Is There An Ancient Roman Temple Of Relics Buried Under Surrey? | Time Team | Odyssey

[Music] nearly 600 roman coins have come out of this field in surrey not to mention 40 odd roman broaches this lovely little cockerel figure there's these steel yard weights clearly the romans were here but what on earth were they doing what could have generated so much stuff and what about this thing some archaeologists think this is part of a scepter if it's a scepter it would have been held by a priest if it was held by a priest then we may have a temple although forgive me if i'm a little skeptical about that on time team we don't have a very good track record of finding roman temples but you never know maybe this site will buck the trend we'll know in three days [Music] [Music] the field in question runs along a major roman road leading from london to brighton and yet surprisingly little is known about any settlements alongside it we're here because of this man david hunt who spent 15 years scouring this field carefully mapping literally hundreds of fascinating finds it is a lovely array of fines now do they say temple to you and i think so tony these are not the sort of things that can be dropped on the roman pig farm are they these are deliberate offerings which suggests giving things to the gods i don't see so much evidence for temple yet the easiest thing really is to say is what is this site not it's not a roman fort it's not a roman town it's probably not a villa that leaves a realm of other possibilities like a shrine site like a temple site it could be just a street side settlement it's it's really up for grabs okay we know what it's not but whatever it is do we know where to look for it well we do look at the distribution of the fines here tony and two major concentrations john you've cheated you've already fizzed no in fact this was commissioned by english heritage a few years ago and it's got some really nice results i mean we've got all these field systems and then these pit light responses where does this sit on this map john that's the corner there so you can see these pits here they go with that coin concentration and then we've also got these responses that match this area have we got anything that looks remotely like a structure no and that's what worries me in a way is because this doesn't look like a settlement you can't see buildings inside these enclosures i think what we're going to find out tony is is this anything to do the romans are these roman fields or pre-roman fields so i think what we're going to do is get a trench in early on say across there and across there there's nothing on the geophys that looks like a building let alone a temple so we're going to use the latest equipment to have another look at the coins concentrations but seeing as not everybody's convinced that there's a temple here at all we're going to see if these features are anything to do with our roman story so it's a good moment isn't it phil that's just what he was thinking it is that it's that moment that first bucket in the ground isn't it you just see below the surface well that's right but you know look [Laughter] well it's roman and it's fourth century idea classic neil t drop flange bowl it does coincide with that darker material oh wow look at that there are two totally different colors aren't they this stuff which has got all the black stuff in it that's where that piece of pottery came from well you can't ask for better than that first hour of the dig and we've already hit roman archaeology but most of david hunt's fines were on the other side of the hedge which makes that the most likely place for a roman temple which i'm told shouldn't be too difficult to identify well in britain virtually all the temples are very easy to spot archaeologically they have a simple plan it's two concentric square walls like that now that's very easily reconstructed because there are some that are partly surviving you've got a sort of central tower over the cellar which is where the god lives and around it we've got a pitched roof and an ambulatory a sort of corridor around the edge door there windows at the top something like that and the temple precinct around it is where all the action happened all the religious process went on outside here but you said earlier if it's a religious side there might not be any building at all unfortunately tragically that's true the kind of place that could be venerated would be something like a sacred pool the god would be or goddess would be seen to live in the pool and that's where the offerings would be thrown and another thing for example could be a sacred tree that was venerated and that became the center of worship so if it's a sacred tree we're not going to find much shall we no that is honestly going to be the problem because clearly the tree would have gone but hopefully a concentration of fines would give it away okay i've got the results from our sample strip john's geoff is the first coin concentration and thinks he's found something worth investigating but this just looks like an absolute mess to me i mean how can you tell features in amongst all of these other dots look have a look it's even worse no it's not it's not this is just stray ferrous material across the field over there at this end you've got these much clearer well-defined pit-like anomalies you don't have this black here with the white around them yes it could be pits it could be burning well that's great isn't it because look we've got three bits of evidence we've got the geophysics we've got the coin spread and we've got this flashish area so free bits all pointing this part of the site trench two goes in over these pits if one of them was a shrine we should expect a lot of small metal finds i see if we can spread it out a bit like a meltdock bar so a team of metal detectorists is going to make sure we don't miss a thing nothing clear thank you ken judging by david's fines there was a lot more going on here than just religious activity well one of the functions obviously was buying and selling because these are steel yard weights you can see the loop at the top um they would have been moved along a bar to to vary the weight that's right material there's a small one here ahead of the guard mercury he was the god of traders and this also would be connected with mercury what's that this is a cockrell most likely to have come from a group with mercury and his attendant animals which was the ram and the um cockrell nice and this is also very interesting it could possibly have been a scepter handle now scepter in those days would have been the one held by the officiating priest or member of the public who was acting as a priest so do you think that this could have been a temple site i think it is possible but i think that we haven't found enough ritual material to make it absolutely certain i think it's a real mixed bag of messages though because a large amount of this material is just basically functional stuff there's key handles now you do get those on temples but also people have to open doors with keys the brooches well they could have been votive deposits but they're all damaged they could have ended up here as metal working for recycling and with all the steel yard weights and the fact that we're by the roman road i can still see this as being primarily a trading settlement possibly with a ritual component but really it's all to play for isn't there if we're looking for signs of roman occupation phil's made a great start see we got some first half second century but you see what i would go for is that yeah now that is far more interesting you see that's a lovely bit of humble decoration that is there's the mark of the potter in that yeah i mean this is one of these big thick heavy room storage jars that's my sort the odd thing is that phil's trench is a long way away from the roman road where you'd expect to find the bulk of roman activity and there's nothing significant showing up on the geophys this is getting really really gravelly up here now look and phil's got a lot more than just pottery look at this don't look at these big stones they're all lead flat aren't they yeah they're all lead flat and they it all starts it all sort of starts particularly about there look listen to that loose and quiet and this is and scrunchy that's the edge of it it does coincide with that trackway phil might have a trackway along with a load of fines but we still have no idea what kind of site this is we're banking on our panel of coins experts to come up with some clues from the 600 found in these fields well they're certainly not a hoard of coins because they actually cover the whole period of roman occupation in britain from this kind of claudius comes from the very first period of roman invasion in britain right through to this coin of arcadius of about 400 a.d right at the end of the period but what struck me looking at the coins with all these ones from the early part of the period is that these are mainly the five and twenty pound notes of their day so the people weren't throwing away trivial amounts of cash were they no they weren't actually and there's a a really significant number of these silver coins these roman denarii which are really quite valuable coins in their terms looking at this great chronological spread though is it possible to discern any patterns within it yeah they're the wrong way around most sites in britain have few early coins and a great bulge of late coins so it's not an ordinary town because those start up get going and carry on to the end it's not an ordinary temple site because usually temples start off gently and you have a great watch of fourth century coinage but it could be a sort of shrine where people throw money in early on when the shrine is getting going and then for some reason most of them just fizzle out and a lot of these coins come from the area of trench two there's a small sharp positive signal down here oh is there i can see it on the surface oh it looks like copper alloy doesn't it can it come in the trench yeah yeah you see it looks like a little broach can i take it down well it does look as though it's fairly loose take this stuff away that's it it looks very small doesn't it i wonder if it's complete just this yeah it's a little easy coming away anyway yeah oh that's very bound up the soil brooches such as this were often broken and thrown into shrines as offerings to the gods [Music] well i think that must be the road yeah there's a mystery developing in trench one where phil's trackway has turned into something more akin to a dual carriageway but why would you need a major roman road here when you've got one just a field away where'd you say the front edge is well one edge is here isn't it right so the other edge is yeah it is actually coming down here isn't it so it's a pretty sure it is it is it is it almost does look like it's cambered that's very wide i mean the only question you might ask is is it actually a trackway and how firm is identification of that as the actual roman road is there any possibility this is the roman road well i'd say if this is right then it's only going to be about five or six meters wide what the you you but how far is that where are you saying the edges here one two three four five six seven eight nine ten eleven meters wide hang on hang on what we don't know is is is you might have a big watch of it in the middle which is really thick which is what you're picking up and it's actually spreading down you've only got to have two meters spread on either side and and five meters wide becomes nine meters wide it doubles the width of it and how did you get to 11 then well okay you know but you see what i'm saying i mean this is a whacking great road isn't it how do we know this isn't the roman road and that's just a complete red herring and who's ever heard of a settlement who would build a settlement 50 yards away from an existing road and what's the point of that if neil's right this is a major discovery and the maps will need to be redrawn but before we get too excited we need to see where the road might stretch beyond the trench that looks a bit meatier phil's on the hunt for physical evidence of buildings to prove that this is a roadside settlement whoa look at that there's another one there whoa look at that and this line of stones is looking promising just take that bit out there ian beautiful job as afternoon wears on bridge is starting to see features clearly in trench too this is john's geophysics anomaly here you can see it looks like a pit that's been cut straight into the natural geology and it's absolutely jam-packed full of pottery okay anything else come on up here at pace can you see here on the far side against that section that looks like might be a circular feature coming up straight in front of us here we've got another one that's got lots of ash charcoal again a load of pottery coming up and where sam is we may be just about to have another one i guess the big question is are these pits the source of the coins if so these pits could have been used to make offerings to one of the numerous demanding roman gods i've been brought up going to school assembly and church twice a year at christmas and easter it's very difficult to imagine how the romans would have worshipped that's because we live in a time when i i think we all believe that we know exactly how the natural world functions and so religion becomes a kind of boring background thing for many people today but in antiquity they didn't understand how the world worked in the same way so everything around them but this great storm that could drown us any minute for example would be driven by a god the wood is going to be filled with gods there's going to be a god of that ruined barn the genius loki there's a god for almost everything and they spend their whole time trying to have a relationship with those gods to make sure nasty things don't happen to them [Music] the weather gods are clearly none too pleased with us as we start to dig into the features in trench two but the fines keep coming there we are it's a fourth century bronze coin oh wow that's one more pitfall as well fantastic new yeah looks like a productive pit at the end of day one despite the rain and the sudden drop in temperature phil's mood in trench one is positively sunny we've got the roman settlement where if in here if you look you see for example we've got running up through there traces of a roman ditch but we're gonna have to clean that up but here where we have cleaned it up look it looks like we've got a big post hole in there and a big post hole in there and then at the back we've got this sort of cobbled surface we might have timber buildings on this side now as i come this way you'll see that i'm coming on to this graveled area now we think that this graveled area is actually a roman road that is running right the way down and going down the hill as we come off you'll see that the surface that i'm walking on is very black and this is probably the remains of another building and we've stripped the area back and up here we've got the edge of it you see here the soil is much lighter and here where i'm standing it's much darker and we think this is where the building is and there's masses of stuff entering it oh it's been fabulous and it's all consistent it is all late first to second century id and date so it's the same date as the bulk of the metalwork and the coins that have bought us here in the first place and it looks like it's quite a substantial settlement oh it does it does so it looks like the gods might have been a bit nicer to us than i thought let's hope they're even more charming tomorrow the weather gods are beaming down on day two in surrey where we're investigating the source of an extraordinary number of roman finds and we've already made a major discovery in the shape of a huge road and settlement do you remember this trench was about finding a field system a simple story are they roman island not rome yeah what we found is this road now not in the ordinary little trackway but 10 meters wide but i don't understand that i thought the roman road was the road that exists today on the far side of that field but that's the hypothesis just because it's on the ordinance survey map was a roman road doesn't it has to be true surely we've actually found the real road here the supplement either side of it but what are we going to do about that area over there where all those fines came well it's still running i think now i don't believe the idea of this being a religious site is over at all the fines are still very suggestive of religion because maybe what you've got is a roman road buildings on either side and behind that the shrine or sanctuary or maybe not it's only the beginning of day two well i'm very confident today tony but not all the experts are convinced that our road in trench one is the old london to brighton road you know it's not impossible you've got a sort of a loop road and that is the road this is just with a loot coming off it um it would be unusual and we're looking at the road from every available angle [Music] phil's looking for more buildings along the roadside the edge is still running right up through there and there are some beautiful finds coming up well same way of course so that's from gall i tell by the size of the leaves and everything that's going to be went on into the second century those things there yeah they mark the top of the decoration going around the band and all the rest is probably from further down it looks like it's the same bowl doesn't it yeah trench two went in under a rich concentration of fines suggesting it could have been the size of a shrine mark this is like the forgotten trench everything's happening over there and there's just a few of you beavering away here maybe forgotten but it's starting to turn up the goods ian's just started work on this pit and it's been producing a lovely group of first century ad material we've got this thing called a bead rim which is a classic first century ad type this is in a romanized fabric clay but what's more interesting is that we've got a similar example here which is hand made which looks a lot more like a late iron age tradition ian it does seem a funny place to dig a pit i mean this is all natural rock you'd really be hacking away at it wouldn't you well it depends i mean this is all gravel round here and it's chalk up on the hills so if you've got any rock at all you want it for hard standing for building and then you chuck your rubbish in afterwards yeah stop your cows falling it what about the other end of the trench well the pit down there is certainly lake roman that's been turning up nothing but fourth century aed material typical of which are things like this thumping great rim from a big storage jar actually a very distinctive type made in the alice hulk forest on the surrey hampshire border people seem to have been chucking things into these pits throughout the roman period but the challenge is to find out if they were rubbish or religious offerings geophys are now investigating the second concentration of fines further up the field the find that's most suggestive of the temple site is this possible scepter handle archaeometallurgist andrew lacey is going to recreate what it might have looked like over 2000 years ago at the moment he's making a clay mold to cast the head of mercury for the top of the scepter quite honestly this looks to me like something my plumber would remove from the loft and say no wonder you had a leak do we really know that it's anything religious well i i completely agree this one found here just on its own is just a lost handle but there were two very similar objects found at wombra now these were found buried in a pit right outside the temple and we think that their scepter handles now we know from other examples around the country that the shaft is made of wood and at the top end if you imagine a little tiny head a figure of an emperor or a god that would represent the deity that was being worshipped and the priest goes around holding this scepter it's a kind of badge of office so it doesn't really have any function it just says you're a big guy yeah it's like a swagger stick the other thing is that the the big man in the village the magistrate has to fulfill priestly duties there's not really much in the way of um career priest if you like that doesn't exist but the big boy round here has to go and be a priest say on thursday afternoons so if time team was roman i'd have this oh yes you'd be the cheapest you'd have to officiate on time team's annual birthday or something like that you know you you'd be tony robinson the priest of time team i can handle that in trench two bridge is wondering whether a layer of burnt clay in her pit might be indicative of some sort of ritual activity but i don't think it's an in-situ deposit it looks like a dump i mean i wonder if there's been an oven or a kiln nearby i'm not prepared to um to agree with you fully on that having dug it i mean there's quite a difference between the material lying above it sort of a more humic charcoal rich cremated bone to beneath it we've got solid bits of animal long bone i mean i would like it to be evidence of some sort of reuse or change in use in which they are burning or heating up this area for perhaps slowly cooking something with all the animal wrote about i think only we're going to find out actually is to leave that in section and carry on down it's getting near lunch time as you can see it's still sunny but the clouds are looking a bit threatening we've been waiting to find out what might be at this top end of the field and john you've got the geophysical yeah it's pretty exciting look that's phil's trench down there with the roman road in it we've tracked it through that field comes right up here over the old field boundary and up to this point where we're stood it then looks as though one arm might go off in this direction and the other straight up the hill so we might have a junction well that's a classic location for a roman shrine isn't it which begs the question what are these responses here and even better than that look how it relates to the coins it's right underneath the main concentration of early roman coins hang on i don't want you to start getting me excited without just cause couldn't this just be rock after all we've had lots of little outcrops of rock in this field it's possible but if you look at the magnetic results there's the suggestion of wall lines in here so perhaps we do have a temple or shrine here after all phil heads up the hill to get trench three underway you've made enough allowance outside the trench to to get it well i wanted to make it surgical so you didn't have to do too much work it's gonna be a rock cut shrine a rocket shred oh you know huge ritual is that right yeah to the great god geo just got trio yes with small red plastic ritual pegs placed around the shrine the romans didn't build roads unless there was a good reason so road junctions are prime locations for something important now look that's got lighter there oh wow oh yeah now if that's perhaps is that going to be where that features cut in from wait what's that here we go bit of bass and phil's confident that the archaeology is roman and how wide is the feature john maybe a meter and a half wide initially we're talking one we're talking about somewhere along here and i think we're going into a whole concentration of features as we go that way so there's definitely something large and roman at the road junction the question is what stuart's now traced the line of the road through the site and beyond into the landscape this is where our site is just here and he's found it lines up with another site towards london now can you see this line coming down here this is where there has been a bit of a roaming rope found in excavation ignore that that's the modern bypass well if you look at the line down the ridge the line goes down there there's the line of the main high street of the modern settlement and that hedge line there is bang next to our roman republic look it's a ba it's a bang straight line that looks really convincing doesn't it that's exactly the sort of route you'd expect from a major linking road if you have another look from closer into the field we've flipped around from south up to north this is where the old roman road was supposed to be which kind of curved and wound its way around it was never very satisfactory but we have something now which makes perfect sense in a roman context crossing over the river and up to the top and if he's right the road should continue to the north of our site as well so in goes trench four and we seem to have recruited a new digger where's the road where's the road is having trouble finding the bottom of her pit in trench too so henry has brought in an auger that's pretty rocky doesn't it it's getting more stoney for going down and it's tough going how deep are we now we've gone down an extra meter and a half meter 60 something like that as well as how did did you say this was bridge that's about 1.5 so basically it's me standing on your shoulders yeah effectively that's quite a big pit but something which is such a narrow diameter one thing's for certain the romans must have had a very good reason for hacking through solid stone to construct what looks more like a shaft than a rubbish pit and there's still no sign of the bottom when phil calls me away to admire his work at the road junction we have just hit business here tony you're kidding what have you got i mean well at the moment i really don't know but what we do have is a massive deposit of roman material look with this sort of stuff i've been getting out i've only just started coming through look at the size of these bits apart and the freshness of them i haven't got the foggiest idea what we're dealing with but we have got masses and masses of it at this end you can see it's very very black but as we come through here you can see there's this it looks like sort of demolition rubble this fired up clay and then of course here well you see it looks there as though we could have traces of some sort of wall structure furnace i don't know what's going on the thing is it coincides with john's geophysics if it coincides with john's difference that way how big is it that would put it about another 10 meters beyond the digger he's almost lost for words you know you don't come down on this sort of stuff we started off there and it was just the first bit apart and then as it came back it was oh my god another bear part and then another bit of pot and we started piling it into the trays and it was just pop pop pot and oh god and then there's all this black stuff and before you know it oh my god what have we got here and i still don't know it looks like phil's got his work cut out to make sense of this lot to bridges trench where she's drafted in chris the landowner conveniently a geologist with a power auger that's three meters i think that's natural three meters in three seconds just a little faster than henry nice and natural look at that got that little bit of weathering on top as well haven't we yeah i mean the key for me is that i'm still not really seeing any any reason for the pet to be here no where is the archaeological material in it the finer sediment here it looks like it's been wet in the bottom for some period of time for that build up but after that it looks more like hill wash i think this is a whale myself yeah where's your gut feeling why are you feeling that well because i believe water would be uh shallow i think it'll be coming out of this rock formation and i think it'll be accumulating in this pit i think that's what it is and if it was a well it could have been a sacred well but we'll only know if we carry on digging down it's the same sort of design and construction is this back here so as evening draws in phil's trench is expanding and there are signs of a structure emerging over the last two days we may have moved to roman road and found a settlement but the weather forecast for day three is awful and we're still nowhere near explaining the presence of the beautiful finds that brought us here in the first place if ever we had need of the roman reign god it's now which is why you are 2.99 a bottle i hope he likes it beginning of day three and last night our stupid stupid diggers dug up and drank the libation that i'd offered to the roman god of weather which is why it's not stopped raining all morning and we've had to put this tent over the big trench the good news is that neil is so enthusiastic it's positively scary why the big grin tony in two days we found a previously unknown major roman settlement and how much more do you want so is that job done does that explain why we had these mysterious scatters of fines all over this field no that's the big question for the day in this trench and already look we've got this lovely child's bracelet come up it just looks like a bit of a wire to me no it's decorated look at that oh yeah so what is in this trench could it be a temple well who knows at the moment we need to clean this area back it looks like it's full of fines and see what's underneath heavy rains making life hard and the pressure's on to get some answers to this complicated site in the road trench we're recording the lines of ditches and post holes before the rain washes them away and it's beginning to look like the road and settlement stretch all the way down to trench four is that corn that is that's certainly indicates there's some domestic activity around here still isn't used for grinding your corn to make your flour for baking soda and this is all suggesting this building activity settlement in this area that's right yes i mean we're certainly not beyond the limits of the site we've proved that this was a pretty extensive complex but we're still searching for its religious center are you still getting fines like you were last night as it started to taper off now no it's even better than last night because i mean we've stopped getting so much pottery but i mean it's still there but what we're getting is just such a wonderful class of objects i mean becky's working on this whacking great iron object now you've got to expose becky have you got any idea what it is well there's been some suggestion about it being a spearhead it's got quite a cylindrical long shaft and then this heart-shaped end is that just an old slab of stone or is that something watch this i love this bit look it's grooved it's a quorum stone but you see it's not just a trench of objects it's got some cracking archaeology because look at this area of stones look i mean it's not just stones that have been piled in there there's there's form there's shape to it but it's not just a piece of stone there you can see there's real order in the layers beyond that because you can see in there we've got this big area of burning and then beyond that again right up in the corner of the trench is very black so there are really clear defined layers and i think if given a bit of time we can sort of tease them apart i think we're going to get some cracking archaeology it's quite a good trench oh beautiful with less than a day to go bridge is in a quandary she's going to have to dig over three meters down to prove that this isn't just a roman rubbish pit but is it worth it it looks to me that the most likely candidate but something ritual actually on the site the local archaeologists are adamant that this is actually like things they've seen that are called ritual shafts i think the shape of it is very regular the way it's been cut through this hard rock all suggests that they wanted to put this shaft here and if we think of other roman so-called ritual shafts sometimes it may just have just a single object placed in the bottom at the center perhaps a skull a piece of bone or even a pot and some organic material it's how to dig it what strategy do we employ because at the moment we're at our maximum safe depths i'd like to be able to retain the geology around the sides of it and then if we actually take out the wrist that whole half and then once we get down to the level that i'm at now i can maintain that section again i can run another section down and we can get down to that three meters it's very fragile sort of breaking up a bit at this end as becky struggles to get the iron work out of trench three it's looking like it might not be a spear after all but um this bit in the middle here is actually solid there's no hollow end to it at all which is very odd isn't it for a spearhead so are you saying it might not be a practical sphere it looks to me more like an ornamental piece of iron work would they have had ornamental spears well you do get like model and votive spears on other temple sites hewley and gloucestershire for instance has produced quite a few of them as sort of part of the general pattern of offerings you're using the t word again yeah i'm quite blatant about it [Laughter] temple we're digging more than 100 yards over there so what on earth are we doing in this part of the site well this is much more well not more interesting it's very interesting it's worth a trip up here convince me stewart's not convinced that this was a temple site at all and true to form he's been ferreting around on the edge of the site to come up with an alternative crikey all these lumps and bumps and ditches and gullets is completely different from the rest of the site isn't there it is look at this here wow those are great big looks of iron slag look at the air bubbles in it industry isn't it it is i think these give us clues as to what's going on because all these lumps and bumps in here seem to have done some sort of industrial processing are you telling me it's roma it could be because you've got all the sort of ingredients you need for an industrial settlement you've got iron coming up from the wheel along the roman road yeah you've got timber that you need for fires you've got water in the valley you've got iron stone and clay all the ingredients are a nice little industrial settlement and the romans never miss a trick do they and if there was iron working on site maybe the spears an example of it yeah that's got it all right now i'm gonna pinch it there it wasn't too bad was it no it's a close-up yeah i'll tell you something it's not a spearhead it's far too thick i think it's something ornamental i'm not quite sure what it's from that was gonna be my next question no well at least it's from a secure roman context otherwise you'd be very tempted to say it's a railing spike wow it's an interesting object interesting it may be but it's not getting us any nearer our temple it's just after lunch the rain started tipping down in earnest will we be able to get to the bottom of bridge's pit before it gets dark in about three hours time and even if we do will it fill up with water again before we have a chance to look at it properly well i hope so look i tell you what we've come back full of food we're full of vigor i've found matt and we're both going to go down and look 15 minutes in we're nearly there yeah i'm done badly yesterday we found a huge roman road a field away from where it was supposed to be but before the cartographers redraw the maps we're confirming its course up the hill and so far helen's found two roadside ditches so is it a road or isn't it a road well there's lots and lots of roman material coming out of both ditches but in between it just looks a bit insubstantial yeah the narrowness does puzzle me it doesn't worry me at all really because look how close we are to the surface this is going to be continually hit by the plow and disturbed and churned up now this looks all right for me for a road on this exit coming through here i mean i think it's good i mean we've got it at this point here if you believe it we've chased it over three 400 meters the only one problem is it seems to stop there where that hollow cuts across again that doesn't worry me because that hollow is absolutely typical of gravel extraction so i think it's probably just been taken out the youtube guys are really positive about this road oh yeah well yeah it's good enough for me then there's now no doubt that this was a major roman road is it a coin i think so and we found signs of occupation in all our trenches along it but what's troubling is that the only evidence of actual buildings is in trench one but guys got a theory i think i have got an idea come on then inspire me well we have got an ordinary settlement by the road at a river crossing which is exactly what you'd expect anywhere in roman britain what makes this place different though is i think it was a market or a fair sight we're on a tribal boundary so over to the east we've got the cantiarchy over to the west we've got the actual parties we know from other places that these tribal peoples would meet in certain places on an annual basis on occasional basis for trading it's social and economic and so that's why we've got all these little metal finds like the coins and things around here but very little trace of buildings what this hillside would have looked like on one of those market days you can imagine is it covered in tents and bivouacs and carts of people doing all their business and that kind of thing and then perhaps the day after it's all gone just back to little settlement but what about this religious element well these festivals took place on dates in the religious calendar just as they did all the way into christian times through the middle ages and up to early modern times things like some bartholomew's vows at margaret's fair it's a roman equivalent so just imagine the people here doing their bartering and trading and dropping their bits and pieces but also taking part in a religious festival as well sounds a bit like a car boot sale today a roman chariot boot sale i think if our roman revelers were meeting at a shrine there's no sign of it at the road junction the floor of this thing is very very heavily burned absolutely dished where the archaeology looks more like a furnace it actually comes right out to there right out there look and it's made out of these reused toils so there's no sign of a shrine in phil's trench but at last bridge's hard slog seems to have paid off she thinks she's found signs of ritual activity in a layer of animal bone where ian is you can see there's a really large animal jaw yes yeah have you seen anything like that before within pits yes that looks like a horse jaw as well which is even more significant because in this part of england central southern england south eastern england there's a tradition actually starts before the roman conquest in the iron age of burying horse heads and horse jaws in pits just above this deposit of course we had that layer of burning and all of the bone has been found underneath that yes do you know of sites where they've perhaps sealed off pits if they have been used for ritual purposes i can think of a number that are both iron age and roman where you might get a deposit of animal bone or pots then you get like a lens of clay or perhaps some organic material perhaps then a sterile layer and then you start the sequence again and i think this is looking very promising in terms of our interpretation of this being a ritual shaft so it's possible that this animal jawbone was an offering to the gods and under it could be layers and layers of previous offerings all we need is another layer of burning to prove it and there's still a metre and a half to go in this pit it's becoming a race against time to make sense of the archaeology before rain stops play hero dear oh dear demora losing but his art is pouring in here no what about the archaeology it's suffering i mean it's very good [Music] phil's now found four edges to his furnace but one of them's puzzling him but this looks like a really good edge well i know i mean you kind of feel that should be the way i know but then you see this edge here is still very very highly fired so this burning it would be actually underneath the wall whereas on this side the burning stops at the wall so you're the roman expert is it possible that actually what we're looking at is is is something with a with a stone base and then actually heaped up on the top of it is is actually a clay built structure with a floor maybe just above the raised floor so maybe that's what claps super structure right now that's what i was wondering well that would sort out the problem with the wall yeah this could well have been a corn dryer and it was just one feature within a whole mass of geophysical anomalies so perhaps this road junction was the site of a collection of industrial buildings but why were there coins on top of it well what's here is seems to be industrial activity it seems for the utilitarian and it's strange because this looks like quite an important spot here next to the road if you're going to push me for an explanation i guess all i could offer you is those coins still look to me like they come from a shrine or a temple or something maybe sometime they cleaned out the temple took all the rubbish out and dumped it over these abandoned buildings and that's why the coins were here guy you're the dissident pulling dissident faces while he was speaking well i've never heard of the romans being so considerate they pick all the contents out of a temple and bring them over here where we might find them so we know there was a temple here or somewhere else but look really as mark says we've had a real result we've got a site that sums up what made roman britain different from the britain before and afterwards we've got the industry we've got some ritual activity going on here but we've also probably got a thriving market or fair center a temporary type of site where people come in at seasonal events but we're not quite done here and with the light fading fast all eyes turn to trench two where the final piece of the religious jigsaw is falling into just off the place you've got a burnt layer down there yep but that's interesting though because that's our second layer of burning the burnt layer suggests that offerings were made to the gods and then sealed with the remains of a bonfire or feast the late roman pottery tells us that the pit went out of use in the middle of the 4th century when pagan worship was made illegal so maybe our superstitious roman chariot boot sailors made one final offering before sealing up the pit forever until we came along [Music] but before we leave the replica of the scepter that brought us here in the first place is ready and i've got one final duty to perform in my capacity as priest of time team feel powerful hell is this all i need no i'm afraid not i've got this lovely headdress for you now this is actually copied from a real one found not very far away from here on a temple site so it's only appropriate that you don it there we go time team's finest sartorial moment just remind me again why i'm doing all this well i think you're going to be a priest of the cult of mercury who i think is the most appropriate god for this location because we've got all the the trade and commerce along here so what could be a better god for the inhabitants here to celebrate so what do i have to do well you're going to sprinkle some water sacred to mercury over the goods that you're just about to sell on to your unsuspecting customers right off you go yeah oh incidentally he's also the god of thieves and vagabonds thanks mate [Music]

Channel: Odyssey - Ancient History Documentaries

Views: 123,769

Keywords: ancient history, classical history, ancient civilisations, classical antiquity, history documentary, classical documentary, time team, surrey, roman relics, ancient rome, ancient britain, roman history, roman documentary, archaeological dig, archaeology, british history, history of britain, roman britain, origins explained, ancient egypt

Id: EEsm_ouj8h0

Length: 47min 39sec (2859 seconds)

Published: Sat Sep 11 2021