Bridge Over The River Tees (Piercebridge) | Series 17 Episode 3 | Time Team

this is pierce bridge on the river tease and you can see exactly why we might want to come here the entire village is inside one of the most fascinating roman forts in the country but that's all over there the reason we're here is to find out what's going on down there over the last 20 years two local divers have pulled more than 2 000 objects out of this stretch of the tees like this lovely figurine and this little fish here beautiful gold ring and intriguingly all of it came from one little area in the middle of the river and on top of that they think they found the remains of a couple of wooden bridges so what does that fort up there have to do with all this down here the whole place is a riddle let's hope we can get to the bottom of it the bottom of the river that is not the riddle i mean no the bottom of the riddle not the river whatever we've got three days to do it [Music] [Music] pierce bridge on the river tease in county durham is the site of an impressive 3rd century roman forton civilian settlement that were excavated 40 years ago there are barracks and defensive ramparts along with the remains of this massive roman stone bridge all this we know but what remains a complete mystery is all the archaeology recently found in the river by two local divers including one of the best collections of roman finds ever seen on time team and that's just for starters this is the perfect site for a couple of divers to work that's a fantastic site for two divers what's your favorite find got to be cupid uh it was one of our earliest finds that's got to be my favorite tony what you reading what's going on here why it's been a busy river uh roman crossing i could explain better on the models over here did you make these i did i got my blue peter badge for it as well yeah this is the modern bridge now with the road bridge we found this structure with the orc piles up here you think that's a bridge we think it is because we've got concrete pier there we're not too sure if it's roman or medieval we're not too sure down here we've got all the wooden piles and there's a open platform there so the mystery is what's going on here ben we've got a shed load of fines we've got the fort we've got bridges what on earth do we do there's a lot to be getting on with isn't there but i think i mean obviously the structures in the river and the fines in the river are tremendously important but i think answers to this mystery about what they're doing there are to be found in the sort of wider landscape so we're not just going to be messing around in the river no obviously we will be in the river that's hugely important to get in there and get recording that but we're also going to be having a look at this context up on the banks and around about there's plenty of stuff to explore up there as well so we know about the fort and the big roman stone bridge that spanned the tees here but there are two mysteries bob and rolf want us to resolve first why have they found so many objects in the middle of the river and second what are the wooden structures on the river bed have they found two more bridges or are they jetties or some sort of water mill there's only one way to find out [Music] what i would do want to do is get to the end of this timber just to give myself some idea of the size of this thing it's only when you're up close that you start to appreciate the scale of whatever this thing was these beams are clearly enormous and if they're roman then they've been lying here on the bottom of the river for the past two thousand years [Music] that's a good winch you could drive a modern lorry over that and and it's probably wider than that then oh it is well this just disappears into the silt it's going to be a lot longer that is incredible and it's all one sick continuous piece of timber good old english york phil fantastic and what about the other enigma we've come here to resolve why this vast horde of roman objects was found on the riverbed philippa i know you've only just started cataloging the stuff with bob and ralph but are you getting any kind of picture of what was happening here well there's just so much to look at but what i can tell you is that there's some really interesting things going on at the site for a start there seem to be a lot of religious objects amongst what we're finding here religious so these could be votive offerings things that people just chuck in the river for the gods exactly right and it looks like all these objects are coming from a very small area in the river about four meters by 14 meters so i think people were deliberately throwing stuff into just one small area what of these fines do you think of votive offerings well we've got here a little silver ring which is would be quite an expensive thing to just throw away and it's got the inscription demarc which in latin is to the god mars and then we've got here a copper alloy figurine of ram and the ram is the symbol of mercury so again here we've got another god being represented well all that makes sense to me as votive offerings except why would you throw votive offerings into a river next door to a fort well i've only just started looking at everything but it really seems that the date of the material is before the date of the fort ah so there could have been a religious site here before the fort was built yep definitely i think there must be a roman temple or shrine somewhere close to where these fines went in the river so hang on there's the fort the bridges all the fines and now it's a religious site too i'm going slightly weak at the knees i don't know how we're going to tie all this together but what i do know is that this place must have been pretty special and what absolutely fascinates me is why all the fines were concentrated in one small area in the middle of the river phil look what i picked up it's the shoe off what of those piles beautiful i mean this is the actual tip that was driven into the riverbed we've got this lovely raw iron piece of raw iron hammered right out and then this this piece up here and you can actually see the imprint of the wood preserved in the corrosion and then this great nail driven into the side to actually hold it onto the shoe that's incredible alongside the timber beams we've now found one of the iron spikes used to anchor them into the riverbed whatever this thing was it was formidable but we've still got the other set of wooden remains to look at further upriver it's just as well i brought my flippers yeah oh it's a little bit cold all right enough of this faffing about let the professionals through [Music] there are no horizontal timbers this time just the remains of a wooden post it's quite narrow at the top with a little notch in isn't it it's not at the top but it broadens down this time they're quite substantial there's a big big post that's a big post there let's have a look at the second one this one here in fact bob and rolf have found seven posts in two parallel rows [Applause] and then there's this massive lump of concrete could this be what's left of a pier do you think it could be roman i think there's every chance it could be yeah there's a lot like a bridge or a jetty or something i mean those posts are big and big lumps of concrete it's quite extraordinary we've got some substantial remains over there which we think might have been part of a big roman bridge phil thinks he's got a second roman bridge over there we seem to have another bridge here this site is getting curiouser and curiouser it's the afternoon of day one here at pierce bridge in county durham where we're getting to grips with what we think might be the remains of three roman bridges in the river tease but while most of us have our eyes firmly fixed on what's happening on the riverbeds down here over here what looks like a breakaway faction of rebel archaeologists appears to be opening a trench in a field that even more bizarrely is nowhere near the river so john where are we on this geophysics i think we've got a little rectangular building here yeah it's on a different alignment to the fort so we're going from the middle across the wall possible ditch outside i have two big questions about this site firstly why are we excavating this little field when the river is actually about 200 metres in that direction but secondly and probably more importantly what on earth is mick aston doing here mick wasn't scheduled to be on this dig ben's in charge not you you don't like roman archaeology and yet you weedled your way into it yeah well it's because it's county durham and it's the tease valley and we've done quite a lot of sites in this area already and i'm interested in where this fits in to the overall picture because we're very near stanic which is a big prehistoric complex and we're in the teas valley where we've got gainford and barnard castle from the medieval period do you see that john the reason he's here has got nothing to do with the romans at all he's interested because of what might have preceded the romans and what came after them yeah but ben you're interested in the romans definitely interested in the romans yeah and the reason why we're here is because there's been a lot of excavation around pierce bridge wonderful tome here you know you just feel the weight of it a huge amount of excavation but it's all taken place over there to the east loads of buildings some sort of village-like settlement over there that no one's actually been over here on the west side have we got a small village just contained over there have we got something much larger something like a small town mick do you think whatever we find here might help us illuminate what's going on down at the river yeah i think so i mean this has never been looked at uh well it has been nice except for this morning with you so we don't know what's here really well we do we're starting to get a really exciting picture i think we've surveyed it magnetically you can see the corner of the fort it shows really clearly and then we've got a mass of anomalies extending across the field do you think all this here might be human activity rather than just geology i'm sure it is when you look at the detail some of the ditches are on the same alignment as the fort but others are clearly on a differing alignment what i think we may have is an earlier settlement and that the fort has been slapped on top of it we've opened our first two trenches here to try and find a building and a road next to the fort if we can establish how the roman settlement developed that should help us work out the story of the bridges and if we're going to do that getting dates will be vital on dry land that means finding bits of pottery or coins down in the river though we're reliant on dendrochronology or tree ring dating and if you've ever tried sawing wood under water you'll appreciate that's not quite so easy make it organized chaos out there henry's doing something with his gps we've got bob and rolf scrambling away for fines we've got mick the dig sawing is it worth it what is it we're trying to find out oh it's fantastically worth it i mean if he could come up with the filling dates of the timbers from the tree rings and therefore the lighter date the bridges are built we start to get a chronology of the structures in in the riverbed what about what henry's doing well he's trying to fix the position of the timbers that are in the riverbed just got a sketch map made of where these tumors have been seen and that's very difficult to line up with what's going on in the fields on that side the geophysics results and so on ah so once we've got the alignment of the bridges we can have a look and see if there are any roads which relate to them that's right so it should help to sort out what's gone on with the various crossings of the river at this point so while henry carries on plotting the timbers in the river john started surveying the banks to see if he can pick up traces of any corresponding roads he's looking for one in particular deer street the roman equivalent of the m1 that we know came crashing through here somewhere close by back in trench two next to the fort we've had a small breakthrough our first find know me yeah you've got a little bit of bone here assume that's animal bone i think there's um is that some kind of what tree marker that's definitely a butchery mark it's um it's a rib from a large mammal which is like a horse or a cow so yeah evidence of butchery the good news is we found evidence there was human activity next to the fort the bad news is we don't know when though it looks like we might be getting a date from the river so what do you think meg um it's wooden but it's not got that many rings in it there's only about 30 in this piece and i need 50 plus so can you do anything with it not with this one but we're gonna try and sample more the more the timbers are down there if you do find a piece that's got 50 or more rings in will you be able to date it for us before the end of our three days yes if i can find the right sample i do have a problem there aren't that many roman chronologies around here um but if i find the right piece of wood i'm pretty sure i can do something with it right still no date but it's only day one plenty of time to go meanwhile i don't know what john had with his corn flakes this morning but he's already finished year fizzing in this field we were hoping he might pick up traces of any roads running down to meet our bridges there's your bridge ben cutting through here there's no sign in my data of a sort of road going on a north-south alignment i mean clearly we've got lots of responses we've got these very very strong ditch-like responses but they're in the middle of the field there where the sheep are we we've not gone quite as far as your bridge yet um phil but at the moment we're not really answering all the questions i'm not quite so worried this is this is good stuff there's great anomalies there maybe this is a roadside ditch it's just that the road has to curve round to take this steep incline down to the river so even though there's no trace of one ben's convinced there is a road here somewhere so we're going to open a third trench to try and find it not that we're clutching at straws all the time we've been here we've been concentrating on the river teas looking at the fantastic fines and the structural remains of the three bridges but there's an elephant in the room which we've completely ignored and that is this fort it's huge isn't it we've got this massive eastern gateway here we've got barracks here there's enough room for a whole army guy where are those big eastern gates on the ground you're walking right under it now so come and sit down here yeah now if it was roman times we'd actually be in the show instead of having our heads burnt off but we'd have the arch going right the way up and that would be the left-hand side of this double arch into the forward it is a big force it's a substantial one hadrian's wall isn't far is it is that why this place was built not this particular fort because hadrian's ward itself predates this fort by around 130 140 years but presumably there would have been a fort here before this in order to guard the river crossing you'd think wouldn't you but there's been no evidence of that found but this place has to be all about the river crossing the romans arrive in this part of the world in the late 1st century a.d this is one of their main thoroughfares right up into northern britain i can't imagine there wasn't an earlier fort here but so far one has not been found finding the missing early fort would be a big breakthrough because it could help explain the position of the bridges back in phil's trench there's no sign of any road but he has made a remarkable discovery i've got this fragment of skull in there is this a grave i just need your confirmation that is human yeah that's no problem just by looking at it you've got this nice uniform thickness and that is just screaming at me that is definitely because look what else i found i was just aha look that's a piece of a very small shell bracelet that is lovely what do you think oh taylor made it really look at that just add it to the collection oh yeah so you never know where it is for a child or an adult would you no cheeky in the meantime ben's got us orienteering up on the escarpment overlooking our site he's convinced this is where we might find the missing early fort it's a stunning view that's not why he brought me up here is it no no i said we've got to get out of the river and look on both banks as well we've got to look around the river and what the commanding position this is it's difficult to believe that the romans wouldn't have put something to secure this bank up here i mean just look at the view it's fantastic the romans didn't just come up here for a very nice view of the on their campaign so they wouldn't just sort of put some default or something up here just to look down on the river crossing down there no no but you wouldn't want your enemies up here looking down on your fort on your settlement you'd want to secure it that's sort of a medieval view of thoughts or something the romans are a field army they fight out in the open they don't need to steward us both of you we're not going to be able to resolve it by discussion are we how about tomorrow if we get john to geo fizz here and see if there's any trace of anything yeah i know i spent most of today looking at the the routes and roadways that might approach these bridges from from the outside world as it were and the possibilities have got robin rose coming through this field there might be all sorts in there we've got it's a huge area we've got about 140 meters we can put a transect straight up there so i'm with you on that one so it's the end of our day one have we got three roman bridges have we got the roads leading up to them well there's our hotel down there so it'll be easy for john to get up at 6 30 tomorrow morning come up here gio fizz and he'll have the answers for us before we finish breakfast beginning of day two here at pierce bridge in county durham where the meadow flowers are out the larks are singing and it looks like being the hottest day of the year so all our archaeologists are feeling very positive i am because at last i'm walking on something roman we've got evidence of two roman bridges over there somewhere in the river t's but this is the third one that's already been excavated although forgive my ignorance ben but this looks more like a road to me than a bridge don't worry about that for the time being don't worry about that have a look at this yeah massive great stones one on top of the other huge great things look and this is a big bridge abutment an abutment meaning well it's the edge of the bridge it's the bit on the bank that sort of consolidates the whole thing so where's the far bank ah we don't actually know i don't understand what's going on at all you don't know where the fire bank is so we've got our bridge which appears to be in the middle of a field rather than over a river what's going on yeah what it tells us is that rivers are dynamic things we're not looking at the landscape that the romans would have would have seen it you know the river has shifted so how does that impact on what we've got to do in order to get to the bottom of this to work out what the bridges were doing why there's all those fines in the river to get to the core of this mystery we really need to understand the shifting courses of the river through time and thanks to the shifting river we can now see how this bridge was constructed paving to consolidate the riverbed beneath with stone abutments and piers on top to support a timber superstructure it's impressive though since we don't have a date for it we don't yet know how it fits into our story late last night ben got all excited about the possibility the missing early fort might be up here on the escarpment overlooking the river so jon was up there with the sparrows this morning to find out sadly there's no sign of it though what he has found is just as crunchy i think this is yeah really nice though because that must confirm the line of deer street through this field i mean clearly we've got the zebra effect here you know the black and white the rigid furrow plowing that that's masking things but there's no doubting that these series of anomalies show the road line yeah and this is what we're wanting to confirm then whether deer street did come through here in one of its phases and and that seems to confirm its alignment exactly where expected to be doesn't it okay so we've got these great anomalies can we be absolutely confident without excavation that's what we've got or do we need to put a trench in to me excavation along the road line is actually key to to understanding the routes and the bridges okay whereabouts then where do we put the trench well i think anywhere in the middle of the field along this sort of line john thinks he's located deer street the big roman trunk road that ran all the way to our site from york and on up to hadrian's wall and as it looks like it could be on the same alignment as our middle bridge we're going to open a fourth trench to find out in the meantime we're still trying to find a road on the north bank that ran down to ben's bridge here so this sort of ray slightly raised here with the boulders in i mean that's not the road is it no your f you'll see that in the side of the trench here there's there's this little white flat material and i think basically what it is it's stone that's working its way down through the plow soil if there is a road here it's masked by all this top soil so we're going to have to remove that but even if we can't find it all isn't lost stewart thinks he's found another road running down to ben's bridge back on the other side is getting really exciting from my point of view because what we're seeing is a link back to stannix hill fort which is three kilometers down the road biggest iron age hill thought this part of the world major tribal center it's 320 hectares it's a huge huge size but the really interesting thing that that relates to is this route way it links stanix right down to pierce bridge here and heads towards where we've got the string line across the river and where there are some timbers in there in the riverbed so there's an outside chance that the piles themselves are prehistoric and not romantic it would be really nice if they wouldn't they i mean that'd be marvelous this is terrific john may have picked up deer street on gfiz now stewart reckons he's identified an older prehistoric road running all the way up to ben's bridge here so is the bridge also prehistoric to answer that we need a tree ring date though poor old mick looks like he's still struggling the problem is i float rather i can't get down deep enough to cut it so i'm gonna bring my stunt double in here bob so bob's gonna have to go in there and do it so basically i need to get as low as you possibly can further downstream we're getting more fantastic finds wait oh hi oh let's have a look oh yeah oh that's beautiful isn't it what do you think that is precisely oh we've got a very nice copper alloy pin there bronze to you and me but it must be a hairpin of some description but there's a little sort of piercing through the middle but with this glass speed on the end i think this is interesting about this is it means women it must mean women and of course the roman army is followed by around by all sorts of women some wives but also women of certain reputations only too happy to help those soldiers spend their earnings so this is what that might be in all the excitement i've completely forgotten about poor old matt he's been sweating it out over in the field next to the fort [Music] extending this trench has been really really useful i had the first wall there yep inside of the building and we've got the other wall just coming up underneath john there um inside you can see we've got these stones here i think it's collapsed wall or roof or something like that and that is overlying this really lovely dark occupation layer down here with the kind of charcoal absolutely chocker with pot and some lovely finds um had this little spindle looks like it's made out of a hot base i think looks like a bit of black burnished potter that's been reused yeah yeah it's a spindle whirl isn't it a drop spindle for spinning wool excellent stuff so what dates your portrait well uh second century certainly nothing late in the middle of the third century would you say i think the key to it is this samian isn't it i mean this is sort of you know second century onwards but you don't get it much into the fourth if if at all so it looks to me as though you've got something here that's actually earlier than that thought so what have they done dropped the fort into the middle of a settlement or cleared a space i mean whether they dropped it into an existing settlement or whether the settlement was abandoned that that's probably up for grabs but we do know the crucial thing is this settlement was much much bigger than anyone previously thought we thought it was all confined over to the east now we know it spreads over here to the west as well so i'm thinking it's something approaching a small town now i mean you've got to think in those terms this is great we've now got convincing evidence that this settlement is a hundred years older and twice the size than was previously thought finding three bridges here is starting to make a bit more sense meanwhile philip is still sifting through all the fines just look over here we've got a range of military artifacts there's this nice scale armor and it's really well preserved and i don't think they've moved very far at all they've just been sat under a layer of silt for nearly 1 700 years yeah i suppose if they'd been washed away in the natural course of events that had been battered around amongst the rocks wouldn't they they've got more bent up damaged and worn down up on the escarpment we were meant to find deer street faye's got something but a giant military highway it ain't what just this bit of cobbling here yep the tiny bit there well i expected a great sort of a great bank you know of you're entirely right that's what they told us we were going to get but we have got something more interesting this kind of wall here which looks like a revetment right and then we've down here we had a lot of pottery and bone and it's quite dark and it's like an occupation oh yeah so what are you going to do with it now what i'm hoping to do is stick a slot down the side here and look for more of this road you think it might be buried under this this revetment and all this occupation then that's what i'm hoping down in the river john's team is about to try and survey the middle bridge don't drop it as far as we know this is the first time radar has ever been used to locate archaeology on a riverbed and there's good reason no one else will be daft enough to stick thirty thousand quids worth of equipment into an inflatable dinghy i'll tell you what you're glad you can't see yourselves from this angle so not enough rings on this one either over in the incident room the struggle to date our bridges is fast becoming a soap opera this one we actually found late last night and basically it has it has more than 50 rings it's actually got 67 rings have you got a tape no well if you look at here on the screen here and you can see here in the roman period i'm just getting nothing hang on so these are the dates so that's four seven one so you've got two there yeah then nothing else in the roman but look you've got loads at 1104 could it be norman no because i know the data really well though and that just isn't jumping out enough at me so what are we going to do keep looking keep diving keep getting wet while we were just filming that scene mix blackberry was beeping but we ignored it and then after we finished shooting mick had a look at the message and it said we have a result and the message was from the laboratory that mick uses in order to have another run at the data uh to see whether they can get a result you're covering something up with a piece of paper have we got a result no well we do but i'm not going to tell you why because i am a bit i don't believe it come on listen no i i don't believe the date myself and because i don't believe the date i'm not going to tell you what it is you genuinely aren't going to tell me i'm not going to tell you i want to check and check and check until i'm 100 sure it's right oh this is ridiculous it's not ridiculous because if i tell you the date and i come back tomorrow and decide it's not right i'm going to look like a fool so you're not like falls on time soon it doesn't matter will you tell me tomorrow if i think it's correct i will tell you tomorrow i'm sorry [Music] back in the river we're still messing about in boats [Music] but ratty mole and badger may have pulled off a minor miracle yeah i think as we went over the bridge there might have been i mean when you could feel the wood under your feet there was a very different response on the screen so it might have worked it's been another storming day we've got archaeology coming at us from all sides even if we still can't make sense of it yet what's really gratifying is that all our painstaking detective work is beginning to pay off we're on a roll phil you put this trench in didn't you so that you could find the road that's right yeah well you've got it haven't you there's a ditch there and then that bit's humped and a ditch on the other side that ditch has got some old rubbish or something in it well this seems to be one of those cases of a little knowledge as a dangerous thing and i'm wrong you're wrong we do have a ditch here and we still think there's a good chance we've got a burial in there yeah but what you've failed to recognize is that in fact we've got another ditch in here which we've not actually excavated we've got a ditch there another ditch there yeah and then another ditch here hang on why does that mean we haven't got a road because you only really need two two ditches for road one on either side the crucial thing is that they they literally appear to be continuing straight out towards the river so we can say pretty certainly that this river cliff has eroded back into the roman town just beyond where this wire is it plunges away down towards the river and you're saying that there used to be settlement there and worship disappeared absolutely in the roman period it would have been way out there but the other really interesting thing is that do you see that white tag down there i do we had a superb roman coin there which philip has been having a look at what you got philippa it's a really nice silver denarius of the mission and the mission is when this coin dates to ad79 so they were here at a seriously early day mick great coin cracking date as well and some more gfs john half the press well also excellent as you can see yeah i mean we've extended the survey right along the riverbank now and just look at the results there's so much going on it's so complex i mean a series of ditches masses of pits but what's really exciting a whole series of stone buildings right along the riverfront now normally at the end of the day if we had gfis like this i would tell you exactly where we're gonna put the trenches in tomorrow but guys this is so complicated isn't it yeah i think we're gonna have to think about it over a drink tonight and we'll let you know tomorrow well like the sound of that client yeah yeah beginning of day three here at pierce bridge in county durham where we're trying to solve the mystery of the literally thousands of roman objects which have come out of the river tees here but as you can see we've got a big problem the water level has risen at least three feet since last night and that's after only what three quarters of an hour of rain the problem of course is that our divers aren't going to be able to get in there to do any more work are they it doesn't look hopeful at the moment does it what is it that we wanted them to do today well we still had sampling to do we still wanted to plot in some of the timbers um but you know that's obviously going to be a bit of a problem now stu where does all this water come from well from the river yes thank you very much this river goes we've got 30 mile run that way right up into the mountains of moorlands in cumbria it might only rain for half an hour here because we rained for two or three days up there it comes in literally waves it builds up in torrents and it's not just the power of the water that erodes the banks and bridges it's the boulders and cobbles it brings with it there's loads of them deposited down there they're that big can imagine them hitting the bridge weakens the structure after a while you're going to get sick of repairing these timber bridges and something said let's build a nice big stone pier bridge over there it's going to last for generations that's why you have to kind of react to that sort of power of the river the divers who invited us here gave us two objectives didn't they one was to sort out the bridges or the remnants of them which we found in the river but the other was to solve the mystery of all these fines in the river are we going to be able to meet those objectives i think we're nearly there we've got a bit more work to do up on the banks and then you know hopefully that will give us more i'm confident it will give us more of an idea about what's actually going on in the river it might not be a raging torrent but the strength of the current makes working out here far too dangerous it's frustrating certainly but it does at least demonstrate the destructive power of the river which we decided last night must have undermined the north bank here causing a great chunk of the cliff to collapse into the water taking part of the roman town with it it's hard to imagine a more dramatic episode in the history of piercebridge you'll remember last night that john produced this fantastic geophys which was so complex and so confusing that we decided not to start putting trenches in but have a think overnight about what we wanted to do and the archaeologists thought overnight and they've come up with a solution they've done more gfs doesn't this just make it even more complicated well i think it's actually helped a lot look we've got the river here there's phil's trench with the early coin yep now we've moved back inland i mean we've got a whole series of buildings these white anomalies are clearly buildings and they're part of the civilian sector yeah i mean this is the vegas outside the fort isn't it but these buildings are clearly sat on top of these ditches so how early are these ditches right that's the important thing to find out and i think if we put a simple trench across one of those ditches we can establish whether it's military whether it's part of the early fort mick i don't understand why we're so interested in these ditches what's so important about them that we need to date them it goes back to the whole idea that all these crossings of the rivers up in this part of the country whether where the roads hit the rivers and there are bridges or fours or whatever there's usually an early roman fort and there's been many attempts around here to find it and they've never succeeded in finding we've only got this later fort and so if these ditches here were military it might mean that that is the early fort and it's underneath the vehicus so it's an important thing to sort out and it's a relatively simple exercise to establish whether it's a military ditch because that will have straight sides and an ankle breaker at the bottom so even if we haven't got dating material we'll know if it's military we're still looking for the missing early fort so we're going to put a fifth trench in here on the north bank to see if we can find it now you've got the other leg then i have phil yeah there's two legs here there's also a couple of finger bones just here so that must have been the position of the hand thankfully all the painstaking excavation over in phil's trench has finally paid dividends ah so we are beginning to get a real impression of the layout of this body in the grave trenches four foot in old money wide so i guess the skeleton the body would be somewhere between what four and five foot tall must be missing it yeah from the length of the skeleton the bracelet and coin found next to it we think this inhabitant of early roman pierce bridge was likely to have been a young woman and as it was the custom to bury people alongside roads we're convinced there was a road somewhere nearby even if we haven't found it with our trench yesterday afternoon for i think the first time in 17 years of time team i asked a contributor a question about the archaeology and he absolutely refused to give me an answer the guilty party was mick worthington our dendrochronologist and i wanted him to date one of the wooden supports of the bridge in the river you had processed the dating yourself hadn't you and you'd also asked your mate at your laboratory to process it he'd come up with a date what date they didn't they came with a date at all well you covered all the data over with a sheet of white paper didn't you and beneath that there was a date no beneath that there was a conversation between two denver chronologists saying this is an interesting area you should look at that in the river i've only found two pieces of wood which are suitable for dendrochronology yeah they have more than 50 annual rings and they are of oak yeah i found two of those i measured both of those they do not match each other and neither of them match any of the reference canonies therefore we have no date and we're not going to get one no hang on this is disastrous if we can't get dates from the bridges we've got no chance of telling the story of this place on top of that our radar survey hasn't worked either there's nothing that obviously jumps out as saying bridge timbers and the problem is that there's so many big boulders down there that the energy's hitting those it's bouncing back up off them and we're not getting the penetration that would answer that question right so it's the it's the energy of the the radar as well but this is about the energy of the river as well it's transported all those boulders strewn them across the bottom and it stopped us from looking at the archaeology that's it yeah it looks like the mystery of the bridges will remain unresolved although there is one small glimmer of hope up on the escarpment fave just about finished here haven't you yes we have i mean we found what we came to look for we've got our roman road deer street it's really vivid in the landscape there isn't it looks fantastic doesn't it and actually we also have our ditches on the other side so we've got one there and one coming in over there as well and of course this street deer street goes slap bang to our middle bridge isn't it exactly and that's what must date it because that's when the romans conquer the north so give us a date the big roman push into the north is in the 70s and early 80s a.d terrific we found deer street better still it lines up exactly with our middle bridge here so we think they must have been constructed at the same time in the late first century a.d but we still haven't resolved the other big mystery that brought us here why so many religious objects were found in the river it does seem to me that we've been ignoring the obvious we've got the remains of a lot of bridges we've got a puzzle about fines at the bottom of the river couldn't they just have been dropped by people walking across the bridges i just don't think that could have been the case these objects here were placed inside this pot and it was placed on the bottom of the river if it had been thrown off a bridge they'd have been in tiny pieces the great thing about the roman empire is that you can actually look up some of the literary sources written by people who were there at the time and plenty of the younger actually describes a river shrine in italy and he talks about how they built their little shrines around to the god and other deities and they put their objects in and around the shrines what we've probably got here is what's left from what was in and around the shrines perhaps on an island like this in the middle of the river why would people have ritually deposited a handle and some knobs well i don't think they were putting the handle and the studs in on their own i think they were probably putting objects inside boxes that have rotted away now and that's what we've got left of them but we do also know from other roman writers that what some people would put in were objects that reflected their trade what they manufactured so some of these studs furniture fittings might actually have been put there by men who were working here manufacturing that kind of material so what crafts do you think might be represented here well we've got this nice copper alloy medical instrument here so perhaps the doctors are involved in the cults and actually because it's a roman military establishment i can say with virtual certainty that the man who threw those in would have been a greek because it was only greeks who worked as doctors in the roman army and that's a reminder of what an exotic world this was because here we are right up in northern britain and we would have had greek doctors with the roman army here we now think there was once an island in the middle of the river before it was washed away by flood water on this island there were a series of shrines where people made offerings to the river gods before crossing over one of the bridges and continuing on their journey finally resolving the finds mystery is fantastic but we're still looking for our missing early fort sadly there's no sign of it in trench five though what we have found vividly illustrates how these bridges were used look that one road surface down there yeah is earlier than that road surface there because in between it you've got a band of sand so that sand goes under the road does it absolutely so that shows that there are two road surfaces they've been at the whole thing has been relayed and reused that's presumably heading down to a crossing of the river absolutely you see when you look at it on the geophysics this is what the the hallway the roadway that we've actually excavated there now if you know that this is a roadway then this is most likely a roadway joining up to it up there then this one also becomes a roadway joining up there and who knows probably this one as well yeah it looks to me as well as if it's the sort of width that you might have say a pack horse with panniers on rather than a a loaded cart well actually i mean in the middle there you can actually see it is it is hollowed in it's more heavily worn in the middle there yeah and i mean you can visualize yeah yeah yeah yeah these people coming up and down this road down to the bridge to reach the middle bridge we think people had to descend a steep slope using one of the curving roads phil's found in his trench a tantalizing glimpse of daily life here it's been an enthralling three days and contrary to all expectations we've even managed to get a tree ring date for ben's bridge using a sample obtained by our local divers shortly after we've finished digging the results indicate it was built sometime between 40 bc and 85 a.d so we're almost certain this is the oldest bridge ralph and bob asked us here to solve two mysteries didn't you that's right yeah the first one was how come they pulled literally thousands of small roman finds out of that little stretch of the teeth how many did you pulled out something like 2 000 objects and oh 1040 coins still counting it's a treasure trove isn't it it's absolutely superb and i think what we've now come to the conclusion is that these things weren't just lobbed in the river they were carefully placed in these shifting islands in these silts as deliberate offerings either on your journey up to the north the military zone or perhaps honouring the river itself and what about the other riddle of the riverbed well we think rolf and bob were right the first of three bridges built here was prehistoric and probably repaired later using roman concrete the second bridge was built by the roman army in their big push north during the late first century a.d by which time there was a settlement already here on the north bank and when that bridge collapsed a stone replacement was built further down river probably around the same time as the third century fort how long have you been diving here we've been down here for 22 years well you'll be able to pack up now won't you we've sold all the problems no i think we've got another 22 years on this yet to ensure you catch all the latest updates please do subscribe to this channel follow us on social media and sign up to our newsletter and join us on patreon [Music]

Channel: Time Team Classics

Views: 125,270

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, time team, time team full episode, time team season 17 episode 3, time team piercebridge, time team bridge over the river tees, dig site, river archaeological sites, history, british history, roman history

Id: acEsAeMXtig

Length: 47min 35sec (2855 seconds)

Published: Sun Oct 03 2021