had you and victor had a stab at this drawing of what you thought our villa would be like but now everything's changed isn't it yes it is we seem to be getting larger don't we and we now know from trench four that where we thought there may have been quite a monumental entrance we seem to have a suite of rooms running across there so we're going to need to modify this part of the drawing and does this also mean that that might not just be a wall but that might be a suite of rooms too there may well be another suite of rooms through there with further wings extending down that steep slope towards the stream it's all looking quite intriguing downright uncertain i call it we still don't know how big the villa was what it looked like or even if it was a villa and geophys are still going down the slope so it's a considerable relief when trench two the one slicing into the north range provides our next clue to the villa's history there's evidence this part of it was radically altered this end isn't maintained any longer the plaster starts to fall off the walls is that is that the blaster there the white stuff there see what the label is and that light gray stuff that's all collapsed wall clasp so what's this brown stuff here that's other gravel that's been brought in to be mixed with the plaster and used to level off to make another floor surface so the flagstones have been taken up using the bit of the villa that is still sort of being occupied comfortably the plaster's fallen off the walls the walls are bare there's a rough floor it's probably used for storage maybe for animals perhaps for slaves but the roof is still on the walls are still up redevelopment like this suggests the occupants lived here a long time and are therefore more likely to have been local britons rather than continental romans and the fines like bill's pot make it ever more likely that they lived here at the very end of the roman occupation has it qualified for the ancient table it has indeed yes um this is quite late it's late fourth century possibly even beginning of the fifth century how do you know well you tend to have an instinctive thing that's fourth century this particular one it's got these little white dots here yeah that's broken up shell which has been mixed into the clay and that's very distinctive for the south midlands pottery in the late fourth century and then you've got the shape of the pot yeah and if you're feeling a bit doubtful you can always look it up and check that that's definitely late fourth century right and it would have looked like this it was a storage jar about eight inches in height just the kind of thing you'd find in a well-stocked roman kitchen yes please put inside like this one tv cook hugh fernley whitting stall has teamed up with roman cookery specialist orello espanola they're making a roman banquet for us using real recipes from roman cook apicus and that means real roman ingredients the kind of things that romans 8 was it very different from the food we're enjoying today yes well it was really different the roman texts have a really sweet and sour taste really really strong they like strong flavor exactly it was a lot honey yeah and then particularly the garum what is this guy fish sauce and fish and saltine strong stuff yes you open that outside you'd have birds dropping out of the sky yeah it's very strong but there are no birds they're all sheltering from the rain in fact the only visible wildlife is a few archaeologists and in trench four they've worked out what the walls are it is a bath it's a lined bath you see it's got red plaster painted red going all the way around four sides and phil and bill just digging out one half of it so can we be on me there so he goes all the way around to here that's right again he's digging here look plaster again yeah coming right the way around but look how it's going down here there's a good depth to it it's probably got this little foot to go so it's quite a deep feature and it would have held hot water and the float would have got in here and had a bar i wish it did i think the one thing we don't need one of the things tony is we've got this plunge pool but we don't appear to have any anything else for the bath house do we know not yet we only got one possible thing over the back there yeah which might just be some buttresses where they actually kept the boiler to support the boiler which that will make heat the water up pipe it in to the hot bar what would a bath have been doing slap bang in the middle of the building well it's it's our place and it's over over on the end here i mean it doesn't ought to be in this range and it's neil really no it should be in the main house but so the man living in the main house doesn't have to come out in the in the open to get to get wet to have a bar so this isn't the main house well it all adds up i think to this being a slightly unusual collection of buildings you know it's not a normal villa it doesn't have the normal rooms in it it argues that it might be something completely different c3240 250. there's more certainty at the foundry the furnace is hot computers at the right temperature it's time to make the first cast so what exactly is the process then tom well i should take some of the molten pewter poured into this mold which i've already prepared by chalking it what have you chopped it for to smooth the surface off so we get a better casting so it's like a sort of roman teflon there that's better yeah very much so and then i shall clamp these two molds together take a ladle full of metal some pretty evil weather you've got for this isn't it yeah so glad we haven't got any water in the mold otherwise it would uh explode and spit all the metal back out again that's it is it that's it i hope these are rivulets so they will have set now were they they've set yes i'm sure it's all set now good luck very hot because the mold is cold you see so it's going to cool the metal down very quickly this is going to be amazing this is that sort of great moment isn't it this is the moment of truth is it actually going to work oh oh just just one or two it could have been a little bit hotter you see [Music] back on site everyone's digging like crazy trying to keep up with our mysterious and ever expanding villa [Music] a new set of geophysics results suggest it's continuing even further down the slope towards a third possible courtyard and carrenza has persuaded mick to put in trenches five and six to test the results but even this may not be the full extent because beyond these new trenches john and chris have still got another 40 meters to go before they hit the stream at the bottom of the site i mean if this is the plunge pool but mick's still worrying about the position of the bath house what about the idea that if that's the main range of buildings over there the main part of the house the the the bath is across the courtyard i mean does that not argue that this is either not the main one or you know there's something else somewhere else or this this is certainly in an odd position if you if you look at other villa layouts there's a suite of heated rooms over there that would be where you would expect the baths but it's also striking me more and more as you look at the evidence from those trenches one and two yeah that perhaps that northernmost range and its counterpart over there the sort of eastern yeah have been very very carefully and systematically demolished right and we may be seeing a whole successive series of buildings moving across the plateau rather than one large contemporary unit so perhaps the bath house isn't in such a strange place after all because if this northern range was dismantled then this range with the bath house becomes the main domestic area of the villa it also means that rather than expanding down the site the villa may just have shifted position during different phases how about drawings which is bad news for stephen victor trying to reconstruct what the villa looked like it's an ongoing project so we'll be altering things every time we find something new about it today's discovery suggests the foundations wouldn't carry a building at all in particular no central tower and of course here in particular now we've got a plunge bath you'll see that if you if you try to make an impressive entry through that gateway now you'd make a splash in the way you didn't expect it this means steve's got to start all over again and this time he's got not three days to make his reconstruction but just one and all this before we've even heard from carrenza who's found more bits of villa in trenches five and six carrenza are you at trench five or six i'm on trench five at the moment we're um we're not too far down it yet we've got some stones turning up that aren't there naturally so they must be part of some man-made feature but we really don't know where their floor or wall at the moment down at the other trench trench six i'm just gonna run down similar situation really tony here we're still going through topsoil it's deeper again we've got quite a lot of stone turning up but we can't tell what it is yet you nick definitely as we speak just come out of the uh where we think the flu hole is what is this over there i think it's a roof finial you see it's decorated it's got like four arches and like a little dwarf column coming up the top so it's a piece of decorative architecture off the roof but it's the first piece of sculpture we've had isn't it of any note and do we know what sort of period that would be from it it's definitely roman but it's happening within the roman period but it's like like a mini triumphal arch isn't it you see that's great meanwhile the pewters have got the furnace a little hotter and they're ready to have another go come on oh [ __ ] so they try again leaking and again all right doing the same again and again oh i don't believe it how about the romans didn't have this much trouble still tom can practice overnight and try again tomorrow there's better news from the incident room where our table's now groaning with wonderful finds what have we got that uh that we're really proud of i think most of it we start off with flint arrow head bronze bronze a real bonds broach of first century a d date this one's later first century ad we've got the charles bracelet and then we've got some fascinating pottery here this is um pieces of pottery made in north oxford area um copying samian wear copying samia and this one's got a piece of graffiti on the bottom so this is the this is the piece that's copying the same way and is that what what's that mark on it well that's just a piece of graffiti so you know whose it was a batch number or something and now we've got all the fines chronologically arranged in a timeline we can work out exactly when the villa was occupied what we've got today is absolute confirmation that this place was in use right through the fourth century nothing earlier still than the 270s but we got lots of more in the middle of the fourth century and then this one which i mean it'll need to be confirmed by getting you know cleaned again but i think that's a coin of honorius so i think so do you think it's a kind of honorius who was then the emperor that was in when the legions left in other words that's plus or minus the year 400 one of the last roman bronze coins in britain that is beautiful so we know that we were here in the third and the fourth century haven't got much evidence of the second century no it's heirloom stuff in the second so as day two nears its end we're another step closer to understanding our villa and thoughts are inevitably turning to tonight's feast for which hugh and orello are making the final preparations so this is the source for me it's very tasty and just nearby john's finished yet another set of geophysics results judging by the animated look on everyone's faces the villa has now become a palace yes what have we got also physical oh this is this is the bee's knees this is come on basically tony we've gone from the stream in the south to the fence at the northern end we finished going north south we've still got a bit to go to the east but we seem to have got the end of it um it's an open range at the end this is the bath house in the center here i've sketched it on for those skeptics um bath house in the middle so that's trench four trench fights and i think that's the general shape the streams at the bottom where mixed thumbs this is here we've even got a water course going from the bath house on which happy note it's time to tuck in thank you very much yeah then we've got see what's this stuff here that's just a bit of encrustation but on the other side you've got the catch plate there and the spring went from there to there yeah and it looks like it's been silvered or tinned tim's just found this in the spoil heap it's a brooch with someone's name on looks like trevor trevick's victory x victory x anyway it's the beginning of day three and if the rain got us down yesterday we're totally ignoring it now because we're getting so many fantastic rewards out of the ground we've got this whole bath house with the finial thing on top the sides seems to be extending and extending way down to the river and now mix opening another trench here what would be the icing on the cake for me would be if we could actually find a roman room somewhere where old trevor actually lived make yeah is there any chance that we will land on top of domestic quarters oh i think it's a very good chance here we've targeted this one because we finally got the magnetometer results for the whole site here's our trench four in this area over here we now think that perhaps that range with the bath house and this eastern range down here we're actually the main living areas uh and so we're putting a trench across here through this eastern range right through all this knobbly stuff where chris and john think there are pack floors but they're also high magnetics which would be hypercoarse flue tiles and that sort of stuff high status yeah an occupation yeah so look at this just just come out the spoil here crikey what's that silver this is what does it say it looks like felix on the end look victrix i don't know something yeah i thought it was trevor originally anyway you love anything like that you're like a cat with nine tails this is great stuff this is really good so by 10 30 on day three we've got a top find and four trenches going strong trench seven here which we hope will give us a room in the living quarters trenches five and six which should tell us how far down the site the villa stretches and of course trench four the bath house which is getting better and better in the plunge pool the diggers are finding lots of beautifully painted wall plaster the blues and reds a sure sign this villa belongs to a very wealthy family and under all the rubble and plaster which the archaeologists think was put into the pool on purpose when the bath house was knocked down they found this and they're really excited keith why is this coin so significant we've found loads of coins so far it's absolutely crucial because it's the person we found in a stratified context that will help us date the building this is the corner of the improgration minted sometime 365 380. so we now know that this bath house was deliberately filled in not earlier than probably about 380 a.d quite late in the roman occupation but crucially they've deliberately filled it in and that means of course they're doing something else on top of it they're still occupying the site they're going to build something else on top of this bar and presumably the thing that was built on top of it might have been wood so there would be nothing left yeah and what does stratified mean it means it's securely under a clear roman occupation or in this case uh pulling debris and it actually relates to the structure we can date the structure because of this so that's our first clue to the fate of the villa as the roman regime began to crumble sometime about 380 a.d so splendor and opulence on this site gave way to something much more basic overnight tom has experimented with temperatures well here we go right no doubt at all oh wow congratulations there we go it's a bit on the hot side it is a bit hot or not [Laughter] that is magnificent [Music] and so too at last is the weather we obviously sacrificed to the right gods at last night's banquet because by mid-morning the whole site is bathed in august sun down at trenches five and six carrenza is increasingly certain she's got the sudden limit of the site these walls are too flimsy to be major living quarters and look more like out buildings just the kind of thing you'd find at the edge of the villa and in among them she's found lots of animal bones that's interesting what's that this is sucking pig baby pig it's actually really nice because it's sort of high status food yeah we've had some deer as well they're not quite sure um it's either fallow or it may have been red deer or very small red yeah which case has been hunted which again is nice sort of high status activity but we've got some lovely information from the bones we've got a possible hunting dog down in trench six down there a lot of bones but there's a lot of um headphones a lot of jaws yeah um and we think that may actually be an area where the boat the animals were slaughtered right possibly and jointed so we've got sort of food preparation now possibly before they've taken them off to the house so again it's looking like sort of you know kind of for ancillary support rather than the sort of opulent occupation it's the only the servants of slaves court is there right that's wonderful while phil's been away petering niles and mick the dig have made wonderful progress in trench seven oh man sorry you've been away so long how's it going oh it's going really well phil look what niles just found an escutcheon plate for a door oh what the keyhole of the door i can see the roman putting his key in there my god where'd it come from from down here but look what else we've got for i've got the hinge as well oh what so we it looks like we've got well a major door and in this wing slap bang where we put our trench if this is a major door then it probably opened into a pretty grand room and by now the archaeologists are pretty sure they can tell what sort of people lived in it my feeling is when you look at this site overall that what we've probably got is a a local family extended family of the dubunnick tribe who became romanized their their wealth steadily grew and by the early fourth century have been able to afford this let's just get the history clear because i don't know what the dubonic tribe is where are we in terms of the roman empire what's what's happening in the roman empire at what date at the time that where we'd think that the the villa would have been built when it was this heyday well it's had about it's had over 300 years or perhaps 250 years have been part of the roman empire but if you like the the british carrying on morris as they always had done yeah so the demonic tribe are there the local british tribe for the cotswold area we we know from caesar easy to give us the experience later it's later than that yeah but uh we we know that they had a romanized town center at siren sester and they became steadily romanized adopted many of the roman habits and by the early fourth century when britain was at its richest we find there's a lot of spare money around and people seem to be investing in in these large buildings design one suspects to impress their neighbours and anybody passing by the area so when we talk about romans living here often the people who would have been living in a place like this would actually have been the brits dressed up as romans britain's romano britain and this is what romano british trevor and his wife might have looked like though now we know he wasn't called trevor the broach has been cleaned up and the legend is clear it says utray felix which means be lucky and that just about sums up our weekend which isn't over yet the geophysics team are surveying yet another area over to the east of the site by the water springs and phil's still scraping at the room in trench seven phil have we discovered whether this is the big domestic quarters or what it is obviously a very very important part of the the site uh tony i mean what we've got here you see all this black that's all all across the floor this represents a collapsed hyper course it's the underfloor central heating system but absolutely amazingly right on the bottom of all this burning or the top of the burning on the base of this uh surface we've got these big metal brackets and you see here a hinge and so what we're looking at there is a chest that's actually he says that with authority now he said i've been lying here for about three hours watching him slowly reveal this going through every possible theory you know the first little bit came out and there's oh it's a door definitely a door you know there comes a little no it's a gate oh wait a minute of course it's a chest because it's the beauty of archaeology that you're allowed to evolve your theories door gate or did you see here so now we're ready to reconstruct the villa and so against all the odds is steve it was built in about 300 a.d when roman britain was at its most prosperous the northern courtyard once the main living area was soon dismantled to become a storage area the second courtyard then became the focus of domestic life in the villa with the main living quarters and the bath house in the ranges around it karenza's butchery and the slave quarters would have been in the third courtyard situated on a spur with stunning views north and south it must have been a wonderful place to live the paving slabs on the floor yeah and this is where you take your clothes off it's a changing room yeah okay you've done that you're not seeing that revealed by the geophysics we've got three rooms in front of us there'll be a cold room a warm room a hot room with a big furnace heating the lot from that end sweat's pouring off you the slave comes up dumps the oil all over you escapes it off with a big bronze stridule and then you you come back through there cool down a bit in the warm room and then out here and then you take the plunge i can't now because jenny's in here at the moment so mixed bathing jen so we've actually got this floor now fantastic in it it's all showing up very clearly now yeah and it's pretty patchy there's some small bits along here which keith you thought there might be an inlet as well yeah let's put it this way if that's not a if that's not clubbing a water pipe to bring water from the spring up the hill i've worked it out it will take five saves two hours to fill this up with bucket fulls of water but even at this late stage the site's throwing up surprises like the posh room in trench seven phil what have you done to that beautiful trinity there's a big black hole in the middle of it i don't want to disappoint you tony i mean well i told you we couldn't give you a mosaic and now i can't even give you a hyper cost but what i can give you is this beautiful little bowl furnace and the really nice thing about it is from the layers associated with this we've had lead so was this stuck in the middle of a posh room or wasn't it a possibility no no i'm afraid well i'm not afraid because it's where people were working it's it's it's great it's a workshop well thank you for the defense of working people but half an hour ago we had a lovely room yeah but we've also got lead and that's a constituent of pewter so it's possible they were actually making pewter here as well almost as well as you ah you know it's true and there's more a last minute set of geophysics results show our villa has started to expand again look army i'm shattered i dread to think what the team like what's nice i saw this we've now extended to right up the hill so we're here we're actually at this trench here now how's all this thing well it's another wing it's another corridor and it's going right up to the hill i've put a ranging pole on the top that's about it as well wait a minute that's by the springs one a time of on it's near the spring and we've actually picked up a watercourse coming down here along this line behind this is the range i'm talking about we have a watercourse coming down here curving and joining the stream at the bottom of the hill if it's on a spring near the spring maybe it's not a villa maybe it's a shrine associated with the villain near the spring these results are extraordinary if this is an extra wing it means the building here is still expanding and it's quite possibly not a villa at all so what is it sadly we're out of time and someone else will have to answer that question on a future dig but whatever it was it didn't last very long 100 years of high living here came to an abrupt end when the army was withdrawn from britain in 410 a.d shawn not only a protection but an essential component of the local economy the inhabitants of our villa face the best financial ruin the worst violent end at the hands of marauding saxons so this is the end of the roman glory we're talking about 400 a.d beginning to move into what we call the dark ages dark ages yeah yeah absolutely the sun was going down on the roman empire rather like it is today well that was great timing off they go back to rome leaving us to contemplate the most exciting and exhausting time team yet but it was worth it in opening up what could turn out to be one of the most significant villa sites in the country we've had a unique view into roman life in britain we answered most of our questions and with that final set of geophys results posed a whole set of new ones which when we've gone should keep the mystery of this fantastic site alive [Music] you

Channel: Time Team Classics

Views: 236,550

Rating: 4.9250975 out of 5

Keywords: Team Team, Archaeology, History, Education, Educational, British TV, British History, Tony Robinson, Phil Harding, John Gater, Stewart Ainsworth, Mick Aston, archeological dig, Channel 4, Time Team Full Episodes, Full Episode, Great Britain, Roman Empire, Celtic Tribes, Gallic Wars, Julius Caesar, Mandubracius, Caligula, Catuvellauni, Claudius, Verica, Provincia Britannia, Hadrian, Caledonians, Scottish Highlands, Romano-British Culture, Britannia

Id: jYU8hTPyiFU

Length: 50min 42sec (3042 seconds)

Published: Wed Aug 19 2020