Mystery of the Ice Cream Villa (Yelnow Villa, Colworth, Beds) | S16E08 | Time Team

inside this building behind me are some of the finest mines in the entire country and they're busy making of all things ice cream but these scientists are also keen amateur archaeologists with another passion and it's over there it's this field because this is no ordinary field it's full of all this stuff lots of 2000 year old bits of roman brick tile and masonry and look at all this lot we've got brooches rings a pin belt buckle lovely piece of roman gold clearly whoever lived here was very important and wealthy but who was it well this time we've got a whole week to find out only joking as usual three days we're here next to a science park on the coalworth estate in rural bedfordshire this field is the local archaeological society's pride and joy because it's stacked with roman finds like this fabulous piece of gold jewelry but what's odd is that as far as i know we're miles from any roman road why stick a massive roman house here in the middle of nowhere to try and answer that we're going to need all the brains we can muster lloyd you asked us here didn't you that's correct honey and you work in that science park i do indeed what do you do i'm an ice cream scientist what does that involve well for me it involves working with the ingredients and the formulations how we put together ice cream to deliver the properties that people want so if i put my ice cream into a cone and the cones stay stiff even though the ice cream's melting that's down to you that's the sort of thing we work on tony yes you are a great man what is it that you'd specifically like us to answer what i specifically like you to answer is it's in relation to the roman period who are the people who live here and how do they fit into the overall landscape do you think we can do that for him neil told order isn't there i mean it looks like a very juicy site doesn't it but you know what really interests me is you know why here we're in the middle of nowhere even in roman times what is it about this spot that leads lloyd and all his clothes to find those exciting finds doesn't everything about it say bog standard roman villa no far from it i mean look at this aerial photograph here you've got this dark discoloration that's the site of the villa house where lloyd and his colleagues are finding all the artifacts but it's set in this unusual ditched enclosure that's rather unusual why have a house inside an enclosure john this is a perfect site for geophys isn't it you can solve this i'm sure we will but the problem is the size it's knowing exactly where to target so we're going to go in with the mag first try and find the footprint of the the actual roman villa building if it is that and then take it from there yeah absolutely you know we've got so much to do we must get a trench in early on today we just can't wait that much longer well john shouldn't find it too difficult to locate the villa building in fact you can hardly miss it for a start we're not talking about a garden shed typically roman villas are massive structures with whole wings full of rooms and a very clear footprint then add on the odd luxury dining room with mosaics and painted wall plaster central heating even an ensuite bath house and it's no wonder this feels full of rubble picking it up on gfiz should be a breeze look at all this lot over the last few years the ice cream people and all the other volunteers have managed to glean over a ton of roman material off our field which means that helen and philippa who are in our incident room over here the local cricket pavilion have really got their work cut out bit of a treasure trove for you isn't it it is yeah the first thing that strikes you when you begin to open a few bags is the high quality of the stuff from here we've got a lovely spoon which has got great white metal coatings still intact and then these horse harness mounts now they're really heavy and chunky they're really top-notch things the brooches are absolutely fantastic too and then the fiesta resistance is this gold piece of jewelry very rare which i think is a link from a necklace that's fantastic but the other thing that hits me is how few objects there are which i think is really very weird compared to the enormous amount of coins behind me philippa you've got lots of coins how many clients do you reckon you've got i think about 400 at the moment but i haven't looked at them all yet what are you going to do with them well i'm going to try and date them all and then that should hopefully provide a chronology for the site but you've already taken one out of its bag what's that well it's one of the earlier coins from the site and it's an aries of julia domner who is the wife of septimius severus and it's quite unusual to see empresses on coins would you have expected to have found quite so many coins on this side no definitely not this is one of the biggest collections of coins from any site in bedfordshire if we're scratching our heads over the fines in the incident room the picture isn't any clearer out on site john you can see from all the stone and roman tile in the field robert is standing on top of a roman building what's the geophysics say well look we can't see clear wall lines but look this is the enclosure ditch that we're talking about you can see the ditch clearly there you can see the ditch clearly there in the magnetics and between those ditches we've got this massive noise now that has to be the building right but as i say you can't see clear wall lines if you give us another half hour we'll come in with resistance and radar and that's far better for defining wall lines and foundations you remember that massive building with a huge distinctive footprint that john couldn't miss well he's missed it and if the villa's proving elusive ben and stuart are wondering why it would have been here in the first place an interesting location isn't it the site because when you look at this map of roman roads here we've got irman street major roman road heading north east of our site here we've got wattling street heading to the west that it actually sits quite a long way from either the middle of nowhere it's a bit in between isn't it i mean toaster here significant roman town military origins god manchester significant roman town military origins erchesta right up here it's difficult to believe that anywhere could exist in this landscape without reference to these towns that's the thing that was fascinating to me about the the landscape we get used to looking at big roman motorways that were like irma street and watman street bashing through the country and forget there's got to be networks of small rows connecting villas to the main road system and they're they're really hard ones to spot we're not quite sure why we can't find a villa and we're not quite sure why there would have been one here in the first place we're on a roll meanwhile john's completed his magnetic survey of our field and thrown radar and resistivity at it too and looking at the results involves some strange ritual in the back of his land rover what can you see under there john not a lot at the moment you mean not a lot looks like a sudoku to me we're gonna be into ice cream making nice piece looks like a piece of contemporary art yeah so we got no magnetic no resistance no radar no no we've got magnetics we've got lots of noise that goes with the well the supposed building i think we put a trench into that magnetic noise it sounds to me as though we want to go back to first principles dig up i agree this is truly bizarre this field is stacked full of fines and yet the geophysics can't find any trace of a big stone structure and now i'm doubly baffled because in spite of that we seem to be opening a trench anyway this is for us a test pit really so i think once we we take this first one a bit steady it almost looks like sort of cooling you think it's something like cobbled surface or something it's damn darn i know that i mean is that the line of the building supposed to be not far off [Music] it's lunchtime on day one and we've opened our first trench here in the middle of our site this has got to be the most closely observed bit of field we've ever looked at on time team we've had magnetometry on it we've had resistivity radar and none of them seem to me to have come up with anything at all so what do we do we put in a trench anyway and not just any old trench a really really long one john why have you put a trench in here desperation panic no not at all you're right we didn't get a clear building plan but we still had all this noise in the magnetics and so we needed to investigate what's going on and the trench has come up trunks absolutely and the archaeology is good i mean you see at this end here it looks like we've got this big area of clay which we're thinking might well be the natural and then somewhere along here oblique to the actual trench you can see we've got big lumps of bone got rubber and stone it's very very dirty there's black material and it sort of dies out somewhere in here but only somewhere i'm not sure about that front end so there is archaeology here i mean yes there's archaeology in the trench but what worries me tony is it doesn't look like a monumental roman building so everything that phil just said is wrong uh i don't disagree with you phil but i don't see a building so it could be the geophysics is right well it can really be wrong the main thing is whether or not there's a build in there or not we can see on the surface there is a spread of material john has picked up some noise on the geophysics what we've got to do is resolve what that really means we've got loads of people that are actually falling over each other so what you do is dig another trench over there excuse me we've got a very long trench here so what do we need to do put in another trench why not totally escape no look look we've talked about the noise on the magnetics in the middle here but if you remember it's set within this ditched enclosure that extends all the way around the site now the ditches show really well in the magnetics and you can see at that point there an end to the ditch so we need to get some dating out and see how it relates to what's here this is madness we may have a roman villa we might have a roman settlement so what do we do we found a ditch all right let's dig for this it's a good ditch tony and what we know is the building isn't over there it doesn't seem to be there so it must be somewhere between the two now i'm not panicking i really am not panicking but if it comes to it we'll open another trench through here later on today [Laughter] definitely oh there's something between there and there great that's time that doesn't show on the geophysics either total mayhem i thought we were here to dig a roman villa but instead we put in our first trench to investigate the noise on john's geophysics and now we're opening a second trench to find the end of a ditch brilliant and if that doesn't work neil's already thinking he may need to open a third trench between the other two genius well done lads though he might not need to because back in trench one i think we've just got lucky yeah i mean it's one big roof tile but it's absolutely fresh i mean this material has not been broken up by the plow look at that look no and that's that's box flute yeah that's your oprah course don't it yeah well it's pretty clear we've got some really big roof tile we've got underfloor heating system you know we've obviously got a major roman house here well if we hadn't found something in a 10 meter long bit of trench we'd have been in serious trouble so while the search for our grand roman villa continues over in trench two bridge is digging the exciting ditch that runs around our site what have you got there's potentially these three um eye bits of iron in here and they look suspicious to me like hob nails from the bottom of boots yeah you're right they've got that curved over surface on the head haven't they that would stick out from the leather but also found with them is all these little bits of bone right now yeah and in fact we've still got some in situ here with little bits of charcoal and burning and that kind of thing around here well it could be a burial wouldn't it given we've got some hobnail boats and i'm not saying that three hob nails make a boot but they are a classic thing to find in a roman burial aren't they they are so maybe we've found exciting evidence of a roman burial or maybe just a boot but it's not all good news because in spite of the initial excitement in trench one we can't find a structure plenty of broken roof tiles but no villa so neil who's definitely not panicking has decided to open a third trench it's going in between our first two trenches where john's equipment registered a massive noise that we're hoping indicates a central villa building back in bridges trench where not half an hour ago we thought we might have a burial the store is moved on it's lake it's neen valley lower need valley so it's up that way and it's one of these sort of courseware types that they start making in a color code late on so that wouldn't be found with a barrier no definitely not definitely not so no burial then as you can see uh over there it's tea time everyone's looking pretty relaxed but take a look at this nothing in that trench whatsoever and over here nothing in this trench either matt what you got in your trench well this looks very much like trench one over there a stone spread on this side ditch in the middle that's about it so basically nothing certainly no buildings that's for sure are we lucky we've got thousands of pounds worth of geophysical equipment to confirm to us how much nothingness we've actually got oh dear me it feels like we've gone two steps forward and three back today we've had a couple of hob nails and a load of broken tiles we haven't got a burial and we certainly haven't got a villa as first days go it's hardly been a triumph lloyd i feel that we're in the process of letting you down rather badly i don't remember another time team where the augurees have been so good at the beginning and by the end of day one we found virtually nothing well we've found some things tony but it's not a fan of roman villa have we you know this field more than any of us do you think that we're digging in the wrong place well one way in which i think we can help tony is that we spend a lot of time walking this field systematically and we broke the field down into a series of grids so the brighter colours are the areas where we've found the greatest density in this case of roof tile yeah yeah similarly we've also got densities plotted out for the box flutile i know i'm very ignorant about these things but aren't they all virtually in the same place pretty much so and where's that pretty much behind you tony behind the digger behind the away from where the trenches are precisely i mean this is recording of the highest professional quality tony and lloyd's group now who really showed this area here defunct live almost like battleships isn't it that's we should perhaps have a look now so who's going to find our roman villa is it going to be our nationally celebrated archaeologist or mr whippy we'll know tomorrow beginning of day two here at collworth park in bedfordshire where we're looking for some kind of roman villa yesterday we put in three trenches we put in one along there one around here and a third there and we found virtually nothing but then a local enthusiast lloyd who was the guy who brought us here in the first place came up with another idea he'd already field walk this entire field and he'd put all the information on a grid and there was one square of that grid d5 where he had more roman fines than anywhere else and that d5 grid was just behind our big digger so are we gonna dig it well yes we are but the good news here we're already doing it look we've actually plotted out the fines related to our trench and with scientific precision our trench is already actually in d5 so we're still in d5 here yes we are but d5 then is where we found absolutely nothing i wish he would stop saying absolutely nothing we're digging for a day we've got good archaeology well we haven't got a flipping villa have we are you satisfied john that this is where we should be digging yes definitely henry's now sorted out where the fines concentration was and he's pinpointed it accurately and the trench covers that as well i am totally confident that this is the hot spot if we just get on take the trench back come back in half an hour tony then we can talk again come on baby come to mama come to mama so we're now extending trench three here to cover the area where lloyd and his colleagues had recorded the highest concentration of fines this does feel like we've got something under here doesn't it [Music] oh look no but this is the best we've got so far trench three looks promising we're finally making progress in our quest for a roman villa and stuart may even find the mystery road linking it to the outside world provided he can win the fight with his map in trench two we're excavating the ditch that runs around our site we ended the day yesterday by ruling out the idea of a burial now we're not quite so sure bridge do you realize we've got something like six hop nails from this end of the trench now they've all come from this little area here wow and i've got probably something like 12 to 15 from this end now it's also coming out with a lot of cremated bone just inside the ditch edge louise is it common to have sprinklings of cremated bone and hobnails in roman ditches it's not unusual it's starting to sound rather like ritual certainly boots have some kind of ritual function and we know that they use bone to mark the end of ditches what's funny about boots isn't it because they're still used today you know you tie them to the back of waiting cars you find them walled up in in houses so once again maybe not a burial but bridges trench looks like it could have had some kind of strange ceremonial function why you brought me out here well a walk will do you good actually still convinced there's a villa here stuart now reckons he's discovered how it was linked to the outside world i think i think you actually like this put these maps together there now what we've got there's the the riveroos down here and we've got urchester over here and if you look at this boundary exists going across the landscape i've highlighted in yellow you see it comes in a straight line right across all the way across here our site is here so it's directly next to it it carries on down then to the valley of the greaters i'm convinced this is a roman road coming all the way through here it's still embodied in that trackway that we see there which heads across the landscape towards us to that direction and of course we've just got the villa in the field through there so we actually got the site bang next to a major road and route way that's that's amazing it turns out that the track running alongside our site has been here for two thousand years back in trench three where we got excited about evidence of burning earlier on there's no sign of any building when they are struggling to work out where to go from here desperate times call for desperate measures for the first time i can ever remember on time team we've got a breakaway archaeological faction lloyd who was the bloke who invited us here in the first place thinks that we ought to be digging here and given that our own archaeologists are flailing around desperately i really don't see why we shouldn't pick up on your strategy what's going on here well tony we know that the current archaeological society is just the latest generation of coal with people who are interested in the archaeology here 30 years ago another coal of person by the name of tony james also took an interest in in the field and this is tony's son glynn and between them they dug this rather interesting pit and what did you find inside the paved floor here and what looks like to be the edge of a rubbed out wall all that's very exciting great photos but how do you know it's actually here because you know one bit of a field just like any other really isn't it it was just for my memory of position in the field and also aligning with two trees that i remember the tallest tree in that group of trees there and with that particular tall one in that hedge line over there trees grow don't they they do it's a small hole in a big field um that said it's better than we've got in the air trenches isn't it well have we geoff is this area yeah we have and was there anything that looked remotely like what's in those pictures no so yeah you know what's to lose small trench in here if we can find this i mean how it's related to what we're gonna over there i haven't got the faintest idea at the moment but i'll give it a go we don't usually panic this much until day three i do sense a whiff of crisis so having spent two days using state-of-the-art equipment we're now resorting to lining up a couple of trees to find a three foot long bit of wall discovered somewhere in this field 30 years ago not that we're clutching at straws in goes trench four [Music] look like we're at the top of something don't we i mean it's a very different sort of soil here john from the other trench i mean it's very well i think it could be a big pit here very silty tony look what's just come off the spoil tip oh is this a roman coin yeah lovely little roman coin back in trench one there's been a small breakthrough the crucial thing is that it's the first coin that we've had from this particular trench or from the area of this trench so that is the first dateable evidence that we've got for the for this area shall i whip it up to philippe not without or give it a number all right can i okay the tide could be starting to turn because back in trench four it looks like we may have the first signs of glyn's wall don't tell me the ice cream man was right can we get that photograph back that's the one you see how you've got this really big slab surface i mean this you just compare that i'm not saying it's exactly the same stone but it doesn't look dissimilar does it well they're both stone clean how do these look compared to what you remember it's very similar to the floor that i found in my test bit so i think you're fairly close just skim please philippa what do you reckon on this it's just come up from phil's trench i can tell who the emperor is it says con stands on there and that can actually be dated to just one year which is three four seven two three four eight so where does that go in your pile it fits just here oh you've got a lot of coins in that area haven't you yeah there are quite a lot from the period 330 to 348 but if you look over here there's loads more we've got huge numbers from the late third century yes it really tells a vivid story doesn't it right through from the beginning of the roman empire all through the 100s and the 200s there's virtually nothing and then suddenly it really spikes and and there's a real coin presence right until the end of the roman empire and this is a really exciting profile because even if you can't find a villa outside we've definitely got one here on the table because this is a typical profile for a roman villa which makes it all the more mystifying that we can't find it in our field though phil has been getting even more broken tiles in his trench all we need now is a building before it was fired what you got there guys we've got an inscribed tile here that came out of this trench um a few letters i g possibly an l in a v do you think it might mean it could be the name of somebody the person who was writing this it could be some kind of mark from the tile person to say how many tiles he was making or where they were due to go but just on four letters it's a bit hard to tell i mean you know as well as i do if you see a better new laid concrete somehow or another you've got a right here have you just about finished that trench now pretty much good story cracking piece of archaeology we have a building we have land divisions and everything else look we've got a ditch running through there and we've got a ditch running through there so we've actually got this air area of the field segmented off and setting the angle of these two ditches you've got what i think is the end wall of a building and joining that build into that ditch we've got an overflow drain that comes down through there there's a great little piece of archaeology for a very small area so what kind of building do you think it would have been i think it's a timber frame building i think that that slot is actually a beam slot to take the base of a timber frame building i think the walls would have been made of clay and then a roof you can have a toiled roof we've got toils off this side so i think we've got a perfectly good build in here within a ditch sort of land division can you give any kind of date for it no but you can because i gave you a coin this morning that came off the spoil tip you did didn't you 348 a.d see you knew the answer all along didn't you so what are you going to do now basically basically record it close it down it's been cracking now fantastic on a site where we're looking for a grand multi-roomed villa we've found the tool shed well it's a start back in bridges trench the fines are now looking less ritual and more every day well to be honest i have seen things like this before on the hardware counter of my local shop i mean i think i think you're right it is quite hinge-like but i'm thinking more furniture hinge rather than something like a buckle plate so there are no notches in the corners for for a buck hole but from this area here we've now had the hobnails we've now had the animal boat we've now had the cremated bone i i feel as though we're um all human life is here absolutely this is the rubbish tip of the site potentially it may be the rubbish tip but it's telling us all about how they lived i'm tempted to say a rubbish tip sums up this dig we've had tantalising glimpses of the people who were once here but it's so frustrating that we still can't find the place they were living in neil came bouncing up to me at lunchtime and he said tony you know those 30 year old photos of that lost stonework well we've put a trench in not exactly where lloyd's friend said because we had some geophysics results which meant that it looked like we got a better target a little bit further over but it's great because we're down on the money we've found the missing stonework haven't we now no no no we haven't tony um the stones you see there i thought look very much like those stones there yeah but the more exposed where phil's digging now it gets more and more random we've exposed it up there it looks more like stones rather than a surface i don't think i've ever seen so much random stone in one trench and we can't find the wall that clinton in his trench lloyd come here you brought us here what's gone wrong i don't think anything's gone wrong tony we've found an awful lot i think the problem is he's making sense of it all well yes that's true we've got to try and prove this one way the other where is this stone building i mean i know you i've given you i mean a bit of a false prophet i've given you excitement i've let you down but we are close to it now i'm thinking that we're going to go further that way if it comes through it go further this way and if it comes to go further that way you know well that's pretty scientific isn't it well why not you know what else have we got to go on lloyd bring all your knowledge as an ice cream man to bear on this site which direction would you go in that direction tony so once again relying on local expertise neil's extending trench four to try and locate glenn's wall it's 4 p.m on day 2 and we're still nowhere near finding this villa in trench one we've got some sort of wooden shed from the fourth century trench two is a rubbish tip full of hobnails and bits of old furniture in trench three all we've got are broken tiles a load of stones and evidence of burning and in trench four where we're trying to find one of the villa walls nothing we've reached crisis point time for a council of war what we know is that there is a stone building or at least a stone part of a building on this site that had a hyper coast yeah but that's not much to know in two days is it it's like we haven't got anything tangible at all well i think we have i mean we've clearly defined this enclosure now and on day one i said i hoped that we'd get noise as i call it in the magnet yeah all right you've got noise but no structures at all no and that is the whole issue we can't see the structures with the radar and with the res and so to me it says one of three things it's plowed out totally we haven't gone down deep enough or as neil says we've only got a small stone building and the rest of it is timber framed we've certainly got timber buildings tony where phillies we've got clear evidence of timber structures so maybe we're wrong to be thinking a monumental stone structure maybe we've got a series of timber buildings one of which had a stone room to it let's extend that trench in both directions let's prove once and for all is there a stone structure in this area while we extend trench three john looks like he's had enough he's moved away from all the confusion to geophysical area further down the field and i don't blame him it's the end of day two and we've had one setback after another but there have been two exciting last minute developments first this area of burning in trench three could that be part of the central heating system inside a roman villa and what about this intriguing circular thing is this roman or could it be something to do with the iron age and part of the reason why this whole site's here at all we'll find out tomorrow beginning of day three of our really frustrating search for a roman villa here in bedford and if things weren't difficult enough half of us have now gone down with hay fever but last night neil showed us two little glimmers of hope the first one was this patch of burning down here which he thought might be evidence of a hyper course the central heating system which would be at the heart of a roman villa neil if you can hear me probably is it no um what it is is a feature full of smashed up tile this is directly underneath the fine scatter on the surface so it explains that but can you see it's curving around to where kerry is then back to where matt is it's like a c-shape question is where's all this tile coming from that's a real conundrum all right it's really intriguing but it's certainly not the villa the other thing that got you excited was that little circle that was on the g of fears yeah i mean here it is at the top end of the site what might it be i think there's two possibilities one is it could be a little circular roman shrine a little religious place or possibly it's not even roman at all could be pre-roman perhaps an iron a drowned house or something it's gonna be a classic classic question what can we do the time available but the first thing is answer this you've got to get that trench open and then see how we go number three find my villa so while we continue digging trench three to work out what neil's c-shaped structure is we're opening a fifth trench if john's circular feature is a roman shrine we should find a central altar with ritual offerings like coins if it's a much older roundhouse it'll have bits of iron age pottery and circular holes for wooden posts i'm not expecting a monumental structure everybody else whatever it is pretty quickly we're starting to get fines the dark and the light that's roman there look yeah bit of a rim look just turning over a little plain rim well let's pull back the can down here this stuff is i'd repulsive how nasty it was i wouldn't come back to help in bridges trench though the mud is the least of our troubles certainly compared to working out what the archaeology is doing what are you thinking well uh what seems to be happening is we've got two sort of distinct phases going on so we've got that dark material there that you've been digging and that seems to be consistently bringing out pottery of that third fourth century date and then can you see that area just along there the yellow that's it i mean that's where we were getting the cremated bone from yesterday the hobnails and the pottery seems to be sort of really going back about 100 years we seem to having a start date about the second century so when do you think the ditch was dug well at the moment i would put my money on it being dug about the third century oh as late as that yeah but what's really nice is that we seem to be starting to get evidence of what's actually going on inside the enclosure besides the ditch this corner is a great one to look in the little circular patch here that is looking very typical of a small post hole so you're thinking wooden structures well that would be typical of wooden structures small structures something that could be associated with small settlement or something to do with industry and outbuilding bridges trench sums up this dig on day one it looked like a burial then it wasn't yesterday it changed to a rubbish tip and now she's got wooden workshops and this is the same field where all the evidence told us we should be finding a huge roman villa back over in matt's trench the signs are looking dare i say it promising they've done a good job cleaning up around this area of burning they have like very clearly now i think you can see where the tiles are coming around in an arc from where matt is coming out here comes right here it ends there back up in a straight line there and then back round and you know what i think tony this looks to me like a classic tile kiln a place where they're actually making the tiles with matte in where the fire is the hot gas is coming round and a floor on the top and all your tiles piled up above it so rather than having a villa we might actually have a factory i mean that'd be ironic wouldn't it yeah but matt how's it looking in there well if it's a kiln it's a very well made kiln look at that stonework oh yeah does that look familiar to you it's very similar construction isn't it yeah we've got three courses of nicely faced stones there they're coming down and they've got a corner as well coming back these are the photos that were taken 30 years ago yes it could be the stoke hole but it doesn't look very burnt to me no the problem i've got is the magnetic responses don't say kiln really they're not strong enough there's clearly a lot of burning going on and that's reflected by the magnetism could we not be looking at an absolute end of a building that's been robbed out and filled in with the tile when you say an outside land that's the little bubbly bit at the end of a roman villa absolutely and i wonder could that be the corner of the building after having been frustrated for two days at least i'm vaguely excited now we've got something that looks like a wall this is a bit more like it neil thinks we've got a flu leading into a kiln used to fire terracotta tiles while john thinks we've got the curved end of a villa building so we still don't know what we've got there's only one way to find out who's right extend the trench well he's under there somewhere oh there's a good edge here john there is a good edge there what it's an edge of fine bye look i'm not disputing the fact we're looking at something industrial small scale and so on but we we've not got an intact fired structure no that's true i mean it's strange why this is not scorched isn't it these stones i mean that is that is hard to explain you got something nice fabulous my goodness yeah it looks like a jet ring oh wow we've been thinking bridges trench was on the site of the local roman car boot sale but now it looks more like the antiques roadshow it's got that kind of like a fake gemstone on it i'm just thinking what what date um those rings that have the the gemstone set flush with the surface people say first second century but sticking up proud like this i'm not sure i think i need to see it clean but whatever date it is we love it i know as girls we love audio we would definitely be anyone's family early wouldn't it meanwhile there's fantastic news over in phil's trench he thinks he's found a large building with exciting signs of the people who once lived inside it there's just one problem it's pre-roman we think it might be a roundhouse so what we've done is we've put a trench across there where tracy is here you can see this big black blob that's far stronger on this side and that is confirmed you can see it's a lot darker here so now we're coming into where we think the middle of the round house would be this darkness here is is is the debris of the occupation and as you get to the other end of the roundhouse you can see that the ditch is there but it's far less clear look you can just see it faintly coming up there and that's confirmed on the geophysics it's nowhere near as strong now we have started to get phones okay and this sort of stuff here i don't have any problem with that bulk standard rollman as far as i know yeah happy with that i mean these are little fine drinking vessels uh that's probably a little cup or a beaker something like that we're well into the roman with those now the stuff that i was more interested in which we're starting to get is what's this stuff all right the contrast is huge isn't it this it's a little bit grotty isn't it to tell the truth i do you know i think you're you're in the iron age with this stuff yes i think you're well in the iron age brilliant it's nasty but in this context if you're looking for a roundhouse i mean this is the kind of stuff that you're after it is not nasty material beautiful yes terrific it's just a shame we can't find the one building we came here for and the fact that we've opened yet another trench doesn't exactly inspire me with confidence it's gone in next door to trench three where neil and john were arguing over whether they had a kill or our missing villa building so which is it it's looking more like a building now tony for one simple reason those stones where matt's digging but not burnt at all now if this was the fire box of a kiln would be really intense heat they'd be scorched red no evidence of burning whatsoever so maybe what we've got tony is like you said a little absolute bubble end comes out steps out where mac's hand is now look come back this way yeah in this new trench we've now got this really fine mortar floor which helen's been exposing yeah and then we've got look artifacts samian wine cup hardly seen that at all on this site so that would be something that someone with fairly high status would drink out of wouldn't that yeah this is where people are living not just working they're actually living keep coming back oh we've got a wall haven't we well i hope so got a very clear edge across here lots of infill if we're lucky get some of this out robert trench back wall the house and then look what else what we've got here this really nice very fine little glass wine goblet again late roman quite high status unlike anything else we see on the site so far so it looks more likely it could be a villa it does but give me another hour we've only got two left so finally we've decided there's a curving wall of a building in matt's trench and next door in the new trench we've just opened there's a mortared floor and the back wall of what we think is a high status room well it's starting to look like a villa just not with the fancy mosaics and wall plaster we'd expected the sort of the shine is incredible on this ring it's just so beautiful over in the fines tents the girls are being well a bit girly what type of person would have owned it that kind of jet ring was only worn by women um and only by women in britain for one thing it would have been saying she was alone of some means but also it would have been saying or seems to have been saying she was a woman of childbearing age because they seem from burials only to be found with women within that age group so this would be a real display of her her status and also what role she's playing in the society that she's living do you know what if it wasn't so fragile i think i'd be tempted to wear it despite the chaos everywhere else phil can at least confirm the story in trench five we are now standing in the middle of an iron age roundhouse and it extends from where tracy is i mean she's pretty much on the wall line about four meters radius going round there and then back in front of where mike is now have a look at the section here you see this cobbled surface here those are actually stones that have been laid down to actually make the floor of the roundhouse this is the surface on which the iron age people would have walked so how does all this relate to our roman stuff we've actually got continuity people living on the same site for literally hundreds if not thousands of years the first people that came here were the iron age people and they would have had the chance to put their fields in their their drove ways and they would have actually had a whole landscape here which the romans would then have adapted when they built their houses here houses what do you mean houses a couple of rooms maybe but that's about it it's five o'clock on our final day and for some reason we seem to be extending trench four where yesterday we've failed to find glyn's wall neil and ben are looking anxious oh you know there's certainly material coming through here what you doing over here last minute five to midnight hunch i just wondered whether this yellow bonded material here is the same as the core of the wall that matt's been finding and if it is then you know this is a much bigger building we've actually been thinking of so far the key to it as well as the facing stones is this clay this is redeposited clay and i think they're using this to set the stones into give me 10 minutes i'll get ian in just pull a bit more of this back and we'll know one with the other you've been saying that for the best part of three days okay ten minutes ten minutes so in a final effort neil has extended trench four to find a wall line that he hopes will link up with the apps in trench 3. all eyes are now on ben and neal to see if they can finally locate this elusive villa okay well ben this has been a bit of a friendship last minute exercise i mean what do you think we've got i think we've got it i think the key to it is this yellow clay i think it's a bedding material i think they've laid this down to create a platform and put the building on top the fact this is so similar to the material that matt's getting over there does suggest that we are dealing with the same structure doesn't it and you know we always thought it was quite small to start with but as it's gone on it's got kind of bigger it's actually quite a respectable size now isn't it really well this is quite a spread of material here isn't it now we're looking at something big and rectangular our time is up so has it all been worthwhile neil it's quarter to six day three have we got a villa yes we have quite respectable one as well about 20 meters long tiled roof stone walls perfectly respectable and respectable rather than the grand multi-roomed villa we'd expected we found a modest country house instead after three days of agony we've got the stone wall of a timber-framed building with an axe at one end inside that a dining room with a mortared floor and next door a wooden outhouse all built in the late roman period on a site where people had already been living for hundreds if not thousands of years elijah's been such a helter skelter hasn't it i bet you thought we'd just come in dig some stuff up and dust it off for you well we knew it was a complicated site tony so it's just a case of bringing all the ideas together helen we've had so many smart archaeologists around and yet the amount of time it took to evaluate what was here was enormous i know it seems to have gone up break next speed today but i think what it's reminded us is how difficult it is to to reconcile top soil all fines with what's underneath lloyd as a final present for you for you to play with after we've left john's still been beavering away doing his geophys and he's just turned up look some more roman buildings here that's marvellous tony thank you very much but do us a favor don't ask us to come back and dig it for you [Music] you

Channel: Time Team Classics

Views: 136,347

Rating: 4.9321094 out of 5

Keywords: Team Team, Archaeology, History, Education, Educational, British TV, British History, Tony Robinson, Phil Harding, John Gater, Stewart Ainsworth, Mick Aston, archeological dig, Channel 4, Time Team Full Episodes, Full Episode, Ice Cream Villa, Roman road, Southampton University, Peterborough City Council, Yelnow Villa

Id: Lpl2i7CEe_o

Length: 47min 22sec (2842 seconds)

Published: Sun Feb 28 2021