Archaeologists Find 97 Ancient Remains Buried Beneath A Roman Villa | Digging For Britain

foreign [Music] but we've got a big history everywhere you stand there are worlds beneath your feet and so every year hundreds of archaeologists across Britain go looking for more clues who lived here when and how you can even see the architecture of the bone inside the jewel though archeology is a complex jigsaw puzzle drawing together everything from skeletons to swords temples to treasure she's got a very cartoon-like face from orkney to Devon we're joining this year's Quest on sea land and air we'll share all of the questions and find some of the answers As We join the teams in the field digging for Britain thank you from Roman times the mystery of a man buried face down on a bed of meat [Music] fabulous Treasure Trove of Queens dedicated to ancient gods and the shocking evidence of 97 murdered babies buried beneath this field [Music] I'm heading towards a place close to Hadrian's Wall where archaeologists are finding signs of that Roman influence writ large this narrow road with its passing places is named locally as the steam gate it's one of hundreds of similar rays which crisscross this part of northern England but what makes this one Stand Out is that it was once the northern Frontier of the entire Roman Empire guarding the central section of the stain gate that important East-West Supply Route was the fort of vinderlander [Music] mid-september an army of over 500 archeology volunteers comes here from all over the world and every week they make new discoveries what you've got there John is a beautiful great big dark blue glass melon bead and there's a bit of a debate about those because some people think that Roman soldiers just simply wore these as decorations all ladies wore them as decorations it's a very very corroded lump of metal but we've actually got here is the the back of the helmet by the looks of things it's very very badly bashed but you sort of see it on the side profile this is the this is the neck guard at the back and this is the start of the top of the helmet coming up [Music] excavated for over 4 but they estimate they've only uncovered 15 of it and that it would take another 150 years to finish the job which is utterly remarkable because the site as it stands is absolutely massive findelanda was bought in 1929 by the renowned archaeologist Professor Eric Burley his grandson Andrew is now its director of excavations the Romans built four forts here by the time Hadrian's Wall was built so really see the first one's predate the wall predate the wall by a good 40 years and uh they're a long way down they're seven or eight meters beneath where we're standing and would they have been stain built no the first six forts hero built in Timber and the last three are in stone and so they knock them down build them up and knock them down build them up very very quickly so and perhaps only 125 years you get the landscape really shooting up to the Fort we're standing in at the moment so this is the last port there's an enormous amount of it still in place it's because nine Fords have been built right on top of each other here that so much archaeological evidence survives in just the last couple of weeks the team working here have uncovered this wonderful flagstained Street which leads from the northern gate of the fort straight up to the headquarters building and the stones are really worn with centuries of use and you can just imagine the sound of those hobnail boots as the Roman soldiers marched in and out of the fort [Music] excavations within the walls of the Stone Fort this year a separate team is working in the vicus the civilian Village which lies just outside the Garrison here at vinderlander so what are you Excavating here well it's all part of the The Garrison settlement that sprung up outside the last Stone Fort that was built at vindalanda so it's a combination of sort of workshops shops and houses sort of wagon parks and trading areas um to supply and sort of you know Link in with the fort there so it was a it was a bit like retail World outside there and all sorts of shops flanking the roads a little bit of evidence for a pub as well we had a building on there where we found a room in the right on the street front there and inside that room all the artifacts that were found are basically drinking because in game encounters so fantastic it's one of those sight where you can almost be there as well you can virtually hear the Romans when you're digging because there's so many artifacts come from the ground and you've got all these buildings that are in really super condition for the past three weeks Justin and his team have been working on a cobbled roadway which ran through the heart of the Roman village we've been really very lucky with this one because we actually got some super dating evidence because trapped in among the cobbles we actually found a little silver Denarius of Severus Alexander which was minted in air d22 right so of course because it was trapped in the road surface it means that the road surface can't really have been made before that coin was minted so we've got a super date for it the Roman Fort is the conservation area where the daily finds are taken to Barbara Burley and her team at all of these artifacts coming out this year most of them are yes oh this is amazing this little Griffin just pull it out and have a little bit closer look you can see um it's got the fabulous Wings here and you can actually just make out the detail of the feathers and then he's got the hindquarters there of a lion and the Romans had a lot of superstitious beliefs they felt that this type of of being would have been very good for protecting and maybe something precious and and things like gold or treasure so we know that he's a little statue but we don't know what he was possibly guarding the village of Hamilton near the Thames has always been a desirable place to live even so it seems for the Romans who built Villas here I'm just up from the river now and walking along on the edge of this beautiful field which seems to be growing some kind of cereal crop but it's not the crop I'm interested in at all it's what's in the ground underneath it almost exactly a hundred years ago this woman Miss glassbrook was walking along in this very same field and started to find some strange pieces of pottery very much like these ones and she decided they were worth further investigation Miss garsberg approached a local archaeologist who in 1912 would make an extraordinary Discovery beneath the soil in this buckinghamshire field the archaeologist Alfred Cox had discovered the foundations of a high status Roman villa which he would call uden over the course of a year Cox would excavate and photograph The Villa while collecting the fines but in doing so he would uncover a dark secret which is still troubling archaeologists almost a century later the main Villa house is what we see in this Photograph and that's in there's a little bump in the middle of the field here and the bump is entirely due to that building beneath the surface but it's quite nice you can work out where you are and you know it's that bump because you can actually see the scene in front of you which has got a white front on it right Gable end that's no it's no Pebble dust isn't it that's right this is a huge excavation it is massive he had to have a huge team of laborers to dig this it was all by hand so all by shovel and wheelbarrows and so that would have been a huge labor force and an enormous cast so this is all still there underneath that's still there just it's got all the the backfill then the soil layer reinstated and of course crops on it forever more for many years the fines from Newton Roman villa were kept in a special museum at Hamilton but when that closed in the 1950s they were moved to buckinghamshire County Museum in Aylesbury where appropriately enough Alfred Cox was once curator Cox published his results in 1921 but it's the way he reached his conclusions that's interesting archaeologists today Alfred Cox was unlike most of the antiquarian archaeologists operating in the early 20th century many of whom were to be honest just treasure Hunters but Cox was different he paid careful attention to each and every find he labeled them with the name the location and even the precise depth at which they were found the artifacts from the 1912 excavation fill over 300 boxes so Brett all of these boxes here from you Denali absolutely Brett Thorne is keeper of archeology at the buckinghamshire County Museum but this is all of the objects he recovered from the 1912 excavations and these as you can see are these are Roman brooches but he's not just collecting the breaches that there are little pieces of just random bits of metal here exactly he did he didn't differentiate um he just picked up absolutely everything not only did he collect even the tiniest little cruddy bit like that little section there he labeled everything even these tiny pieces yeah I mean just to show you an example if I show you this one this well the crude bit of card is that Cox's right this is Cox's handwriting yeah east side of yard 35 inches north of east of enclosure wall unit and the date 2 10 12. so this is his original display piece fantastic so this must be really unusual for the time hugely unusual I mean people these antiquarians just went in and dug they just took out the goodies the pretty items to put on show and they weren't interested in anything else all these little bits of bronze wire little tiny shades of pot where the label is actually bigger than the pot piece um they wouldn't have kept that they'd have just dumped it all back on site completely read the stratigraphy we wouldn't know anything about the site there's so much more information available to you now yeah because he's done this work because he's been so gay because he's so ridiculous exactly yeah over the past year Jill has been taking home the Hamilton boxes to reevaluate Cox's 1912 findings with the eye and the techniques of the 21st century archaeologist foreign but there was one particular set of remains which Alfred Cox was uncharacteristically reticent about William Cox's report he obviously tells us about a good number of the fines selectively he doesn't discuss all the fines and I was rather surprised to find in his report that in actual fact he he did find 97 infant burials now he only gives them a paragraph or so of a mention which you know even in 1912 that's a very important find it's an unusually high number and it was rather odd the way he just described them rather informally as being wrapped as little bundles and potentially buried secretly after dark to a tiny little leg here of oh yeah little infant beans absolutely my new beautifully preserved them the Bane is incredibly I was over and you've got some little pieces of skull there which is I mean it's almost eggshell-like isn't it it's incredibly thin but but brilliantly preserved the infant bones were thought to have been lost until last year when Jill and Brett rediscovered them packed away in Old cigar and gun cartridge boxes how many infants were there buried at Eden well that was the key thing we've got 97. it's an astounding number for for the one Villa it's quite a shocking number actually it is yeah and it's actually quite normal to have infant burials you're not considered it to be a proper human being ready for the cemetery until you're about two years old in the Roman world so you do bury any babies that are lost between being born in two years and you put them in the garden or in the yard or perhaps even under your floor but this number but not 97 there's something different about uden there's something very strange going on there isn't there so these are the boxes this is is how cockspacked them cigarette boxes all with his detailed notes on about where that particular infant was was buried in again the sort of the date and all of the information that he loved to record but it's strange what doesn't seem in keeping is the fact that he squirrels his way and doesn't really look at them again there's no mention anywhere in the published report of them other than a short paragraph saying um Cox thought because the body's kind of cut and recut each other they're buried in a very small area that he thought it must have been done surreptitiously after dark and hidden um I do handle human bones obviously but this is the first time I've really had to deal with infant bones and um it's quite a it's quite a strange feeling isn't it it actually quite upset me because they are obviously very small skeletons and they were clearly very young babies so it just has that effect on you nearly a century after Alfred Cox first discovered them the infant bones are once again coming under scientific scrutiny This Time by Dr Simon Mays common to find a handful of burials at Roman villa sites but what is unusual is to come across quite so many that there's no other site that she would anything like the 97 infant burials that we've got from Hamilton something that struck me is I laid out skeleton after skeleton was they all seem to be a pretty similar size the best way to determine how old an infant was when they died is to measure the bones we measure the bones of the arms and legs by doing this we can age an infant within about two weeks oh Simon's measurements confirmed his initial hunch the babies looked the same size because they'd all died around the same age a 40 weeks gestation so it seems what we're dealing with is infants died around time of birth [Music] control infant mortality there would be a wide range of bone size but this wasn't the case and that made us think that perhaps these individuals were being deliberately killed [Music] so suggesting infanticide as uden Villa the Romans were murdering their newborn children I think the fact that we've got 97 infants makes us look for something systematic that was going on in the coming months Simon will carry out further tests on the bones of those babies once buried beneath this buckinghamshire field these investigations May shed light on the motives Behind These awful killings it seems like there's something quite disturbing going on here because to some extent we we expect to see this we know that infanticide was there in Roman society but at this what's happening the Roman army just happened to coincidentally be just over the hill there's a track in fact leading off in that direction towards where we know there's a Roman Road and in fact a Roman army encampment for some time the only explanation you keep coming back to is it's got to have been a brothel really it really is the only explanation you can think of all sorts of wealth of other reasons but they just don't hold water but at the moment the story of Eugene Ramen Villa hasn't been told in all its fullness has it absolutely not and that is just my opinion I have no proof of that theory of course but it's one that works for the moment I'm going to continue investigating it foreign Kent there are new investigations into the beginnings of Roman rule almost exactly where the emperor Claudius invaded these Shores [Music] in the year 43 A.D the people living here on the Kent Coast looking out to see would have been greeted by the sight of an armada of ships approaching it was almost a hundred years since Julius Caesar had first invaded these Shores and the Romans were back this time they were here to stay [Music] just half a mile away from where the Roman army came ashore we're getting a glimpse into the Britain of the first century and it's all thanks to an 87 Million Pound Road being built here in Kent six miles long and covering a hundred acres it's the last part of a road project linking the channel tunnel and Coastal ports to the motorway Network Beyond the new road here Cuts right across a part of the country that is incredibly rich in archaeological terms because for thousands of years this tip of Kent jutting out into the English Channel has been the gateway to Britain not just for the Romans arriving in 43 A.D but for those who preceded them and those who would come much later archaeologically speaking this place is something of a gold mine [Music] for the last few months digging for Britain has been following the teams from Oxford Wessex archeology they've been tasked with Excavating and recording the evidence uncovered by the diggers and bulldozers before the ground is once again covered up this time by a four-lane highway the entire length of the new road has been carefully Stripped by earth-moving equipment removing the topsoil without damaging the archeology below Andrew this is a massive area of excavation but this is only a small part of the whole scheme it's a very small bit this is the biggest dig in Britain this year it's a road scheme just over six miles long but it's one big archaeological site almost every single bit is an archaeological excavation and how many archaeologists have you got working here at any one time at the moment there about a hundred 130 archaeologists on site but working in the offices backing them up there are others so about 150 people so you've got this big new road being built along it has to happen first it is it's one of these Bittersweet opportunities that the archeology will be destroyed but the sweetness is we get the opportunity to make a record and to investigate about this part of the archeology of East Kent turn the clock back 2 000 years and this part of Kent where the new road is being built would have looked very different then the Isle of thanet really was an island separated from the mainland until Medieval Times by a stretch of water called the wants some Channel and it's here that the new road is being built and more importantly for us where the excavations are taking place the important thing is this is a precious opportunity to record the archeology here before it disappears forever as the new road comes through [Music] the rolling deadlines for completing different sections of the new road mean that the team has had to develop a fast method of systematically recording the objects at the time they're excavated find is individually numbered plotted by GPS and photographed as well as being accurately drawn by archaeologists in the field look at the construction compound nearby the data is fed into computers and the photos are carefully traced I've come a bit further south on the site now to an area rather poetically known as zone six but there's really interesting archeology here two thousand years ago this would have been the neck of a peninsula sticking out into the wants some Channel and the archaeologists are finding evidence of the very people who would have been living here when the Romans arrived yeah and it's here that the team have discovered the foundations of an Iron Age Roundhouse and this is a typical building of the period before the Romans arrive in Britain yes of uh for hundreds of years thousands of years before the Romans arrives people lived in circular houses with conical thatched roofs and sometimes there's been one or two in a small farm or it seems to be the case here maybe a small village with seven or eight or more houses in it so very typical of the Iron Age so you think this was a village then we think so yes as you can see we've got many more of those curvilinear ditches which we think May indicate whether where the houses were this one's a nice complete circle but we're just catching the edges here just little arcs we are really lucky with this one it doesn't happen very often that was such a good preservation so it would just be in a Timber house none of the Timber is is there but we've still got this ditch that went around the periphery yes and is there any dating material that's coming out of that we are quite lucky in this respect as well we've had um we've had some pottery from the um from the Alta outer ditch and it suggests it's um it's a Belgian Pottery which would put us about 100 years before the Romans arrived so it gives you a really yeah [Music] a few feet away the team have just uncovered a cobbled surface littered with animal bones they seem to be they seem to be kind of embedded in the stones as well they believe that this was The Butchery and food preparation area for the village he's very inhabitants would have seen claudius's Army arriving in 43 A.D we've got these two Pearl marks which could be from a knife so this is the remains of animals that have been butchered on the spot just here it looks like it yeah and here we've got a tiny gold coin that on this side this coin reveals that the inhabitants of the village already had European connections before the Romans invaded so on the back you have the horse for The Chariot here and on the other side there's just the very faint remains of of the head and we find coins like this some just a few miles away from Minster but in France as well and we think it may well have been made in France and used in Britain [Music] that beautiful little coin from the Iron Age Village in Kent suggests we already had links with France at the time of the Roman Invasion but I'm now headed west to Dorset where there's hard evidence of trading with the Romans themselves well before they thought of making us the latest addition to their empire foreign 200 years the Romans had been expanding their empire across the Mediterranean but in the first century BC they started setting their sights further afield Britannia to the Northwest might have seemed like the end of the world but it had things which the Romans wanted and what the Romans wanted they usually got Britain already had a reputation for its mineral wells for its Gold Silver and Tin but there was something else the Romans wanted from us and it was this grain there was plenty of it growing in this part of Dorset back then just as there is today and in fact Britain would go on to become the Bread Basket of the Roman Empire for those living in these agricultural areas well some of them would become very rich indeed [Music] [Applause] traditionally it was thought triggers the Iron Age tribe who occupied this part of Dorset were warlike and resisted the Roman Invaders but archaeologists from Bournemouth University seem to be finding very different evidence at this late Iron Age farmstead well this survey of the site which is a magnetic survey shows that the Iron Age ditched enclosure we call a banjo enclosure that's because it superficially resembles a banjo with the body and the neck and some of these necks are very very long where are we standing in relation to the stretches you can see there well we're standing right at the entrance here where presumably there would have been a possibly a gate so we're looking at this ditch just here yeah that's right that's this ditch here and it falls round and then curving round and back down this is where you would have entered the site and you would have seen one probably substantial roundhouse and a number of subsidiary round houses and a lot of activity going on within this large enclosure these sites are effectively wealthy well appointed undefended [Music] nothing else on the site which is really intriguing the Bournemouth team they found more than 30 cylindrical pits carved into the chalk Bedrock by ancient tools and now excavated by the hands of modern day archeology students miles what are these pits well these are these are large cylindrical storage pits basically it's been cut down straight into the chalk and we're assuming that what they're actually storing is is grain of some kind have you found Green in these fish yes yes indeed we've got small pieces of oats and barley which have come out from the lowest levels of these pits and presumably that's not just for their consumption on the site here this I would imagine it is stuff that's being exported right and to some extent we can see the results of that exportation from the artifacts that are coming up in these pits so there's artifacts as well yes indeed it appears that once the grains come out they're putting a whole range of artifacts in we've got these large slabs of Iron Age Pottery oh yeah so they're using this as a rubbish pit then no I don't think so I mean we're not seeing a mass a random sort of deposit of domestic waste we seem to be seeing a deliberate selection procedure they've got fragments of horse and cow and sheep it's quite peculiar it suggested something symbolic about placing these objects in there yes indeed I mean it might be that having emptied the pit you've got to put something back in as a kind of offering perhaps sure the long-term fertility of the land perhaps is an offering to the to the Gods critical use for storage of grain but there's definitely something else going on objects are being placed in the bottom of these pits that have some kind of symbolic value and it's not just objects it's not just animal bones and pottery that the archaeologists are finding all the deposits I've seen on the site this has to be the strangest it's an adult male who's lying face to down on I suppose what can best be described as a bed of meat how strange you've got sort of horse and pig and cow bone all there sort of underneath him and it looks as though he's just been thrown into the hole I mean it really doesn't look as they've been placed in there with any any serum and it's not a formal barrier it's only to our Modern Eyes it looks like he's been rolled in as I said he's lying face down his legs are slightly Tangled Up and there's no obvious kind of order or perhaps reverence to that it's difficult to see whether this is a grave in a conventional sense and and that the bone represents food for the afterlife or whether the the adult himself represents just part of the deposit hi strange there's something very odd going on with these pits isn't there there is there is I mean it's almost like um I suppose bearing an ancestor bearing an aunt to an uncle in a cupboard in the kitchen it doesn't make sense to us you know this is the area where they're living they're working but their dead are going in these kind of disuse pits very peculiar [Music] bones deposited in the pits here in Dorset it's clear that the people who farm this land prospered from Trading with the Romans foreign the Bournemouth University dig is showing that far from the popular image of Roman Invaders locked in combat with the local tribes this settlement at least is suggesting a much calmer transition becoming part of the Roman Britain is is no significant shock to these people at all there's just a great deal of of continuity I think that's that's pretty much for the whole of Roman Britain because we get so awed by the high visibility of Villas and temples without realizing that these just represent less than one percent of what's going on in the countryside the by far away the bulk of the population are living the same lifestyle doing the same things completely unaffected [Music] [Applause] 30 miles north in Somerset evidence is emerging that here too local people may have been keeping hold of their ancient beliefs and ways of honoring the Gods there's nothing around to suggest there's anything particularly special or significant about this Somerset field that I know for certain that 1700 years ago somebody or a group of people came here and did something right here on this very spot late April this year metal detectorist Dave crisp was searching this same field he was about to make the discovery of a lifetime I got this funny signal and it was an iffy signal it really was so I dug down and I dug a bit deeper and it was still there and I dug a bit deeper I'm literally I'm 12 14 inches down now and I put my hand in and I pulled out a black thing and I thought I got a rock no it looks like a bit of pottery it looks like it looks like a Roman bit of pot bit of burnished back burnish where that's quite interesting I thought to myself so I put my hand in again and pulled out a bit more clay and there was a little radiant little bronze Roman coin very very small that size me finger now then I realized that the the piece of burnish where I had was the top of a pot and I thought I got a horde and I went and I'm in the middle of nowhere saying I've got a I've been 22 years detecting and I've never never had a horde before that weekend [Music] Dave was convinced he'd find treasure but instead of digging it up he contacted the portable Antiquities scheme which records archaeological objects found by the public finds liaison officer Anna Booth suspected that this was going to be a job for a professional archaeologist we actually had no idea how big the horde was going to be at this stage so it was very exciting for us all and we uncovered the neck of the vessel and what we could see was a small dish in the top of it which was actually acting as a lid at first we wondered whether this was the bottom of a quite a small vessel and it was turned upside down but when we dug a bit further we realized that it was actually a lid sitting on top of an absolutely enormous vessel of the size that none of us had ever seen anything like it before so it was absolutely fantastic and it was only at that stage that we realized that it was actually a huge horde of coins that we were we were dealing with that must have been quite breathtaking it was amazing it was an absolutely fantastic and then over the following two days we actually undertook the excavation and it did take us the full two days starting first thing in the morning till last thing at night until the sun went down just Excavating thousands upon thousands of coins and bagging them up [Music] it took a huge amount of time but it was absolutely fascinating and an amazing process to go through [Music] because Dave crisp got archaeologists involved right from the very start archaeologists who were able to systematically excavate the pot layer by layer it's meant we have a much better chance of finding out why that pot full of coins was buried in this field all those years ago the Froome horde is looking like it might be the biggest coin horde ever discovered in Britain they're estimated that there are around 50 000 coins weighing in at 160 kilos that's about the weight of two adults but the Queens need urgent attention and that's why in early may they were brought here to Central London the Roman coins arrived at the British museum still wet and stuck together with heavy Somerset clay Pippa Pierce is a Metals conservator at the Museum several weeks now Pippa has been fully occupied carrying out the first stage of the Queen's conservation by carefully washing the contents of the 67 bags which made up the Froome horde and the fume cupboard for a quick dry the coins spanned 40 years from ad253 to 293 and the vast majority are made of debased silver and bronze Roman coin experts Roger Bland and Sam Moorhead have dropped everything to concentrate on the somerset coins he has another coin of tetracus as Claudius that's the emperor standing holding a branch they've been sorting the coins by Emperor at a rate of nearly 6 000 a week it's now eight weeks since the Froome horde was raised and all the coins have been cleaned and sorted but are we any closer to finding out how and why such an enormous horde was buried in that Somerset field Roger this is just a small fraction of the whole horde how many coins do you think there are well we think the final number is going to be just over 52 and a half thousand coins so how big is this horde in the context of other hordes that have been found in Britain it's the largest ever um horde found in a single pot in this country there was another horde found in 1978 which had just a couple of thousand more coins but that was uh in two parts and do you have any idea of the value of these coins maybe about the equivalent of four years pay for a Roman legionary soldier so if you were to turn that into present day values that might be about a hundred thousand pounds in in present-day terms so Sam this is a piece of the port is it this is the piece of the pot that was found in and when they excavated the pot was already broken and you can see it's quite thin neither I nor the conservator believe that this would have been able to hold 160 kilograms of metal without breaking yeah that is very thin and so it's almost certain that the pot was actually buried in the ground first and then the coins were added after it had been put in the ground Sam doesn't think that this port was one person's saving scheme but more likely part of an ancient ritual I I don't believe myself that this is a horde of coins intended for recovery and I think what you could see is a community of people who are actually making offerings and they are each pouring in their own contribution to a communal ritual vote of offering to the gods or whoever it is just because it's communal that doesn't necessarily mean it's ritual though it does it because people could be burying something in the ground that they were worried was going to be taken away from them if you're going to bury this for security and safety you put in lots of different pots so you could easily take them out of the ground later also if you wanted to get these coins out of the ground you'd have to dig down to the pot smash the pot and then shovel them out which also be a very lengthy process so I believe that it was never intended for recovery and you're seeing Echoes here of a more ancient tradition pre-roman I think so yes absolutely the same people we know from other studies that the people of the West country were the same people as they were in the bronze and the iron ages so why not continue the same practices [Applause] thank you I Am Naturally quite a skeptical person and I tend to look for the most obvious explanation for things but it really does seem from talking to the experts that whoever it was that buried that pot full of coins in the ground wasn't intending to come back to it in which case perhaps this is an echo of an ancient tradition that we're seeing maybe those coins are a votive offering and perhaps this was a sacred field [Music] not all archaeological recoveries happen as fast as the Roman coin horde there's one project involving a catastrophic fire and a Roman shipwreck which has lasted for over 30 years [Music] Guernsey in the Channel Islands Jason Monahan's Museum director here [Music] as a young student in the 1980s along with diver Richard Keane he was involved in the biggest archeology project the island had ever seen [Music] in the course of my diving in the harbor and the pier heads picking up the pottery and scallops and whatever else I could find I came across a wooden wreck Richard thought it was an old barge used to build the harbor wall but it would be another year before he realized the significance of what he had found there was the wreck more exposed and great big chunks of Roman tile you know you can't mistake Roman tile I thought crumbs this is going to be really interesting [Music] Richards would find the remains of a Roman ship uniquely preserved on the seabed for over 1600 years but how did it come to be here some beautiful would have had a wide Sandy Harbor and this ship would have been somewhere in the entrance possibly anchored possibly moored um it caught fire for whatever reason we don't know the fire Rage for some time then the water came on board quenched the fire and the ship sank what the maritime archaeologists had found were the remains of a galley room and trading vessel which transported car games from as far south as Spain through the English Channel and possibly even up into the North Sea the ship was carrying blocks of pitch a natural resin which would accidentally preserve the wreck we believe the fire raged in the back of the ship the back of the ship is the best preserved because the cargo of pitched the ship was carrying melted during the fire and this spread out to cover an area of about eight square meters so when the ship sank this quenched into a solid mass and effectively held the back end of the ship down the Roman Timbers have now crossed the channel to Portsmouth and the Mary Rose trust where for the past decade they've been treated and dried there's even more exposed presumably yeah they were sticking out the seabed at this end here yeah for Jason too it's been a long journey this was my first job after leaving University so it's such a very strange after two and a half decades to be coming back and seeing the Timbers in the final state that we talked about are very excitedly all those years ago the conservation processes has worked beautifully there um because you know but there's one final problem to overcome the Timbers are wrapped boxed and ready to go home but there's nowhere big enough on Guernsey at present to house the reconstructed ship this is a very important ship for Guernsey Roman archaeologists talk a lot about trade inverted commas but actually we have we have very little evidence apart from inferring that this Pottery went from here to there so here we have a very solid example of how the trade was carried out ships like ours sailed from port to port carrying stuff in their holds 30 years might seem like a long time for an archaeological project but back here at vinderlander they've been digging for even longer and during that time it's here where we've come closest to knowing the Romans who occupied Britain tempting to think that we know everything about the Romans already after all they wrote things down they left us records but archeology gives us a different perspective it helps to fill in details and paint a fuller picture but it can also challenge our preconceptions and that's when sites like this get really interesting So Randy what do we got here well what we've got here is the wonderful until recently it was believed that temples were never cited inside Roman auxiliary forts that was until last year so this is all part of the temple this is all part of the temple it actually stretches from the gate all the way up to the angle Tower this is all three rooms of the quite an impressive building and what's awesome about this is that we absolutely do not expect to find temples to pagan gods particularly Eastern Cults inside auxiliary forts this is the first one that's ever been found anywhere in the Roman Empire really we were actually looking for a toilet block under here because we've got Barracks behind us and so you're looking for latrines we found a temple there is some sort of poetry in that I'm sure see these little pillars here these are they supporting your floors it's a hypercore system that's right exactly right a high wall system you can still see the burning on some of the stones here to show that they had to fire up in the winter time at least so where is the fire itself little furnaces in this room behind and then jote comes through there comes through the flu and then circulation and they even know the identity of the God who is being worshiped in this newly discovered Temple because amongst the ruins they uncovered this remarkable find an altar to a god from turkey called Jupiter dolichanis here you've got the beautiful iconography of Jupiter dollar canis riding his Bull on this side he's got his Thunderbolts clutched in his hand here and the ax in the other hand so is this also set up by a military man this altar is set up by the Big Chief himself the commanding officer of the fort if we just read the front of it here we can see I O M for Jupiter Optimus Maximus yeah I mean everybody's got to be a little bit beneath Jupiter and then Underneath Him you've got the actual name of the God himself it's dollar Kino d-o-l-o-c-h-e-n-o and very very clear on that line there and underneath that you've got the dedicator so pickiest pudence his second name and the very very bottom line very common on most inscriptions v s l m and that's really just means the guy willingly and deserved he filled his vow and what you're looking at here is the end of a contract it's a contract between a personal contract between solpicious food ends and the god due to Dollar canis so he's promised to erect an author to this God he's somewhere and he's now fulfilled his promise exactly the signs that say need to be preserved with the relief carving and the and the writing but obviously the topspin explains is all very weathered isn't it it's really well worn but also it's been very very badly damaged as well by people coming in when they were demolishing the temple and the demolition of the temple happens sometime we think in the 350s or 70s and you've got this sort of power struggle with the Christianity becoming the official religion a lot of ancient Pagan Cults and shrines end up going by the wayside poor old with a dollar canis here eventually fell victim to such a a new movement on the Northern Frontier rum Britain [Music] had arrived at vinderlander but just 50 years later in 410 A.D the Roman army departed Britain this time for good vinderlander 2 would slowly be abandoned and would fall into ruin it's the remoteness of this part of Northumberland which has allowed vinderlander and its archeology to survive as a legacy to the Roman occupation of Britain in the 400 years the Romans were here they transformed our country from its language to its landscape leaving a lasting Legacy that remains with us today and yet sixteen hundred years later we're still discovering new things about their society from that terrible infanticide on the banks of the Thames to that massive coin horde found just earlier this year in the Southwest there's so much more to understand about the Romans in Britain and so the digging continues [Music] all right

Channel: Unearthed History - Archaeology Documentaries

Views: 415,258

Keywords: English history, Roman history, Unearthed History - Archaeology Documentaries, ancient mysteries, archaeological discoveries, archaeological mysteries, archaeology exploration, archaeology lessons, artifact analysis, civilization documentaries., cultural anthropology, cultural heritage, documentary films, excavation site, exploration, historical documentary, history exploration, lost civilizations, trade with Romans

Id: sKqso7QFxg4

Length: 50min 4sec (3004 seconds)

Published: Fri Nov 10 2023