Caerleon Roman Legion Fort In Wales | Time Team

kalyan just outside newport south wales 2000 years ago this place was the fortress home of a mighty roman legion and just recently a team of archaeologists working here have come up with some stunning discoveries their finds include some dazzling jewellery [Music] and fine carved objects but even more exciting than that they've identified dozens of new roman structures these buildings appear to be bigger and more extensive than anyone could have imagined so when were they built and why and was this place more significant than people previously thought only by digging can we hope to understand what these new buildings might be and why they were put here there it is that is the information we want i've never excavated one of these before in my archaeological career [Music] so time team is heading to kalian for three days to lend some mind and muscle power we'll be helping out in any way we can together can we crack the mystery of one of the great sites of roman britain [Music] lying just outside newport south wales on the edge of the river ask is kalian's legionary fortress it's one of britain's greatest roman sites [Music] the fortress has been known about for over a century and since the 1920s archaeologists have uncovered its bathhouse amphitheatre and even a barracks [Music] so with all these large buildings already excavated what's left to do well on the land outside the main fortress a cardiff university archaeology team have made an incredible discovery this area to the south of the main site was always thought to be nothing more than empty fields but thanks to some remarkable geophys site director peter guest now thinks he's identified a spectacular complex of roman buildings you've saved us a lot of time haven't you you've already done a load of fears pete what's this uh intriguing large complex that we've started talking about it's just southwest of the fortress it's it lies in the area between the amphitheater and the river us and it can comprises this series of buildings here which you can see a little bit better on geophysical results that we have here where we are now is in the middle of this very very large complex here a square courtyard building with large ranges on three sides and on the fourth possibly fronted by the keysight roman archaeologist by and large you look at the shape of something and go oh i know what that is because the romans built 19 of those somewhere else what's the problem here the problem is the scale and its location it's so big it's one of the largest buildings known from roman britain and the courtyard itself is over 100 meters either way and the fact that it sits outside the corner of a legionary fortress it's not what we expect from looking at other fortresses across the uk a gigantic courtyard like this could have been a temple complex a large monument or some kind of giant military parade ground we'll only know for sure once we put some holes in the earth we want you to dig in the center of this on top of what is a very interesting and possibly significant um little rectangular building so tim what in more detail do you actually see on the geophysics that we're actually trying to excavate well your trench is positioned over the corner of a little rectangular structure of some sort more or less on the axis of the courtyard but one of the intriguing things is that the geophysical anomaly which surrounds that is different from the rest of the structure that mark the line of stone walls couldn't different be later couldn't we be looking at a victorian privy or something or a medieval cow shed it could be many things we'll only know once we put a spade in the ground whether we are looking at a victorian privy or a roman building of some importance uh just need a digger don't we kevin so phil's trench could allow us to identify the mystery building in the heart of this giant courtyard and it may even offer us the key to understanding the entire area look at that look at that beautiful that's coming up wow lovely lovely all you do with some turf like this for me lord one thing that's crucial to understanding kaleen is the ask river in roman times rivers were vital thoroughfares for transport and supplies so alex langland's is taking a closer look wow peter this is actually quite some river isn't it it is this is crucially important to the sighting of the leadership fortress here we're on the lower banks of the rivers right and this is the lowest crossing point of the river so what effectively you're saying is that everything down river from here is just too difficult to cross too wide too difficult this is a very tidal river it has a high tidal reach right which means that in terms of being able to sail up and down it can be quite tricky at low tide as it is now at high tide in the afternoon the river then rises to the top of the mud flats you can see behind us and almost the bottom of the bushes over there on the right-hand side but at the same time i guess that that tidal reach could have been used to bring materials into this location exactly it's a very strategic place and it's a very good river for allowing access into the hilly interior part of wales so that the legion here would have been able to supply the auxiliary forts at us and abagaveni and at brecken 2 and then in the opposite direction the legion could have been supplied from the rest of roman britain through the seven estuary but it is also about control the legionary fortress sits on a major crossing point of north south and east west access routes and it's about controlling people's movements and also communication but also about being able to bring in large quantity of men and materials in order to push the roman conquest of wales further and further west kalian was clearly a very important center in roman britain but getting to grips with the newly emerging picture of this site is a daunting task there are over 30 students and volunteers working here this summer in eight active trenches your trench is just here time team's raksha is joining supervisor rob in a trench just to the east of phil's trench slightly to the south of the amphitheater they think they may have picked up some roman buildings on the geophys of this area so what what are we actually targeting in this trench well the first part of the targeting was to establish whether these humps and bumps in the field were the waste tips from the 1920s excavation of the amphitheater and secondly once we can clear those out and prove what they are then we can hopefully get down onto the roman levels and find out what these buildings are underneath so we possibly have a roman structure in here i certainly hope so i'm actually quite excited because you're still very much at the early phases and i want to get in you've got me for three days come on man right that's it we're going to move you up to the uh roof tile level up here and see if we can find you corridors walls and maybe part of the monumental complex [Music] so here in this well advanced trench raksha's already got some serious archaeology to get her teeth into but even in phil's trench only opened earlier this morning we're getting indications of walls and floor surfaces hopefully by the end of the day there'll be more to report in the meantime marianne's keen to get to grips with the bigger picture of this site by 76 a.d the romans had conquered most of britain and fortresses were a key means of controlling their newly subjugated lands in britain there were just three permanent legionary fortresses one at chester one at york and the one here at kalian guy we're talking about colleen being a legionary fortress do we know what the layout would have been if you imagine that this is our fortress here you've got something like a very large playing card shape and that represents the fortress walls and you've got a gate in either side here and there at one end we've got loads of barrack blocks all the way up here and at the other end we've got loads of barrett blocks all the way along here and in the center here we've got the headquarters building other administrative and store buildings and we've also got a huge military bathhouse and outside just over there is the amphitheater and beyond that is the site that we're digging today so this is a big bustling city it's kind of self-sufficient isn't it it is self-sufficient it's very self-sufficient because it has to be this is the edge of the roman empire and it is a sort of centerpiece if you like of roman military culture but it's not just the fortress all around here are going to be the cannabis the hapmans the settlements if you like which are a sort of civilian settlement outside the fortress but at kaleen we seem to be finding far more than mere hutmans outside the fortress walls the evidence we're finding of a gigantic monumental complex is something nobody would have expected so what's its function it all hands to the pump as we attempt to find out matt williams is getting ready to muck in hi are you kaz hi hi i'm matt nice to meet you matt nice to meet you kaz is a cardiff uni supervisor and she'll be doing her utmost to keep matt in line their trench is at the edge of the courtyard complex where the team think there's a series of additional buildings running along the side right i've been volunteered to join you in this trench it looks pretty impressive can you tell me what's going on trench fire has been located to find the uh the orientation of the rear range of rooms that form that monumental courtyard within the complex these walls would have formed the main walls of that range of rooms so the walls we see coming out at right angles this one here and this one to the right would have then formed the room dividers the internal walls right so you're standing in a little room there i am indeed okay so where'd you want me then well come on in here got your trowel i have indeed always got my trailer with me fantastic so the plan for today really is to take down this dark silty stuff in the hope that we can find a nice floor surface so a posh floor to go with the posh wall really that would be fantastic opus signing them something like that brilliant lovely opus igninum was a waterproof building material made of mortar mixed with fragments of crushed tiles or terracotta there's pot with pot coming up already look there's a piece there we have out of here another piece here yeah trays and trays full of pottery animal bone oyster shells bits of plaster that have come off the wall fantastic finds coming up as well we could be looking at a fairly grand series of rooms running along the courtyard edge but it's still too early to tell for sure it was all going so well but this is wales in summer what else did you expect still just before the weather turned phil harding made a rather intriguing find i know this is the middle of august but the rain has been tipping down everybody has left the trenches except these two intrepid archaeologists who are very excited about something what have you got lance it's a really stunning object what is it peter a very unusual find it's an intaglio what does that mean it's a gemstone that's been engraved you can imagine how difficult it would have been to engrave such a small object and it would have sat in the middle of a fingering um something that a roman legionary would have worn on one of his fingers have a look so it's got sort of figures in it isn't it it represents roman imperialism the eagle we have the roman emperor augustus in the person of the capricorn which is also the symbol of the roman legion and then of course the horn of plenty the cornucopia is associating bountifulness and good times with roman rule i think this is the most beautiful delicate little fine we've had on time team for ages i know and the beautiful thing is it came from our trench and actually the archaeology in the trench ain't bad we actually put this trench in to examine the square building that showed up on the geophysics yeah yeah well you can actually see now the corner of the square building not only have you got it but that certainly doesn't look like a victorian privy to me it's definitely not a victorian privy i think we're happy with that it's unusual in that it's made of bits of roman brick and tile not the normal mortar and stone that we expect and i was talking to tim earlier on about it and he said being that he's made out of tiles like that explains where it showed up differently on the geophysics to a lot of the other walls and it's the only building if that's right it's the only building in this massive complex that's not built out of stone and mortar the only one that's made out of roman brick and tile instead so our mystery building is already looking very promising given the materials it's been built with it could turn out to be something very significant indeed it's been a fantastic first day helping out on this remarkable site but we're ending the day in the campsite where all the students and volunteers live for the duration of the dig and those volunteers now include matt and raksha we've got a surprise for you uh to help build the team a bit we don't like the idea of the students sleeping in all these tents while you go off to some grand hotel so in order to build team you two are sleeping in there tonight yeah we are serious actually i've got a surprise for you i came here my camper van today so if it's all right i think i'll just sleep in that so it's just gonna be you right yeah beginning of day two here at kalian in south wales where we're helping to investigate some mysterious and huge structures that surround one of the biggest roman fortresses in britain these tents by the way aren't ours they belong to the cardiff university archaeological team who are doing most of the digging although having said that that tent is ours as is this camper van because last night in the spirit of camaraderie we got raksha and matt to stay here overnight here's a bacon sandwich for you cheers i hear that you might have had to have visited quite a few public houses in killian last night in order to help you get to sleep yeah we did it it was there to numb the the freezing cold and the pain matt you drew the long straw there's your thank you very much uh how was the night for you um pretty wild we didn't have a great amount of sleep but i feel fairly refreshed i mean that you know the cap in the morning open the van door and then there's rain on your face straight away so i'm ready for it i think do you think you're beginning to get a grip of the archaeology of this place well definitely because uh we turned up yesterday and as you know usually we start and finish within three days but i came in there yesterday and the supervisor was there and they've been digging for three weeks here's the rubble they've gone through this we've gone through that so already straight away we're into the middle of the trench and there's so much stuff has been going on already and yeah i think are we getting onto it are you losing your voice i am indeed losing my voice oh i think there might be a bit of karaoke last night oh messy messy but while those two are still reaching for the alca seltzer one stalwart of british archaeology is already wide awake and itching to seize the day phil's strength is starting to look very ambitious let's hope he's not biting off more than he can chew in the two days we've got left here [Music] let's just take a bit more of that side of that stone and let's just see whether or not it goes down onto that sort of just just clean gray silk phil's key aim for today will be to find the courtyard's surface this could give us a vital clue as to the function of the mystery building and the wider area surrounding it [Music] and while phil cracks on marianne's dropping into the town's museum she's going to take a look at some of the key finds to have emerged from the fortress over the years some of them look downright vicious okay these are obvious to me that's a a spare point and this is all weaponry isn't it yes we obviously being a legionary fortress we've got a tremendous collection of military items from spearheads arrowheads some of which have clearly seen action you can see that that's hit a target fantastic but we also have some of the ring mail of the centurion the centurion war that type of body armor but then we've got some other weaponry these car trops here would be thrown on the ground and whichever way they land there's one spike that faces upwards so they just throw them on the ground and when it went into either a horse or man's foot that's it it brings them down yes and they're still used today to stop cars the police use them as a stinger even to this day they're very effective tried and tested method and what about this it's the image of somebody with long curly flowing hair leaning forward he's naked these are not roman traits he's clearly got his arms bound behind his back and we believe he's probably represented a captured native possibly even a native salute from the salary tribe in this part of the world and he might be leaning forward because he's about to receive a sword blow to the back of the head from a soldier or a cavalryman gosh you can't really get away from the fact that this is a military science certainly is a military site and i'm sure the soldiers would have liked this type of art personally i'm not sure quite how much time the battle-hardened legionaries would have had for art appreciation this after all would have been a busy bustling fortress a constant hive of activity and nowhere in the fortress would have been busier than the river bank where goods and men were shipped in and out of kaleen so alex is exploring a trench that looks like it's picked up the roman key side scott now things have dried up here in trench one we've got a really good opportunity to check out this stratigraphy haven't we yeah absolutely i mean the rain's brought out the colours you can see the various layers overlying each other and what we seem to have here are various events of tipping and ground makeup for presumably ground reclamation so they're building up the ground surface in this part of the trench but what are they doing in other parts of the trench well behind you we've got the taking the wall um and that effectively divides the the wet side of the the port to the uh dry side yep yeah and the crucial thing here is this clay then that's bonding the tegular wall together that's creating a sort of waterproof boundary absolutely so what they're trying to do is rework this area then to maintain access to the river though yeah i mean this could be an event where the river's silting up um and it's moving away from their port wall and so they're putting hard standing down they're reclaiming the land they're moving closer to the river as it moves away from right so we've almost certainly got a working keysight here i think so i mean if we look at the surface farther back over there yep um we've got a flagstone surface and uh you can see that there's parts of the flags missing and it's a good hard working surface yeah but it's very smooth isn't it yeah yeah i've been seeing a lot of foot traffic yeah now that's actually that's carrying essentially up to our supposed monumental feature traffic from the key side yeah so goods and people coming in here are going to have been using this floor to get up to that part of the site yeah it leads you in it takes you from the port side all the way up into the courtyard to the complex up there so far it's not an especially grand keysight could that mean that the courtyard lying beyond it is likewise less grand than we might have imagined it's too early to tell but there's no denying that some of kaleen's main structures were built on a truly impressive scale guy this must be one of the most intact roman structures in khalil if not the whole of roman britain it's a fantastically well preserved amphitheater but what we've got are only the bottom parts of it it had a huge wooden superstructure all the way around the top so you can imagine it towering over you how many people would it have seated well at least six thousand which is a pretty large number and many of them would have been gathered up here watching gladiators who would have started off their bouts by saluting the president of the games who would have been up over here and right out in the middle here this is where most of the bouts would have taken place and where someone would have died and this is where their bodies would have been dragged away from is that what was happening here gladiators fighting to the death christian martyrs being thrown to the lions i'm not too sure about the christian martyrs although that might have happened but what we would have had is slave gladiators people whose lives were basically doomed they weren't going to live very long they were going to have horrible grizzly deaths out here but you haven't already got slave gladiators you've also got amateur soldier gladiators men who wanted to be like the great gladiators who would come out here and try and do their level best but it's not the only thing that happened here because what you should also imagine is the roman army performing here they would have put on celebrations of great battles from roman history but this is one of the most interesting features what's this this is the shrine to nemesis and nemesis is fate and fate is the goddess who determines if you're fighting out here whether you live or die that day time team's matt williams may not quite have the physique of a gladiator but he's battling admirably against his hangover matt have you been getting on here am i right going across here yes just give across onto that wall yeah yeah how are you getting on pretty well i mean we uh came in here yesterday and cass said we've got a lovely painted plaster wall let's find the floor to go with it uh so it came in and we've just got one floor i've come up with two we've got this lovely crushed tile floor there and then there's an earlier white plaster floor underneath it there so what's happening in the rest of the trains well if you're coming down this way yeah you're in the room there uh this is where the main front wall of the corridor was so if you step down here and echo now we're outside yeah and we're in another kind of covered walkway a bit like the back and here's the line we should have had the posts on and the floor the roof coming over the top so now we nip outside it's beautiful kind of stone pavement there that is lovely it's absolutely amazing why is it flipped up at 90 degrees i think that might be something to do with uh water management there would have been a lot of uh water coming off the roof here and there's a drain just behind you there sure so that's basically to stop maybe the flooding of the uh of the main courtyard area it's a fine example of the careful civic planning for which the romans are renowned and rigorous roman planning alongside very rigorous discipline is what turned the mighty legions into such an effective military force when we talk about the legions themselves what do we know of the structure and the hierarchy we know that they were divided into ten cohorts which were subdivided into centuries and each century was made up of 80 men it used to be a hundred men it had become reduced to 80 but they had kept the title century and essentially you won't be surprised to hear was commanded by a centurion these are the blokes are going to be standing there saying you giving them a really really tough time those are the chaps you'd be scared of right which brings us neatly alex to your love of experimental archaeology yes and how there might be no better way of understanding life as a roman legionary than to live it for 24 hours right okay this is sandals and skirts time i guess all the way are you working for it well i don't think i've got any choice about this have i no no no we've got a lovely delicious horrible little man centurion waiting for you over there right so are you ready to do your duty for rome alex at my signal unleash hell or half a dozen legionaries anyway [Applause] now chris i've been somewhat press ganged into joining the legion and as i understand it it's 25 years of my life i'm signing away here indeed and in fact if you're enjoying that 25 years you also are not allowed to make a legal marriage right and if you were married when you enlisted the actual process of joining the legion would be an automatic form of divorce right before you joined the legion you would be expected to have purchased your kit you're in the kit of a typical legionary of the first century a.d with this uh laurica segmentata type armor made of strips of metal yeah joined together entire side on leather straps so even though it feels heavy it's quite flexible right so in terms of training what's the sort of first steps well first step with any soldiers really is to learn how to march we know that the roman soldier was trained to march some 20 miles in five hours okay that's quite a pace really it is yes okay right well i'll put my um my hat on what's this called it's called a casus casus yeah and finally you you need uh scutum very large shield it's um type of shield that you know riot police are still using today yeah well they're in that shape great stuff and uh this throwing javelin called a peelum a peelum right so i'm fully kitted up and ready for war yes well you better introduce me to my new family i will do where is the vexilarius come on get here no you two should be there shouldn't you you're dozy not you him next draw some would eat a turn to your right [Music] [Music] see you in 25 years then alex good luck hopefully phil's trench won't take quite that long to start producing some results can i get in your trench left by all means come on in now this is the one that we put in yesterday because of the geophys which showed up this part of your monumental complex and yet you seem to have got bored with that side of the trench and you've started working here ah but you've also got to remember that when we actually had that discussion we also flagged up the the fact that we needed to try and find the surface of that monumental complex and what we've been able to do is actually get through the full sequence of the of the deposit where is the bedrock where is the natural the natural is right down to the bottom of that hole with the muddy pedals so really you haven't managed to find the surface that you were looking for uh we have where is it in the uh uh we're actually standing on it really here what what is there here that tells you that this is some kind of archaeological surface well look here you've got a big lumps of charcoal you've got brick and tile and here you've got an enormous chunk of pottery and then over there you've actually got a piece of of iron slag but you've also got buildings here as well where are your buildings uh well actually one of the crucial pieces of evidence is where you're standing you're standing on it oh this thing here yep so what do you think that is paid well there's a series of uh these large flat stones that seem to be set into the surface and we're thinking that there might be post pads so you'd have a big timber and rather than driving a hole in the ground and putting it in you'd simply have a flat stone which you can then rest your pad on and as long as the superstructure in the roof is heavy enough it should stay in position but what it means is is that this this monumental complex the courtyard surface may actually have had quite rudimentary buildings it gives you a totally different impression of what was going on in here people were i don't know about living here but certainly working here there were been buildings in here so our large courtyard and its associated buildings may be looking less grand and imposing more rustic and work a day [Music] but we've been wrong before and at this stage we've still got no idea what kind of structure it was keep digging phil it's not just the remains of the military buildings that are so fascinating on this site we've been getting a lot of small fines as well although frankly raksha your fine isn't exactly small is it not really what is it well tony we were cleaning away this section hoping to find the remains of a robbed out wall and came down on this large white object and it appears to be a section of roman water piping really idea what it would have been for water supply water drainage uh we know that there was a baths to the north of the site um we've got high status buildings which will need very often have water supplies to them this isn't the whole thing though is it no it isn't because this is still carrying on in that direction and it's also going off in that direction i mean it's it's such a surprise we're so happy we thought we were going through the the kind of backfill from the 1920s excavation of the amphitheater and we've come down onto roman layers we've got this stonking great pipe and i can't really express how significant this is i've never excavated one of these before in my archaeological career raksha and rob have found a vital clue the lead pipe means we've got fairly grand buildings at the edge of the courtyard certainly more than mere rustic huts but over at phil's trench the quest for a floor surface isn't going quite to plan he keeps turning up rough unworked stone [Music] yet in most cases wherever you pop in a trench at kaleen there seem to be rich pickings the cardiff archaeologists have had hundreds of small fines out of their trenches this year what's this um this is actually an open work belt plate you can see it's pierced it would have been on a roman soldier's belt so it would have been silvered originally and contrasting against the leather of the belt it would have been quite spectacular and those plates went all the way around the belt the military belt was the symbol of being a member of the roman army and all the status that goes with that if a soldier was disgraced part of his punishment might be to stand in public without his military belt and that was a a major way of disgracing a soldier wow felt this shame what about these i mean obviously that looks to me like a brooch yes it's a horse brooch this is probably one of the latest finds from this site and possibly dates to the fourth century then we have some other animal broaches some very nice uh zoomorphic broaches again of about the same period zoomorphic being they're in the shape of an animal the shape of an animal they respected a lot of the natural world and they looked at the traits of different animals and and admired many of the qualities and that's reflected in some of the broaches they chose to wear the finds have helped peter and his team build up a detailed picture of daily life here in the fortress but there's only one way to truly experience a legionaries lot and that's to spend some time being ordered around by a bossy centurion alex langlands is about to enter the man-to-man combat phase of his legionary training okay so i throw the javelin and then you just draw your gladius almost i've got my obviously i've got my shield up here like that so you use your shield to knock him in the face and come in like that stab him with the shoulder and give it a give it a bit of that there like that really nasty but i've also got a dagger here as well now what would that be if you broke or lost your sword or if the enemy were really pressed up close together right you can see from the shape of the dagger once again it's a stabbing weapon yeah and that would be useful for stabbing once again into that into their neck in there yes into the stomach that would be ideal nice and soft all right so alex we're gonna put you in there and um see if you can do some training with a great stuff with the wooden sword and wicker shield right okay so if you both want to get stuck into each other nothing personal then [Music] come on get stuck in harder harder come on this is not the girl guides and again boy and again and again i think you've got the measurement this one are you trying alex use the sword come on stick in there push and stop pushing stop use that shield use that shield okay [Music] oh i submit a yield to the might of the legions well that was quite good it just goes to show they do say even a trained man in a battle yeah could only fight for about 10 10 minutes or so when he would need to draw back and let other ranks come forward to to take over the fighting that's absolutely knackering yes absolutely i have to say your fitness levels need to uh are not quite as good as you thought they might be can i get a job in the camp kitchen honestly i cook a mean soup [Laughter] [Music] if there's one man who's never daunted by hard labor it's the centurion of the trenches phil harding he's been motoring ahead today but is he any closer to explaining what went on in this giant courtyard phil yesterday morning you started excavating this trench because geophys told you that there might be a magnificent building here and we've got the top of it but then you moved over here in order to try and find the surface associated with it thinking i imagine that it might be flagstones or whatever but what you found was something entirely different yeah i mean really what we've got is an earthen yard i mean we've got areas where people are actually living areas of burning it's a much more utilitarian ordinary sort of yard surface and what have you found here well we do have an enormous pile of of stones now logically the all the building material around here is stone apart from the tiles here so it could well be that this is a dump of of stones that have come from another building but the big question is what do we do in this trench tomorrow well the big question is in front of us what is that building yeah it's why we came and why we put this trench here in the first place the good sign is that we've actually got our floor levels at a low level and walls at a higher level so there should be at least this much of it we think we will are likely to be able to get standing walls maybe a foot high really exciting and now there's just one more day left to solve this archaeological mystery [Music] 8 am on the dig site time to rouse the troops it's nearing the end of a very exciting summer for the cardiff university team working here they've already succeeded in learning much more about this startling site and even at this late hour the finds just keep tumbling out of the ground over at the keysight trench they've just unearthed another direct link to the roman legions it's ages since i've been on a site where there's been such a wealth of small fines but the one that always gets romanists going is something like this isn't it it is absolutely this is a small piece of old red sandstone with three letters on it and we can see part of the letter a a v or a u and then probably a g at the end do those letters have any particular significance to you it's extremely significant because it's an abbreviation for the word augustus or another word augusta so of or the emperor or by the emperor and what was the relationship between augustus and this place the second augustine legion that was based here was raised by the emperor augustus at the end of the 1st century bc and also various monumental inscriptions were erected in roman britain and around the empire in the emperor's name and subsequent emperors took augustus as one of their titles where do you think this inscription would have been it would have come from a much larger inscription that probably sat we think above the main entrance way into the courtyard complex that phil's trench is in and it essentially would have allowed people to recognize who had built this and there would have been perhaps a processional route from this part of the port on into the major complex funneling people in obviously it's all about roman imperialism and projecting imperial power so how many courses have we got here then we've got one two three and we've got certainly got a fourth one there ah no then is that that is a stone and it's going under the wall so that war is built on all that stonework now that's something we never expected i thought they might have leveled it up a bit better than that and put some decent foundations down but wow it looks like they've just just chucked in a lot of rubble and built the wall up on that but there's no argument at all that is the bottom of the wall and there's a big piece of stone going underneath it that is the information we want that's good that really is good so another clue that this building may not have been as grand as we thought it was i really think i'm beginning to get a handle on this site and the key to it is the river ask which when you're working in this field you're not at all aware of but in fact it's just behind that hedge line there and in roman times people would have sailed here from the continent up the ask they would have landed at that port they would have stepped on british soil right here for the first time they would have come through this huge archway they would have entered the monumental complex and they would have been confronted by the enigmatic building that phil's been working on for the last three days phil this has been what we've been waiting for isn't it the moment when we began to uncover all the debris around this building yeah the first good news is that it's not square anymore you're kidding no no i'm not kidding it is now oblong it is twice the size that we originally thought how why where well you know originally we we we had this square building that showed on the geophysics you can see i'm standing in one room of it we've got one wall going along there one room going along there now we can actually find that we've got a similar size room of exactly the same dimensions tagged on in this direction you can see the wall going off in that direction there is it just me or does the line of it respect the entrance up from the port that is that is so important tony the fact that the alignment of this rectangular building does respect the symmetry of the whole courtyard so whatever this building was it was part of this enormous imperial statement slap bang in the middle of kerlian absolutely so the scale of our mystery structure implies that it was something rather important but not all the evidence points that way we still don't have a clear idea of its function just half a day left for us to work out exactly what the romans were up to in these rather muddy fields and it's getting muddier by the minute another dose of invigorating welsh rain still it's not enough to stop matt and kaz toiling away matt you seem to have been up to your knees in drains for two and a half days now well there's a drain coming through here and early this afternoon we discovered that this other one here and you can see the top across stateware casters matt before we go on you've got to promise me one thing you will never go anywhere near a karaoke machine ever again it's got to keep me away from cardiff students guests what have you got well this wall we saw yesterday that was the division between the building and the courtyard to the right of me we thought this was originally wall tumble that had come off the wall but actually removing half of it today we've got tiles covering a drain why have we got so much water management well i have a theory we've got drains the drains here we have this pavement with a lip on it that i showed you yesterday and there we have the courtyard the surface that i showed you has actually turned out to be nothing all we have is silt clay almost kind of river type deposits i think that this whole courtyard area was subject to some pretty bad flooding but the river's about 100 meters from where we are now it is tony but we know that from roman britain the climate changed from the mid third century onwards so we're getting much wetter weather and actually that could explain that this part of uh colleen hill may well have flooded so could that be the reason why this once great roman settlement fell into disuse yes indeed it could and we've actually managed to take some samples out of these drains and hopefully that will help tell us when and if that happened that's great matt the whole of the decline and fall of this part of the roman empire could be writ large in your trench just the top five meters it's a good result and peter is now getting a really clear picture of this monumental courtyard area but what are the mystery building in the heart of the complex time's now up for our contribution to the dig has phil got any answers well it's a lovely piece of archaeology phil but what does it tell us about this building well it tells us that it was never quite as grand as perhaps we once thought it was i mean the story is quite clear once they decided that this was where they were actually going to build their building and they looked around and they was realized that this is a boggy flood plain so they flung down some of that big stone rubble over there that gave them a firm foundation and then they build up about four or five courses of the tiles you can see where they actually bed onto the stonework and on the top of that they build a timber frame superstructure ah so this is probably all the wall that there ever was this is the only wall that there was it it strikes me anyway is what you would expect in caroline a very symmetrical building and it's not flamboyant it is very military to me and we know that it's aligned to the entranceway pete what does that say about this building well it still puts it in the central part of this big courtyard so it's clearly important it's the first building you would have seen had you got off a ship or a barge in the middle of the port looking in this direction and it tells us a great deal about what was going on in the courtyard where are the fancy floors we can't find those at all so we're looking at a building that might have a more of a functional role perhaps something to do with this space being used as a stockade or a corral rather than the big open yard where leaders might have paraded so the courtyard and the building in the middle of it were most likely to be used for controlling goods and people coming in and out of the fortress perhaps it was a customs post or holding area but crucially the new evidence from the dig suggests colleen was even more important than previously thought a place with a large port and an administrative center as well as being a mighty fortress [Music] it was a crucial landmark in rome and britain and only thanks to the dig has the full scale of this imposing site become clear you

Channel: Time Team Classics

Views: 227,713

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, Roman Britain, Roman Empire, Welsh History, Romano-British Culture, Sub-Roman Britain, Hadrian's Wall, Julius Caesar, Gallic Wars, British Iron Age, Gnaeus Julius Agricola, Tacitus, Antoninus Pius

Id: kXd_RJkZoTg

Length: 46min 48sec (2808 seconds)

Published: Wed May 27 2020