The Hunt For An Elusive Roman Villa In Gloucestershire | Time Team | Odyssey

if you love ancient history then this is the channel for you history hit tv it's like netflix but dedicated just to ad-free history documentaries including a huge library of ancient history content from the ninth legion to buddhica to the first britain simply check out the details in the description below and make sure you use code odyssey on sign up [Music] the field in question is in standish near gloucester slap bang in the middle of one of the wealthiest areas of roman britain and with fines ranging from the iron age to roman it should provide a snapshot of the lives of ordinary brits at the time of the roman invasion quite a little treasure trove that boards found it's terrific little hall we've got roman building material roman pottery roman broaches roman coins and some irony stuff as well have we got any clues yet as to what it might be i think the fact you've got iron age stuff and roman stuff suggests it's probably a farmstead going through over that period and in fact the geophysics suggests that as well you've done this already we actually did it four years ago but we've resurveyed it with the new instrument and look it's a whole complex of responses yeah i mean i think some of this oval stuff and circular stuff it looks like iron age stuff perhaps iron age round has an enclosure whereas this rectilinear stuff is more what you expect from roman fields you know roman paddocks and probably even some buildings in there as well is this where you got all the fines from no most of the fines came from this area and we haven't surveyed that yet so we're going to have to extend the geophysics to cover right to the edge of the field did you put a trench in i put a trench in on john's earlier geophysics down there and what'd you get oh well i believe i found an iron age surface what do you mean you believe your family well the week that i chose last year it happened to be the hottest week of the year and i had to close the trench down to preserve the archaeology so you're not quite sure what you've got i'm not now what are we going to do well i think probably the first thing could be to reopen paul's trench and see just what you had there but there's plenty of other targets on geophysics isn't it quite what well perhaps these pits are they iron age and it'd also be nice to look at some of the rectilinear ditches see exactly what the state is yeah and again phil's looking for the early end of our story in trench one where he's expecting to find an iron age roundhouse next to the stone surface that paul uncovered last year [Music] yeah i think that's paul's excavation [Laughter] matt puts in trench two over these two large pits [Music] finds from these should give us an idea of what people were eating and chucking away here and when [Music] gfiz are on the hunt for a roman building in the area of the field where paul found most of his roofing tiles and tessare pieces from mosaics could there be a villa here an hour into the dig and the unpredictable british summer is causing field problems in trench one as he tries to make sense of iron age archaeology in wet clay the problem is identifying individual cut features what you're gonna have to rely on the geophysics you mean if that will solve me for once i would relish the thought so it wasn't like this last year when you dug it no i just stayed here never recorded yeah jane now you've had a chance to look at all of paul's pottery have you been able to draw any conclusions from it well he's found a very interesting assemblage of roman pottery he has fine samian tableware from central and eastern ghoul he has one piece of amphora which we know comes from southern spain and that would have been used to contain olive oil that's nice and here we have a range of material imported from pool harbor in dorset black burnished where and we also have a range of ceramic building material emotionally roofing tile so we're getting the whole range of material you might expect from a well-appointed roman household what kind of data are we talking about for this mostly we're looking at material dating from the second to fourth century paul's fines bear striking similarities with froster court just five miles away excavations there have revealed an iron age farmstead which evolves over the centuries into a substantial stone-built roman villa with roofing tiles and ceramic wares just like the ones from our field it's taken over three decades to untangle the story at froster but at standish we've got just three days it's brightened up in trench one phil and raksha have literally hit their first find next to the probable roundhouse look at that truncated pot just going right the way round i mean this is good i mean i know we've hit the top off of it but at least it gives us that answer how deep do we have to machine that's as far as we dare machine look at it the pits in trench two have already thrown us a bit of a curved ball oh dear it's skull nobody was expecting human remains here that looks very very human doesn't it it does not much of a ridge no around young lady who is she and when did she die but i think most of it went with the uh with the with a plow in trench one phil's called jane in to help identify his pot so i'm dying to know what sort of pot it is and how old it is yeah well you have a very big pot here phil and you've got a tiny piece of rim just here which suggests to me you've got a large storage jar with a slightly averted rim and we're looking at something that would have come right around up to this so we have lost probably over half of it it's got little shell fragments of white shell in it which is local so this suggests it's been locally made and we see little red brown pieces what's up the local sand or something no this is grog grog is pre-fired clay pottery it's already been fired and it's crushed up again and added back into the clay and it makes it much more plastic and malleable for forming large vessels such as this so does that enable you to give some sort of date to it it does because grog as a technology is introduced into gloucestershire in around the early 1st century a.d the iron age people who used this pot lived through some dramatic changes because they witnessed the roman invasion and the imposition of a whole new political and economic structure [Music] but how long did they cling onto their iron age lifestyle while the landscape around them changed military colonies sprung up at gloucester and sirencester and a major roman road carved through the countryside how far do you reckon our farm is from this roman road oh it's not very far at all it's only about a kilometer and a half if you can imagine in the roman landscape the military need lots of produce to move around they need farms to provide grain hides all that sort of thing in the roman economy they actually take over the earlier iron age farms as it were and drag them into their economy like tenant farmers that's got to be a hill thought it it is yeah you see there's this big promontory right on the edge of the cotswolds dominating all this landscape out to also seven classic place for an iron age hillsboro and there you've got outside to the stack between the two haven't you on this step of flat land that's right it's actually prime agricultural ground and of course that's why the site is there it's a farmstead it's exploiting this good ground in the indh period and through the roman period and beyond [Music] bridge is looking for the later roman end of the story in the more rectilinear ditches of trench three [Music] a bit more interesting black burnisher or something just a few meters away in trench two the human remains are now looking like a burial [Music] it's uh obviously a skeleton but can you say any more than that mark well from the actual position of the body it's clearly in a crouch position on its side tightly flexed so what would that indicate one one of two possibilities for date either late neolithic early bronze age or late iron age and what would your money be on at the moment my money would be on late iron age given that we know there's late iron age material from the site how does it fit in with the geophys well the geophysics here i mean we're looking for these two anomalies is this one of them no you wouldn't expect something to show with that kind of strength on the geophysics it's just the grave unless you've got a lot of grave goods paul can we borrow you for a minute yes could you run your little machine over this if you get any iron spikes yes there's iron in there whereabouts just there by the shoulder hey here so what might that be well that's nice because if you've got a strong iron signal up by the shoulder first of all it tells us it's not bronze age but secondly it could well be an iron broach which are not uncommon in late iron age barrels and that's something we can date excellent so we know that iron age people were dying here but where do they live the answer to that might be in trench one where phil attempts to locate an iron age roundhouse you cheered up yet you as miserable as sin this morning with reason tony with reason what's your reason well i'm digging on clay you wouldn't believe it but clay is the most difficult material to work on it really is i mean if it's sunny then it dries and it goes like concrete and cracks if it chucks it down raining it's an absolute quagmire believe it or not this overcast damp sort of atmosphere is just about the most ideal thing it just shows up the contrast so much better now look come and have a look at this here's our trench l-shaped that bit is that bit along there and then it runs out in that direction along there now then be led by this big black blob there you see in the corner here we've got this big area with pottery it's very very dark yeah now then here we've got this straight line this ditch here's somewhere where you're standing here this is standing on it yeah oh i can see it well look there's a piece of pot there and it's running along and running straight up there yeah yeah okay here we've got another curving one going round there and this is a bit more difficult to see but if you're led by these bits of pot in there yeah a bit of bone there another bit of pot and it's actually coming round yeah yeah here like that so what you've done really is to have confirmed the geophase isn't it yeah but that is what's so good about it i mean we can now rely on these this geophysical print to tell us about the rest of the site so could these marks in the clay be the remains of an iron age roundhouse [Music] and since we have complete faith in geofiz can they find us our roman villa now done the whole of this end of the field where the roman building material was supposed to come from right and you can see for yourself doesn't look anything roman there to me no i mean we've got some fantastic results but as you say it all looks as though it's probably iron age a series of probable round houses yeah curvilinear ditches paddocks enclosures nothing rectangular regular that strikes you as sort of roman building no no but i mean there are a number of targets there i mean that for example looks quite a nice thing to look at and you look around house yeah it's got an entrance to the south that's exactly it okay so let's have a let's have a look at that one in the meantime you'll carry on aren't you yeah because if you look i think we've got a boundary to the settlement there right could it come around and follow that would be nice to see if there was nothing beyond it wouldn't it or fields beyond it and then we'll have to come back to this part how does this field too big oh god you can do it so there's still no sign of a roman building to go with paul's fines but it looks like we have a much earlier structure trench four goes in over the shape of our second possible iron age roundhouse under kerry's watchful eye that's it coming through just give it or should that be john [Laughter] your trench just give it one more and then then we'll do what john wants that's better the valley sun's come out in trench one phil's mood is as changeable as the weather look how long the shadows are you can't see a thing can't see a thing go away i'm grumpy again we haven't found any grave goods buried with our skeleton in trench two and mysteriously the iron signal that the metal detector picked up has disappeared it's ready now to lift and plan and photograph and do we still think it's iron age well the only finds come out of the fill of this so far is roman pottery so it has to be early roman or roman at least so not iron age at all [Music] our bones experts confirmed the skeleton to be a woman in her late 30s who probably died after the roman invasion buried without grave goods the chances are she was a low status worker it's been a productive day one glimpsing into the lives of the british at the time of the roman invasion and in trench three bridge is getting some clues as to what happened next bridgette yes you got something interesting there well it's a very tantalizing pot piece here um and i'm just itching to get into it just in case it's whole would be i think it's probably black burnished where which was made on the south dorset coast so what would that have been used for it's fairly everyday stuff cooking storage that kind of thing and did all this lot come out of the center edge we've got amazing bits of pottery here look we've got these lovely rims here we've got a piece of sanion we've got some bases we've got black burnished wear and we've got some size decoration it's just wonderful so what store is this telling you well most of this stuff is coming into the second century aed so this is the local potting industry in the roman irish tradition people are now starting to get access to imports from france we've got amphora from spain it's all part of the gradual romanization of the settlement and people slowly moving up market what about structure in this trench well there's certainly evidence again we've got more roofing tile coming up yeah so there's certainly something fairly close by and we've got this dorb here that was used for the walls of a roman building but no foundations no walls nothing like that yet not yet not yet but there's always tomorrow beginning of day two here at standish in gloucestershire and in this field we've had the most extraordinarily good geophys all these curved features that round one there which i'm told is probably a round house in fact the whole thing is a great iron age landscape but what really interests me is the possibility that there's a roman villa here we've had lots of fines haven't we lots of pottery but no structure at all you were shaking your head why because i don't think we should go villa chasing what do you mean well there's clearly some roman activity somewhere in this field but we don't quite know what it's indicating yet but there's nothing on the geophysics that indicates anything like a roman villa okay so what do we do about it well john has said there's enough noise in this area here there might be a timber built structure so what i think we'll do is put a trench in here next to where we found the freshly broken stuff and see if that's not where the center of roman activity is but what about the iron age i mean we haven't even got the focus of that yet have we no i mean there probably isn't a focus to that in the sense of a sort of center an estate probably a scatter of buildings across the landscape so we need to continue with the three years we've got opened we need to know whether it's early iron age stuff whether it goes right the way through whether it's just at the roman end of the the iron age we'll get that from what we've got in the holes the early part of our story is coming on with excavations over two possible iron age features phil's now convinced that he's found our first structure an iron age roundhouse [Music] bit by bit he's lifting the huge storage pot sunk in the middle of it hello little rim not supposed to be up there our iron age brits would have used this pot to store their grain or water [Music] trench four which was placed over the second round house has produced results that even i can see this trench is really coming on now isn't it you can really see this thick black curving line and it sort of stops here and then starts up again all the way around to where you are yeah i mean it's lovely because it matches perfectly what we saw in the geophysics and we thought might be evidence of an iron age roundhouse and we're now fairly happy that's what we've got so why have you got this big black line well people tend to call these things drip garlic and assume they've been formed by water running off the eaves of a thatched roof but that's ridiculous the actual building itself would have actually been within this set back perhaps a meter from the inner edge of the pitch and you'd have an entrance about so wide yeah yeah but if you look where ian is there's a lot of pottery coming out of there so there's no doubt about the date of this we've got things like this which is a classic middle iron age type of room probably talking about third second century bc so why have we got a big black blob right in the middle of a round house in fact it's a ditch of roman date that would have been cut through here long after the roundhouse itself had disappeared some of the other blobs may turn out to be iron age pits and give us some more dating evidence we're only going to find out why excavators so we just keep going down now absolutely at the time of the roman conquest in ad-45 standish was in the pro-roman dubunny region of late iron age britain as our farmstead became enmeshed in the roman military structure our romano brits as they became known could have accumulated sufficient wealth to aspire to leave their iron age roundhouses behind them and upgrade to a posh new house built with the roofing tiles dorb and tesserai that paul found so where is it in goes trench five that hasn't moved very far either it's really nice quality pretty unabraded pottery all together saying that there should be more substantial structural features somewhere nearby the pottery that bridges found is so sharp edged in comparison to paul's finds that our archaeologists have had to reconsider the location of any roman structure it now seems that centuries of plowing have moved the fines up the field away from their original location near trenches five and three [Music] it looks like we're getting closer to our building in trench two where matt's found some rubble that could be from the foundations of a roman building and among it some iron slag ah there we go beauty step from the bottom of the furnace where you burn your oar and all the clad goes to the bottom and kind of sets iron working on site so our romano brits were making iron products here such as the iron axe that paul found with his metal detector john before you slope off to lunch have you finished the geophys on this area here we've not done the whole field but i think we've got the whole complex map now you remember the boundary on this side of the field we've now extended and look at this sort of funnel arrangement at that point it's weird it's like a little entrance way in there isn't it yeah and we've extended this way and clearly got the limits of the whole complex so what does all that say to you well i think we can stop stop your fizzy yes well you can have a lunch break give us a lift well it could be anything in the rest of the field might be a pyramid mark what do these iron age settlements look like in this area we've got very little to go on any sort of comparative material the best site still is froster just a few miles to the south of here which of course does develop into a villa you can see we've got this irregular come rectilinear ditched enclosure and then within that the excavations revealed numerous circular structures if you compare that with the geophysics that we've got from here at standish you can see we've got these very similar types of enclosure and of course at least three circular structures two of which we've now confirmed by excavation and the fact that we've got at least three of these suggest that we may be seeing the beginnings of a small village starting to form in the closing centuries of the iron age as to how it actually looks i mean we can only speculate but victor's been working on a rather fine sketch here that gives a nice impression of what just been talking about you can see each of the round houses these smaller plots perhaps being used for vegetable growing corralling animals and probably looking at extended family units occupying each of these little plots so this looks a bit like a snapshot in maybe the middle of the first century a.d because i see here on the edge somebody's experimenting with the more roman style yes there's a radical new introduction yeah corners yes [Music] [Music] are you as frustrated as i am by the fact that we still haven't found this villa well yes i am i'm in a way because it'd be lovely to find a lovely roman villa with stone walls and mosaics underfloor heating fountains oh yeah the whole shooting match would be great but you know we know there's about a thousand roman villas in this country of different shapes and sizes and even if you stick 50 people in them to include the family and slaves and farm workers and that sort of thing that's only 50 000 people out of a population we know must have been anywhere between three perhaps as much as six million so where were the rest of the river well what we now know from modern archaeology is that far more of them were living in ordinary rural farmsteads and even you know the iron age roundhouse we're always hearing about that building remained in use throughout britain throughout the roman period but there are wooden roman buildings as well exactly now the kind of thing that we could have is a basic timber frame when you drop a timber into the sleeper trench like that and you build up a frame of timbers all the way along and in between that a lattice work of wattland daub so that's a sort of twig like structure here framework slap plaster on top of it that is perfectly strong enough to support a heavy tiled roof you can stick painted wall plaster on it you can still have mosaics but presumably it's going to be much harder for our archaeologists to find exactly because we can only see what is visible to us and unless timber has been burnt it's just not going to be there if guys right there'll be nothing to see but clay phil's favorite but there's a ray of hope in trench five bridgette i hear you've got a bit of wall yeah oh crikey yeah yesterday i wanted to get some structure in bingo look what's here all this masonry but it's not a very massive structure is it no it's not at all it's only about 40 centimeters i don't think it's enough to be called footings for a masonry wall but it could be for a timber wall if you put a a one foot square timber in on top of that you could support a timber frying building absolutely what i think we need to do is actually do some resistance survey right and i hear what you say it's not a solid stone foundation but we stand a better chance of seeing a building with resistance until now john's been using magnetometry which measures changes in the earth's magnetism and shows up metals and heat affected areas [Music] the resistance survey will pass an electric current through the ground solid features such as stone impede the current and will show up as high readings against the low readings of clay soils [Music] stuart what are you doing on a bike in the middle of a field well riding it just supposedly it's the obvious answer but this is my mobile incident room i've got i've got everything i need here i've got i've got mirror photograph i've got mobility and i've got the landscape around me it's a great way to do landscape psychology that's all you need yeah that's the field where we're finding all the remains in there we're standing here and down here is a very very major stream going all the way down now if we know from other sites if there's a villa and they say if it's a bigot it ought to be somewhere along this stream course we know the site at froster to the south a very similar site to here and that has a villa with it and where is it it's next to the only major stream source stuart goes in search of a villa elsewhere but the archaeologists are still convinced that the fines suggest a substantial roman building within our field so mick and jane decide to take another look at the pottery this is of particular interest it looks a bit sad it was a piece of simian really so it looked like that it would have looked like that so that's really worn and it's particularly prestigious this item because it's a lion's head from a militarium with a hole in his mouth area for pouring a spout and we can just see the grits on the inside area this would have created a surface of grinding and it would have dated to the late second early third century and one decent handle and one decent handle and you would like this stoney because that would have been a tankered how big well i'm told they can go up to three pints i think this is more fills yeah yeah so what's the latest material we've got latest we have is this little black burnish word dish a little flanged conical bowl with it with a big sort of rim sticking out exactly this was made from around 270 so that's the late third century and they still made them into the fourth century that's still sort of a long time before the end of the roman period it is a long time what does it always tell you well i think it confirms that we've got an iron age site going right the way through but not quite through to the end of the roman period i would have expected at that end to see you know tesserai wall plaster heating fluids i know we've got a few test rides from the field but from what we've done we've got nothing that would shout villa bombshell so that means there might never have been a villa at all here i think that's like well we've got to see what bridget comes up with in the trenches opened up but yeah no i think that's probably that's what it's looking like i think i told you we shouldn't be chasing a villain no you wouldn't listen to it i just didn't i ignored you didn't i yeah i didn't listen the iron age end of our story is taking shape in trench four ian has discovered an intriguing stack of pots sunk into the entrance of the round house nobody yet knows why they were buried [Music] stewards fail to find any sign of a villar elsewhere so all eyes are on the geophys john what have you threatened to do at lunchtime stop jiofizzing you've been beavering about all afternoon yeah well nick wouldn't let us remember the wall in bridget's trench over there yeah comes through on that sort of angle we've now done the resistance and look we've got this fantastic change between the low resistance the yellow and the high resistance and that's where you'll have building rubble maybe foundations could there possibly be our villa well look where it is on the map there's bridget's trench and it's right in the center of this area of interest there's one caveat well it could be that it's all geological ready when you are there's just about time for phil to dig a test wrench to find out if the geophys shows archaeology or geology i think they're going to come down on the mosaic floor well if it is i still think it looks very clean it still looks so badly clean doesn't it john's not looking too confident see this stuff is just so dry compared to the clay this is going to look like gravel it's going to look like um building rubble whereas this clay by comparison is just so moist and full of water that's going to be the contrast in resistance so it's all geology now our best hope for a building is in trench five where bridget's line of rubble is looking like the foundations of a timber structure if we've only got that one wall and one wall doesn't make a building so we haven't quite got one more it looks like we've got to return you see just coming up here oh yeah it's your foot down here you mean yeah yeah yeah right and so that would be two rooms attached to the one wall yeah it's the most substantial thing we've had isn't it yeah absolutely is it substantial and also what's very nice is we've found something that could imply a substantial building we've got a tessera a very very nice fine-grained limestone it could be a mosaic fairly close well we shouldn't be too surprised because roman timber buildings can be substantial reasonably impressive buildings in their own right and we know from towns like london that they could have tessellated mosaic floors and painted wall plaster and substantial tile roofs so that that doesn't negate the fact that it might still be timber that we're looking at no no not at all right what size is that we're not looking at a palace no by any means but i think that's a very interesting sign okay so have we found a luxury roman pad a pretty basic one or nothing at all we're ready to start the serious work of day three looking for our roman building the situation is this over there in matt's trench you've got all that stone but it looks like it's probably only rubble whereas here in bridget's trench you've got something that looks a bit more promising down here now we can't excavate the whole area between these two trenches so we're going to be relying on john's deer fish no you're not no why not because we've drawn a blank yak well here's matt's trench there's bridget's trench this is all geology between the two we've got nothing mick it's okay we just go back to first principles which are well you know in the old days we didn't have geophysics you just extend the excavated area and see what you've got so we've got walls and things in here remove this way see if we've got other walls to go with it he's being his usual bright happy birming himself i'm all with it as far as i'm concerned he's right that's all down there so what we have to do is work over here find another wall make sense of this building well given that we found absolutely nothing they're being remarkably sunny we'll see how they feel at lunchtime [Music] that's it with just one day left it's time to bring in the heavies phil joins bridge in trench five oh what's this that's a ring look at this no it's the rim of something more like a vaz or something doesn't it danny rob we can sort that here in a minute let's get on and strip this off [Music] there's a fascinating twist to our iron age story emerging from trench four where ian found the stack of pots you got bones coming out there oh just a few it's a horse or part of a horse i mean this is really getting to be very exciting why do you say that's exciting well in in the middle and late iron age across much of southern britain you do get these things that people call structured or special deposits yeah and ian's exposed here three or four pots that are superimposed and crushed we've got another pot here all this burnt stone so are you saying that these and the horse are deliberately put in here it is a deliberate deposit quite often these deposits are thought to be associated with special events like perhaps the abandonment of this house and its demolition it could be like a closure event and perhaps this involves a feast and then everything that was associated with that feast it's all gathered up and placed into this what's the significance of the horse the horse is an animal that takes on growing status in the iron age if you can be seen to afford to kill and consume a horse it confirms your rank i mean it might have been the old nagging honestly but it's still a horse have you got any dating for this yeah the potter is giving us some very good dating information it's towards the end of the middle iron age in this area so it's between about 150 and 50 bc so the round house in trench four must have been closed around 50 bc the pottery in fields roundhouse dates to the first century a.d we'd taken it for granted that our iron age farmstead consisted of a group of roundhouses but it now seems impossible that all three can have co-existed and that's a bad sign for victor you're going to have to go back to the drawing board that was abandoned by the time these two were going do you mean demolish that yeah and build that one yeah oh my god as we search for some clarity to the roman end of our story every find helps jamie we were just looking at this big old rim wondering whether it might be amphora or storage jar well phil i think what you've got here is a very large storage jar quite a squat dumpy pot but quite a hefty thing for storage so it's it's about what this height i would guess so yes and we're looking at the later part of the roman period maybe fourth century the date of the storage pot confirms that people were living here late into the roman period [Music] but where were they living it's mid-morning and the rubble foundations seem to be dying out i'll tell you something else there's no phones over on this side too no there's nothing nothing it's clean as well i think we'll move over roger please in trench one mark and paul are cleaning up the iron age surface that paul excavated last year mark we actually inside the round house here yes we are yeah and just sort of cleaning up around these packed stones here is this natural no you see a lot of these are actually sort of fire reddened so it could be the base of a hearth or an oven stiff old stuff yeah so this would have been the half that our family sat around talking about the arrival of the romans or the state of the farm not much evidence of buildings in trench five but some interesting finds that's fantastic it's a very nice beverled edge on it as well it's part of a corn stone which would have been placed on top of another one and turned they were used for grinding corn trench five has expanded in every direction since this morning but i'm not sure there's much to show for it i've stripped off a big area out here in an attempt to follow the spread of material out here and it dies out and so then we decided okay we'd go backwards to try and find the other side nothing there now well there is something there you see what you've got to remember tony is that this whole site is just smashed around by ridge and furrow this is medieval plows yeah you see the sequence is a big furrow over there yeah and then here where the main rubble spread is the ridge yeah and then it comes down here into the furrow and this of course is where the front of the building would expect it to be so that's why this rubble is in this long thin shape it doesn't mean the building look like that it's just that we've lost the size of it yeah it could well be quick we might just have survival under the ridges we've lost the rest so mick have we got a building or have we not well we might have look you see this spread of material here we think that there is a good possibility that at right angles we might have a partition to that main wall so we've ended up with a load of rubble in the ground and a bit of stuff there that might be a partition and that's all that we can yeah but we haven't built it hard to play with the remaining time and we what's that we do that is to extend the trench in that direction to see whether we can find the end of the building over there and possibly a return underneath the ridge over there well it's ten to one now yeah lunch and then the final throw yep all right so it sounds a good plan medieval farms consisted of long thin strips heavily plowed into high ridges and deep furrows crops were planted on top of the ridges the furrows must have cut through our archaeology the effect on the land was so dramatic that you can still see the lines of ridge and furrow in our geophys the final throw is underway in trench five and things are looking up there are big stones all the way through there and that is on exactly the same alignment as that set of stones coming through here stuart's been drawing together his observations have another absolute field there literally with this what is absolutely staggering about this field is can you see these old field boundaries are very different to the modern ones can you see how that axis is parallel to this one here and how that one goes through there respects the alignment of that group of paddocks now what this suggests to me quite strongly is that these are the same boundaries that were laid out in the iron age and the roman period and they survived right through to the present day if you look at the wider picture the complex we've got is not going to be the only one there'll be others they're part of a whole network of long boundaries which carve up this landscape this strip of good agricultural ground we've got between the highland to the east the cotswold edge and the river seven out here you're only just a little bit below the modern cloud yes when you look at it yeah and the the medieval would have been probably up somewhere about here yeah eddie price has been excavating his farm at froster court for over 30 years and is used to making sense of the patchy archaeology preserved in the ridges of the medieval ploughing can you see any internal detail because we keep looking at it you know um you've obviously got a you've obviously got a gravelish floor right um fallen roof tile suggesting you're on a building which is roofed anyway yeah your current stone and the pottery fines suggest you could be domestic yeah but um but more like a farm workers building or something of that nature probably so how different was life on the roman farm in the third and fourth centuries from the life led by the romano brits in the first century a.d and the way that the iron age farmers who enjoyed their horse barbecue lived their lives in the last centuries bc mick could it be that the people living here in iron age times were various generations of just one family i think that's very likely i mean you tend to see a lot of sights on the geophysics and a lot of stuff in the ground i think there's lots of people but it's actually probably the same extended family quite a big family yeah just hopping around the landscape and eventually ending up of course in the medieval village over there sure so jane if this is all one extended family what story can we tell from your fines well we're starting in kerry's trench we're up in the middle to late iron age we're talking around first century bc here it's pretty rough stuff isn't it it's very rough stuff it's come from across the seven typical in age not sophisticated at all things have changed haven't they by the time we get to phil's trench we've jumped on quite a lot now nearly a century 50 50 years for a century we're still using the same technology the same handmade traditions this is his very large pot he had set in the ground but we're suddenly beginning to see evidence of roman occupation so are we before the roman conquest here and they're getting bits of roman goods or we're actually after the roman conquest we're after the conquest but we're still native in our habits and our traditions right the stuff from bridget's trench is completely different isn't it a completely different story very roman we're getting exotica we're getting imports from spain emperor we're getting the fine tablewares we're getting imports from dorsets and we're getting all the local wares developing what sort of data are there we're into the second century on this one and moving into second and third on this one clearly they've got a lot of international trade going on but they're also getting pottery by presumably going down to the market buying the pottery and what they can put in it so they're part of a proper market economy and then in phil's second trench we've got all these lovely big chunks we have we're definitely into the third century here very nice spout from a mortarium for grinding materials i don't understand well where is it where is it huge big bowl studded with little grits it's for making pesto you put your olive oil and your basil and your pine nuts in grind them all around and pour them out onto your salad it's funny when we first came here what i wanted to find was the roman building but what's interesting me now is the idea of all these generations of the same family in the iron age living in this one field great stuff so our story begins in the second century bc with our iron age farmers living a peaceful iron age existence in the shadow of the hill fort at hairsfield around 50 bc they upgrade to a new roundhouse and witness the drama of the roman invasion unfold around them but how does our story end [Music] our last throw of the dice in our quest for the roman building was the extension of phil's trench over here how'd you reckon you did i think we've done really well we haven't found you're a villa but i think we've got a cracking story out of this i mean i think it's absolutely amazing what we're actually standing in is the yard of a roman farm and the sort of activities that were going on in that yard include metal working look we've got this lovely little fire reddened a furnace base and the nice thing about it is that we've actually got some some metalworking slag all right this is the yard but where's the farm the farm starts here this wall here is actually the boundary of the farmyard and i think what's happening is that they're actually throwing all their refuse on the other side because on that side of the wall we had masses and masses of pottery on this side absolutely nothing now if you come onto here we've actually got the first of our buildings we've got the foundations going along here and they turn around here and come back so in fact we actually had the building in the trench all along but we just hadn't cleaned up enough to be able to see where it was the beauty of it is we've actually got another building and the other building is out here we've actually got a foundation that comes along here it's missing here because of the furrow the medieval furrow here is the ridge and this we've got a bit of the foundation and it carries on through there that's one side the other side is in here and look there is the base of that foundation so we've got a large building here facing out onto the yard and a much smaller building also facing out under the yard finally we're able to piece together an impression of our roman farm the outbuildings could have housed the blacksmith who used the furnace the farmhouse would have been a timber construction our romano brits had made it but not quite enough to be able to afford the grand villa although they still had painted plaster a mosaic floor and the latest sandstone roofing tiles in three days we've caught a glimpse of 600 years of an ordinary iron age farming family living through extraordinary times you

Channel: Odyssey - Ancient History Documentaries

Views: 306,136

Keywords: Ancient Dwellings, Ancient History, Ancient History Exploration, Ancient Residence, Archaeological Expedition, British History, Deep Dive into History, Historical Exploration, Historical Mysteries, Historical Mystery, Lost Roman Villa Exploration, Odyssey - Ancient History Documentaries, Roman Culture, Roman Empire Relics, Roman Villa, Uncovering the Past, Villa Search Mission, Villa Surveying, Villa Uncovering

Id: 7fuYzhi4tMU

Length: 48min 8sec (2888 seconds)

Published: Fri Jan 07 2022