Is There A Giant Iron Age Settlement Hidden Under Lincolnshire? | Time Team | Odyssey

[Music] take a look at this and this and this it may seem hard to believe but the locals here in rural lincolnshire reckon that all these are part of a posh roman building and they've got good reason to think so because nearby in this field a local metal detectorist has come up with some really extraordinary fines isn't that beautiful and look at that and that they all suggest that in roman times something quite special was going on here and we've got just three days to find out what [Music] the romans reached lincolnshire within years of the 43 ad invasion lincoln became a great roman center but there are no records of roman activity at our site we can be 12 miles from lincoln wickenbee seems to be nowhere near any roman roads and there's no evidence of a roman town really close by [Music] and yet metal detectorists have found hundreds of roman broaches coins and bric-a-brac in two fields around wickenbee initial geophys has been done by local archaeologists but what was happening here in roman times has continued to remain a mystery come on then francis this is the 2004 geophys what's it tell us well it tells us there's a lot of archaeology there danny there's an awful lot there are a lot of ditches there they're on at least two alignments which suggests at least two phases there are a lot of fines out of the middle i think you're looking at a fairly major series of roman settlements john the gift this has already been done you're redundant there's lots of areas we want to actually revisit i mean take this anomaly here that's on the far side of the hedge i just wonder whether that's an industrial area and then look they've not actually found the limits of the settlement we need to extend the survey and get the wider picture phil i've got an odd feeling about this one the geophys has already been done and it's francis who's always saying to us that metal detectorist fines can just be the background noise of antiquity and there might not be much going on here at all is it worth doing it well it is because what they were able to do was establish unquestionably that there is settlement here and and what we want to do is actually try and open out some bigger areas to put more flesh on their story so we can actually see what's going on here [Music] roddy hole down here let's make a hole [Music] so phil opens trench one over an area where a large concentration of fines have been discovered [Music] and yeah fizz get going over the rest of the field where the ditches seem to continue not of a sniff of phones is it no but it's not long before something roman does emerge [Music] whoa oh our first find our first shirt of pot look at that well i don't think we'll call the british museum quite yet [Music] there's evidence of roman towns outside lincoln but we know virtually nothing about the rural areas in roman times [Music] wickenby's roman finds already give us a glimpse of everyday life in the country with cosmetic devices elaborate drinking spouts and religious icons [Music] yet we'd expect a countryside settlement to be a farmstead not quite the place for so many spectacular metal finds [Music] our excavation gives us the rare chance to shed light on what seems to be a rural yet wealthy and active roman settlement it's not just the geophase and fines that suggest a community here but some locals think these columns were once part of a roman structure it may seem surprising but original roman columns are lurking in other gardens [Music] stone expert peter hill sets off to investigate whether the ones in wickembee are original [Music] within a few hours of digging our first trench is already giving us a new insight into what romano british people were doing here fines on the morning of day one phil you've been working overtime you bet we've got all the evidence here for a roman salmon we've got masses of big shards of roman pottery okay they're a bit they're a bit churned around at the edges because they've been in the plow soil but we've got our first copper alloy object which was the reason we came here and we've also got burnt stone so we can demonstrate that people were actually living here you're happy that all that is roman oh yeah oh well i think so but i'm very happy about this tony it's white it's very heavy i think it's lead alloy but what really excites me about this is that i think this could have been actually melted here on site look at this a dozen manky bits and a seed train they think they've got the roman equivalent of manchester there's archaeologists molten lead suggests not rural farming but metal working and john thinks that a huge blob on the geophys may give us more evidence i don't understand why you're so interested in that blob when there's 50 other blobs this blob is actually set within this small ring and when you look at the characteristics it's stronger than lots of the other anomalies and it suggests to me that it might be small-scale industrial say small kiln or oven something like that if it is industry guy what do you think it might be i agree with john there's a range of possibilities and a kiln pottery industry that's perfectly possible but actually we've got so many metal finds from the site and scrap type metal finds i think one of the most likely possibilities is that it's a furnace to do with bronze metalwork and where would the metal have come from there's going to be new metal being mined but also there's a whole industry of scrap metal going on in the roman world you know the time we live in metal is terribly cheap and labor is terribly expensive but in the ancient world as in the third world today it's much cheaper to get a man to rework old metal so you've probably got scrap metal coming in as well as the stuff that's being made here so do you think that some of those metal detectoring finds which look so fantastic to us could actually have been old metal that's being recycled oh some of them almost certainly are because they're so broken and damaged and it would explain why they're in that state and why they've been left here [Music] phil moves to open a trench over john's blob where we think there might be evidence of metal working in a recycling center nearly a hundred roman broaches have been found at wickenbee mostly dating to the first century helen's been studying them and she doesn't agree with guy that they were here to be recycled a lot of brooches haven't got an enormous number of breaches it's quite incredible and i'm having a look at them because one of the suggestions for the use of this site has been that it might be a manufacturing site for broaches but i can't see any evidence of that everything that you can see here has been finished everything's been done there's no unfinished bits and pieces here the alternative of course is that this place might have been taking broaches to cut up for scrap and recycling but in that case why only broaches it's a real mystery to me still guy you are one of those who thinks that all this is scrap metal aren't you i think i am now helen just said too many broaches and that's somehow special but you know as well as i do that every roman site produces broaches in abundance yes and this abundance well they're portable yeah that's because this is a manufacturing site whereas the other ones aren't they're portable they easily break and they go out of fashion what better source of metal for scrap and reworking show me the unfinished brooches show me i didn't say they were making brushes and you've had your saying was a manufacturing site those were that's what you said and i just cannot see any evidence of it these are all finished the enameling has all been done all the tooling all the pins are there everything is finished and if it was scrap why concentrate on brooches why not just use anything for scrap i didn't say it was a broach manufacturing site deary me what manufacturing side is it then this is this is the last chance that we've got to have a look at all the fires that have come up so far there's going to be more fireworks soon when we start pulling up our own fines keep at it and the quality of these things is extraordinary as well isn't it but if you've made broaches in their bro halfway through day one and roman wickenbee is already bringing us to blows ah got archaeology here but at least phil's beginning to expose hard evidence of activity on the site tracy yeah this is a lot more promising oh nice but what we've got is the top of the natural creeping through i think that orangy stuff and we've got the same stuff there and then look through the middle i think we got probably got some sort of a ditch but when we come back here now look oh yeah charcoal nice now that is the most encouraging archaeological material i've seen in any of the trenches with signs of burning things are looking good for guys proposed recycling centre where tools sculptures and bowls could have been made and two years ago a metal bowl was discovered just yards from phil's trench it's not just remarkably intact but it may conceal more clues to life in roman wickenbee why is it in such amazingly good condition i mean it's not broken how did it get into the ground absolutely i mean it looks as though it has been held in a very alkaline soil it's been in it's been in very good condition in the soil until it was excavated it looks as though the bowl was deposited in this position and then soil has been covered over it and within that we've got a lot of organics we've got a lot of roots a lot of leaves that kind of thing but that's still not telling us about the function of the bowl yes and when you say organic of course as it's a roman bowl you start thinking about maybe it's a votive deposit maybe it's something to do with a a religious part of the site with with a food offering or maybe even a libation of wine in it i mean it would be fantastic if we could just see one big white fatty blob at the bottom of it bowl of cheese absolutely or some olive oil or something like that used in that libation in the village we've been investigating whether strange columns around wickenbee could be from a roman building as some locals believe we're right in the heart of rural lincolnshire here lots of lovely houses a lot of them new neat driveways but these really old pillars keep turning up could they be roman most unlikely if you look at this very clean neat moulding here much too neatly finished to be typically roman very largely unweathered no very unlikely so what do you think it is almost certainly 18th century typical 18th century classical column there's more to show you how about this one pieces right um very similar to the last one we saw the same molding on the top now pretty much knocked about but it is the same very cleanly worked there and no it's looked very on roman again 18th century classical there's going to be an awful lot of disappointed people in the village i'm awfully sorry i can't help it so no grand roman building for the locals but given the range of fines and the complex geofiz we suspect that there was more than a roman farmstead here [Music] and our first trench is giving us a glimpse of this mysterious settlement with a maze of roman archaeology and hints of an even earlier community from the iron age from the centuries before the romans arrived well you promised me a big trench this isn't bad is it well you can see now tony why we need such a big trench it's absolutely crammed with archaeology i mean up here there seems to be a floor or a spread of some sort i mean it's loads of pottery you can see roman pottery surface there and then as you come around here if you look along there you can see there's a diagonal one just going right through to our feet here our feet here and continuing at the far end that produced iron age pottery so that could be early when you come around here and there and they've got two things there that's it yeah and and they've got roman pottery in them so i mean there's shed loads of archaeology would you say that this is categorical evidence that we've got roman settlement here oh without a shadow of doubt oh yes but is there iron age here and anything later that's what i want to find out so not only have we got a substantial roman settlement but francis suspects this ditch is part of an earlier iron age one while we closed down trench one john's geo fizz has uncovered a whole new feature and we've heard there's a water spring in the corner of the field why have you brought us to the other end of the field well look we've put the three trenches in and they've basically confirmed the results of the earlier geophysics the one thing i said that we wanted to do was extend the survey in this direction and that's what we've done and look we've got masses of ditches continuing whole series of pits and then this fantastic circular anomaly there what do you think that might be well i think it's got to be a roundhouse yeah it has to be yes so would that be iron age uh not necessarily tonya they can be roman in this part of the world are we going to dig it oh we've got it yes oh absolutely the thing is tony this is now far more than just a mere farmstead or series of farmers dude it's much much bigger i mean it goes way over there beyond that hedge it's looking for all the world like i don't know i'm in a small town or something like that but there's more to it over there behind the fence in those sort of dry reeds we know there was a spring there now springs were very often ritual centers there were a focus and i think we've simply got to dig that because that holds the clue to why there's a settlement here in the first place so we've got a spring who knows maybe a sacred spring we've got a round house we've got a roman new town we've got coins coming up all over the place what could possibly go wrong it started raining beginning of day two here in lincolnshire where we're looking at what could be a huge roman settlement yesterday it bucketed down with rain today we've got 25 mile an hour gusts of wind but the archaeology is really intriguing behind me there's what could be a roman spring or maybe it was used in the iron age in front of me there's an intriguing circle which could be an iron age house or once again maybe roman which gives us quite a conflict of interest on my right we have guy de la bedoire internationally renowned romanist on our left francis pryor who failed his latino level [Laughter] francis why are you so interested in the iron age stuff when it's a roman site we've come to see well because the romans in britain were iron age people roman settlements always satis nearly always start with iron age settlements the reason that iron age people were living here is the same reason that romano british people were living here and if we can crack why the iron age people came here then we know why the roman people were here i mean they're far more important than than the romans francis turns up to all these places on with his iron age and his bronze age goggles and in fact i'm amazed he hasn't got us looking for a neolithic cause-word enclosure by now the thing is that all the prehistoric stuff's very difficult to find the visible side to this site is roman this field is awash with roman finds that's why we're here that's what we've got to understand what about this spring um well if it is an iron age site the iron age people would have used that as a sort of religious center it would be the equivalent of the parish church and if we have a sacred spring or something there it would be gorgeous because that would explain why this place was occupied in the first instance so it looks like we might have an archaeological gold mine here francis is always doing this he seems to forget that you i and even francis have to drink water that's why people come to springs in the first place that's the most important thing the religious bit comes second do you care that it looks like we might have an iron age roundhouse here do you know if i had access to the most powerful microscope in the world i would still even then be unable to locate my interest in that iron age roundhouse each to his own [Music] francis opens a trench where the farmer remembers a pond of water that formed from a spring [Music] if francis can find evidence of an iron age settlement it could explain why there were people here in roman times and it could also help us understand the transition here from iron age to roman culture in fact any clues to this roman site are important as we're revealing wickembee to be far more than a farmstead it's already produced hundreds of metal artifacts and coins the most surprising is the large number of roman broaches [Music] guy thinks that these were part of a rural metal recycling effort and that phil's trench may give us supporting evidence guy you promised me a recycling center all i can see is a big black stain in the ground i didn't promise you anything i was just indulging in some frantic but uh sincere speculation what have we got well it is a big black stain in the ground actually but it's what's in that big black stain in the ground which is really interesting i mean we are getting lots of things like this food waste you see there's a dining out on oysters we're getting masses and masses of pottery but something which we've not had before and we've only just started to get is this burnt clay now burnt clay is structural that has come out of a furnace or or an oven probably something um industrial aha oh yeah yeah what it's a big black stain in the ground if there is an oven there could it still be there or is it likely to have gone by now it could still be intact i mean what would happen is at the top part it would would weather and so what we'd be looking at is the decayed top of it but we'd only have to go right the way down before we perhaps get the base the intact bit of it but rather than being a recycling center it could just be a rubbish dump a landfill yeah how do you feel now internationally renowned romanist [Music] not to be outdone francis is desperately trying to locate the pond of a spring which could give clues to the iron age and roman periods it doesn't look very like a pond [Music] that looks strangely undisturbed that's not a pond can we go further over ian yesterday bridge began to conserve a metal bowl found several years ago at the site and with evidence for metal working there's been speculation this bowl was made from recycled metal the romans recycled many forms of metal including coins and indeed coins keep emerging at wickenbee look at that silver denarius sort of late first early second search look at the detail on the head absolutely crisp as a button beautiful [Music] the site seems crammed with roman archaeology but then the roundhouse john found that we thought was roman could be much much older at least if francis and his passion for pre-history turns out to be right so john is this the latest geophysics yes what i've done is i've zoomed in onto that ring feature we were talking about earlier and there's three actual elements there's a definite kiln there i have no doubts about it then you see this speckled sort of response now that could be waste material from the kiln and then clearly we've got the big ring i mean it's 15 meters in diameter there's no obvious entrance that i can see but there is an internal sort of feature that could make it well i mean an early bronze age barrow around sort of 2000 bc and maybe the thing in the middle is a grave i mean it's possible but it's the size of a thing look i mean if i run out to the edge it's a long way it's a long way and we've got to go right round if you go over there to where we're going to dig look we've got to go round here we're now on the edge of matt's trench where are we going to put that well like that in effect to take in some of this later material yeah i think it looks very exciting right let's go for it [Music] so a trench goes in over what francis hopes to be a burial mound dating back over 3000 years so this we're just getting down to this sub soil now [Music] there's a few bits of bone animal bone i think that is that bandage pot well prehistoric pot it's not roman thank heavens please use influence yes it's interesting while we're uncovering the iron age story we're still on the search for evidence of how roman culture impacted on rural iron age life we know iron age lincoln was transformed into a grand centre within decades of the romans arrival but what about the transition in the country clues are emerging in phil's trench it's a cracking piece of pot you've got there maria the the rim is still going on down isn't it yeah i think it's still going down that way so what we're actually looking at we've got the rim of the pot going round there and then this is the shoulder shoulder there yes and you can see the sharp changing angles so what sort of i mean are we looking at a pot this big or this big no probably only only about this side we've got quite the sharp shoulder and then it's going to come quite rapidly down to our base i would say is that a you and me type part or is that a host status knobs pot no that's rather an everyday work a day vessel late iron age but that will carry on over into the early roman period in sites out here in the lincolnshire countryside but but this could actually be very very important to demonstrate that people were actually living here when the romans arrived that there was actually a pre-existing community living on this site and that they'd actually adapted to and changed and adopted the the the roman ware life as the when the romans came in well absolutely i mean there's this change of political control but but in many other ways the life in the countryside just just continues on much as it much as it did in rural lincolnshire adaptation to roman ways may have taken some time with iron age culture surviving well into the roman period but we'd expect the new roman economy and power structure to have radically reshaped the landscape we know of several roman roads around lincoln and major roman settlements cluster around them but wickham is a long way from these roads and so stuart's hoping to find evidence of a link between our site and the major roman road network and the time team website can help you find the roman roads where you live that that could be the natural coming off coming down into the volunteer or not could be earlier in the day we began to dig a spring which could have been used in the iron age and roman periods francis hoped it might hold valuable clues to the site this morning francis you hoped that this would be an iron age spring and guy you were looking for a roman spring what have we got um well we haven't got an iron age spring and we haven't got a roman spring we haven't actually got a spring at all no spring no spring no no it's a springless trench why um well still it's been doing some clever work with the stream patterns here and where that hedges is is a sort of straightened version of the stream system but actually covered a large part of this area with ponds and things so rather than an isolated spring the whole area would have once been a damp bog and that explains why there's no iron age no roman nothing in there it was just simply too boggy what francis is saying in a roundabout way is that i was right and the romans just came over here to use the water and not chucking dinky little votive offerings yes but i'm also right because it proves that the reason people came here in the iron age was the stream and and we've proved that now okay we haven't got a spring no but there must be a spring somewhere no there aren't any springs in the area so the good news is that we've settled the argument they're having this morning the bad news is they're still bickering oh shut up [Music] so we found water in lincolnshire great we've also got lots of ditches a possible prehistoric burial that's definitely roman it's quite fine and roman pottery all over the site but what people were doing in this rural roman settlement still eludes us oh that's a big old shirt then phil who thought he'd got either an industrial site or a rubbish pit begins to uncover some intriguing stones that is it just off the top of it yeah wow see that is he's got big stuff it's got a stone yeah buried in it in it that's dropping down there isn't it yeah the other side whatever it is at last we think we've got a roman wall then john's dear fizz throws an iron age feature into the mix it's come five o'clock why are we putting in another trench at the far end of the field well i think the answer lies in john's geophysics look we said we wanted to try and find the limits of the settlement and i think this curving ditch we've got here may well be the boundary of the iron age settlement now i think this ditch potentially holds the secret of the iron age settlement here it's all about its status and its role and judging by if it's got a rather elaborate interned entrance there it was actually quite quite a substantial thing you know quite showy this isn't just a you know a fence around the edge of the garden but we're not going to see that till tomorrow are we no no no no no should we go to the pub oh come on see you later kerry thank you see you again my brains turn to mush this afternoon we've got geophys that looks like spaghetti we've got archaeology which is just loads of big shadows in the ground we don't really know where we are do we well in a way the problem is we've got too much archaeology i mean on the ground it looks very simple but once you take off the topsoil we've got ditches everywhere we've got pits we've got posters we've got a mass of stuff we've got fines virtually coming out of our ears and i reckon in the last hour or so we we think we've probably got a wall a sort of structure you've got three bricks it's looking like a wall look what you need to do is stand back and look at the geophysics we've just talked about this boundary to the settlement that goes with the iron age a whole series of roundhouses are now visible across the field these go with the curving ditches then you've got these straight lines which i think is the roman settlement superimposed on top it's a clear picture in the geophysics i think yes but i don't i don't think we're looking at something being imposed you've got the original iron age you know the native inhabitants as you like and then you've got the roman economy changing not roman people coming in this is a major period of transition and i think the way to understand a change in the economy is to look at industry and uh well i don't like that you know trench that you've got there phil with the three bricks and don't forget the kiln and i think that kill is crucially important and we must get in and dig that tomorrow okay so we think we've got a kiln we think we've got round houses we think we've got boundary ditches we've got a magnificent wall and we've got just one day left to sort it all out [Applause] beginning of day three here in lincolnshire and i'm not just using the four by four because it's tipping down with rain but also because this site has got so big that you need to drive from trench to trench in order to appreciate its size and we've got only one day left battling through the mud in order to untangle the maze of iron age and roman archaeology yesterday our investigation into a roman site took a new turn what the hell it is we began to uncover evidence of a huge prehistoric settlement if you get that loose up but gently gently it could help us make sense of the settlement that was still here in the roman period and with time ticking on we've frantically started opening new trenches we started digging what francis hopes is a bronze age barrow and grave and we opened a trench over what seems to be a huge iron age enclosure ditch surrounding the site i see ian's doing all the work as usual kerry um what's actually happening here well he's doing very well i'm just keeping an eye on him but he's great looks like he's getting towards the bottom of the ditch but we think if you see that dark patch there yeah this one might have some sort of pit looks pretty massive doesn't i mean it could be a huge post hurdle or something like that is there anything like that on the geo fizz john no not really all i can see is the ditch i mean having said that you talked about this curving entrance now that looks as though there might be too large doesn't it pit's there i mean it'd be nice if you could envisage a whole line of post holes down the bottom of the ditch what a sort of huge palisade well well it's a possibility isn't it if there was a palisade here it suggests a high status iron age settlement this might explain why people were still living in wickenbee in roman times yesterday in the pub francis and john also decided to open a trench which could give clues to roman industry on this rural site as they think it's a kiln so yet another trench gets underway well we've got 10 metres square here in um basically there's a kiln underneath it or something like that so we want to clear that in short order really i mean that that's basically we're just starting to hit that edge yeah yeah yeah keep going a little bit more yeah [Music] over the three days bridge has been busy conserving one of the most spectacular roman finds from the site a metal bowl that is really nice isn't it it's wonderful it's just looking so much nicer than i mean i couldn't imagine that this is what was underneath all that horrible caked up old soil it's so shiny and so lovely you've got any idea what it might have been used for well it's certainly not for cooking i don't think you could put any heat underneath that and the bowl survive a bowl like this could have been used with with some of the weights that have been found previously on this site and the bits of balance arm and so on to be used for weighing something i mean if i take these three rather disparate objects i've got over here and try and show you what i mean these two could be put together to reconstruct what's known as a steel yard you hang it from there so that's your pivot point there's a hook on this end generally and you could use that to hang some kind of bowl from and then you have a weight on this balance arm which you move up and down until it balances but if that was going to be used for weights then it would be hanging from something so you'd have to have holes so it could hang yeah but that's the great thing now that the cleaning's been done actually can see that there's deliberate cut marks and wear marks around the outside of it although some of it is corrosion i believe that this one here is deliberate perforation and cut on the side of the object also this one here now they would be two good places where you'd be able to actually suspend the bowl or the pan so you could have had chains attached to the bowl and then pulling up and attaching to that scale that helen's demonstrated and we've also got some really really nice wear marks on the interior the bowl so it looks as though whatever was being used inside it it was at least harder than the brass it was made from so you're chucking in things like bronze or stone or iron the evidence the bridge has revealed suggests a story of work not of rural farming but of recycling and industry and the same stories emerging in what francis had hoped to be a bronze age burial [Music] francis the round thing that you were looking for in this trench is it a round house or is it a round ditch or is it just not around at all no it's round tony and it's a ditch it may be a house but i think far more likely it's something rather different because out of that ditch we are finding this stuff this is uh plaster yeah and it's roman it can't be iron age but what makes it exciting is that some of it is actually painted you can see here it's painted in two different colours it's lovely it is now that sort of plaster only comes out of high status buildings so could there be a roman building right here well well somewhere in the area i suspect that what we're looking at here the reason we're getting so much of this stuff is that they could have been recycling stone so you demolish a house and then you chip the plaster off the stonework here in order to reuse the stone somewhere else so this could be some form of a workshop i think so no prehistoric structure for francis but we have got a roman workshop metal recycling and now stone recycling yet we still haven't worked out why there was so much roman activity in this quiet corner of lincolnshire we'd hoped a possible kiln could give us clues one two three but in coring we discover the feature possibly a well is very very deep still go over here it's definitely a well the excavation becomes so waterlogged we just can't resolve this trench's story but stewart's found answers from the roman landscape we've got this whole complex of roman boundaries and ditches and stuff in our field but is there any evidence of that roman life still in the landscape today it doesn't look it at first first shot as it were here's lincoln down here over here we've got irman street you can see almost got like a ladder a very regular layout of parishes and here around the site it's almost like crazy paving in comparison you think you'd have no chance of the roman period landscape surviving in there and by looking at the the maps and their photographs and parish boundaries what you can pull out from under that is the roman landscape there's irman street there's a roman road coming north east out of lincoln carries on down here clearly underneath there's a kind of a grid pattern of roads and fields within which our site sits one thing that is really quite striking here is the way these all things come together towards this place called rand where there is evidence of a roman settlement that looks to be like a small market center where whatever was being produced here at our site will be transported down to round and then exchange sold whatever and then along the roman road network to lincoln and beyond is this kind of discovery of much smaller scale roman habitation fairly new oh i think we really are on a cutting level with archaeology if you go back 20 50 years nobody had any idea about this extent of settlement all these techniques like geophysics aerial photography or stuart skills it's all adding to this mountain of information that the population in ancient times was much bigger much busier and more complex than i think anybody had ever really understood only a few decades ago our sites are glimpse of roman britain archaeologists have been missing before one of a large rural population of widespread industry and recycling stimulated by a new commercial culture and phil's triumphed with more evidence of this transitional time with a structure to show off [Music] yesterday evening the only tangible archaeology we got was stains in the ground except in the pub to much hilarity it has to be said phil alleged that he'd got a wall and the evidence for his wall was three manky stones have you still got a war totally vindicated tony absolutely those three manky stones that you described them as look this is what they are look there they are going through there and the edge of the trench as we saw it came across there now we've subsequently pushed that back and that we got one stone there we've got another stone there but we've also got an inside edge to the wall as well which is coming around there and you can see the whole thing is curving back round now i think that this is probably going to be a furnace or a kiln hang on hang on the furnaces you've shown me in the past don't have that light clay stuff there they're always black that's after they've been used this one was never used it was either constructed and it fell down because there was a flaw in the design or or failing that they didn't need it it maybe it just collapsed maybe it was just unstable but the thing is this has never been fired this is what they would have looked like when they were built how does that fit in with what you're thinking about this place i think it fits in perfectly you know we tend to think of roman towns as all those regular places like lincoln for example with its grid of streets and it's big public buildings that go up at great expense and are there for hundreds of years but all these other minor settlements well if you come here one year and then the next year or maybe five years later it would look different every single time with an enclosure built up for one job owned by one person doing one particular activity it gets knocked down or washed away in a storm or something like that but it's constantly changing a bit like a town in the developing world nowadays yeah if you were to go to a place i don't know in africa for example you'd find a shanty town where the buildings are made out of corrugated iron and timber and they're only there temporarily and replaced by other things they're surrounded by drainage ditches and most of all what you always find there is there's lots of modern western rubbish or manufactured goods that have come in from outside and that's the sort of thing we've got here isn't it a kind of shantytown settlement but all those flashy broaches and other manufactured goods yeah because even nowadays you in a shantytown you'll see a few loaded people with a lot of bling absolutely yeah with only a few hours to go we've at last shed light on the roman story of our site but francis is still so determined to reveal the prehistoric story he's digging the enclosure ditch himself sorry francis i didn't realize it was you is it a post hole a post pit yes back here it is going down there that's massive isn't it it's very big john it's very big but you're still not at the bottom the ditch no and the ditch is rather wider than we thought it's at least three meters yeah move over a bit edge here yeah from there to where ian is i mean that's a big feature yeah but any dating well yes um this post has been dated by pottery this stuff here and that's a cordon jar cordon bowl late iron age so that's about the time of christ roughly now that post hole is cut into a completely filled up ditch and we got one bit of pottery out of it it's not much to write home about but i've shown it to our pot specialist and this is i think early iron age pottery so my bet is that this enclosure ditch was dug sometime in the middle of the first millennium bc so anytime between say three to 500 bc so this post dating to about the time of christ was pushed through a ditch that was created up to 500 years earlier i mean that's coming together really well then isn't it it's fantastic john i am so glad you found this feature we came to wickenbee to investigate a roman site in doing so we've uncovered a very early prehistoric site that grew into a vast and important iron age settlement when the roman economy arrived the rural settlement here embraced it people here were trading with coins building kilns working metal and even stone this community constantly changed and recycled adapting to a new roman world just starting to rain again pretty muddy pretty sticky but a pretty good three days oh fantastic three days tony i mean we thought we had a scatter of roman coins and a few ditches you know farmers did something like that and we've been able to shove the site back 500 years to the early on age when it was an important site then and it became even more important in the late iron age it really has been a revelation it does what lies hidden under the soil hang on i just knew francis would turn it into a prehistoric site but he's missing the fact that we've also for the first time got a glimpse at a new type of roman site i think wiki has turned out to be a little microcosm of what perhaps most of rural roman britain was it's a new type of site that metal detectorists are finding now we're recording it we barely understand the archaeology yet we're just at the beginning of the story and it may take decades of excavations of places like this before we really understand them at the beginning of day one these two were both fighting their corners passionately you wanted it to be iron age you were desperate that it should be roman it doesn't matter guys we got both a thousand years of british archaeology in three days not bad [Music] you

Channel: Odyssey - Ancient History Documentaries

Views: 99,222

Keywords: ancient history, classical history, ancient civilisations, classical antiquity, history documentary, classical documentary, time team, british history, archaeological dig, ancient roman britain, roman history, ancient roman dig, tony robinson, iron age, prehistoric documentary, time team full episodes

Id: 0H1UXt-6fF4

Length: 47min 27sec (2847 seconds)

Published: Fri Oct 22 2021