Potted History (Mildenhall) | Series 17 Episode 6 | Time Team

see this that is ten roman coins if i found these all together in the ground they'd officially constitute an archaeological horde so imagine finding this many coins 55 000 to be precise that was the size of britain's largest coin horde found here in this wiltshire field but take a look at this i'm standing round about here these crop marks are roman walls but the scale means they're about a kilometer long so could i be standing outside an entire roman town welcome to canettio a field full of giant walls and lost buildings about which we know almost nothing this is the single largest site we've ever attempted to investigate and as usual in trustee abus nobis cognizandomest that's three days to dig it [Music] the lost roman town of canettio lies halfway between london and south wales just outside marlborough in the heart of wiltshire bounded by the river kenneth and the medieval village of mildon hall bizarrely known to locals as minol it's hard to imagine a whole town lying under the stubble of this wheat field it's a fantastic notion this idea that underneath this field is an entire roman town but when i look at it all i can see is the sweep of the stubble i can't see any lumps and bumps or anything yeah it doesn't look like much does it really tell me but actually this is a site of a roman town called kunetio but his site was lost for almost two thousand years until aerial photographs of 1940s showed unmistakable patch marks ditches big stone wall roman buildings roman street you're quite confident just from that to say it's a roman town rather than anything else i'd stick my mortgage on it yeah well fahrenheit we know where this place is we know what it was do we really need to dig it just putting it on the map is not enough the air photograph alone demonstrates that we've got big buildings we've got small buildings we've got roads we've got no idea how these layers relate to each other and of course we've got the coins the coin hauled as well strongly suggest there's another dimension to the function here we have no idea of the base of this town and we've only got three days are we really going to be able to do anything concrete in such a short time yes we are we're going to be very focused you know mark wouldn't like nothing better than us still be digging here in his retirement absolutely but what we are going to do with tony is the biggest geophysical survey time team that's ever done john and his crew are going to do a dutiful survey of the whole roman town that will look fantastic it's going to blow you away from that we can target in on particular point to answer specific questions well geo fizzing a whole town is surely a time team first john and his team have clearly got wind of our mammoth task and set off at dawn without waiting for a green light but geoff is just the start we're going to have quite a job deciphering the jumbled layers of history in their survey and in order to do that we need to excavate [Music] mark have we sorted out what we're going to do yeah we're just looking at the the plot from all the air photographs that has been accrued over the last 50 years and what really stands out is this big black line which is the wall with big projecting towers and particularly just here which is where we're standing on the site of the south gate which appears to be quite a monumental structure how does that marry up with what you've done john not quite as clear as that i'm afraid i think mark's actually cherry-picked the the main features and what the geophysics is showing that there's far more complexity to what's going on here it's obviously got a long period of history and so there's different things from different periods and they're all on top of each other so it is a bit of a jumble and we don't really know what is what it is we've got to get a trench in haven't we there's only one place where your survey john matches marks which is the line of this wall so i guess you gotta get trench in there what do you think phil i couldn't agree with you more uh neil i mean one thing we really must do is confirm that that is the wall but i think we can go better than that why don't we pull the trench back from the wall and with the eye of faith there might actually be a white line coming round there which might actually be the front of a tower so trench one is going in across a break in the southern wall where the team suspects we might find the gateway and a watchtower [Music] well well well digging in wheelchair again oh it wasn't the was here or dark in it i would love to see this wall he's supposed to be very big it there's our first roman poem i would say that's a piece of roman pop yeah without doubt that's from dorset so yeah that's probably going to be later roman we didn't want an address for it with up to 400 years of roman history to unpick every piece of dating evidence is going to be crucial in working out a chronology for connectio what is it that you want to find out from this site where can i start i think for these three days the thing i'm really interested in is getting some good dating evidence for these walls in the early roman period they'd express the power of the state by provision of big public buildings a forum basilica amphitheater in the late period it's not focusing on these public buildings it's big flashy walls with immensely strong gatehouses and projecting towers that's the statement of power of the late roman state so i'd like to see whether we can tie a date down for that lot what are you after here these small towns is something that we largely tend to find in the northwestern provinces in france in germany and britain and we know very very little about those so we're very much reliant on the archaeology and so what we have here is an almost unique opportunity to really investigate what's going on inside and to put the whole thing together despite centuries of destructive ploughing on this field gf's are producing cracking results and that's reflected in the archaeology phil how are we getting on superbly tony just as on the geophysics we've got the wall here it ends about here and then i think we're going into the ditch it's much darker through there and it gets chalky around there and at the back round the corner we've got this big black blob with with pottery and we've got bone on it i think that's our pit and apart from that we've got other bits of pottery we've got coins it really is all coming together so already it looks as though our roman town is beginning to appear in the field how much more is there we'll find out later oh and of course this being time team it looks like it's going to buck it down any minute welcome back to the roman town of connectio we're about a mile and a half outside of marlborough in wiltshire and according to the archaeologists the town itself ought to be right under my feet and it seems that they're right because already we've got this really robust looking wall here and this black ditch here apparently there's some sort of pit just around the corner there but in order to get a picture of the whole town we've set john the extremely ambitious task of geofitting the entire site and in order to do that he's employed some rather unusual help [Music] john what is that contraption this is jimmy in the future we've got such a big sight here um the only way we decided we could tackle it was to try this new bit of kit that the swedish have developed and basically it's radar on wheels jimmy is this usually used on archaeological sites no no this has been designed with the utility mapping in mind so looking for pipes and cables hasn't actually been used on archaeology in britain before well that's quite exciting it really is a first and it is absolutely amazing this has got 10 times as many antenna and it's all on this cart and it's 10 times as quick in 18 years of time team i've never heard you so excited before yeah but a bit worried because i could be out of a job [Music] there's no such help for henry though it shanks his pony all the way [Music] our ultimate goal is a complete picture of how canettio developed over time so we'll use henry's field work as a template and then spend three days adding evidence from aerial photos john's deer fizz results and 3d models and as the predicted rain starts to fall trench one gives us our first classy find ah yeah it's a spoon yeah that's the handle you got the little drop and then you've got just part of the bowl it would have been a circular one and they tend to be earlier rather than late roma so more likely second century early third these types of spoon were usually silvered or tin plated and were a cut above the regular day-to-day wooden variety and equally lavish objects were unearthed here during the 50s and 60s unfortunately the excavation notes were never published but the amazing finds did make it to a local museum davey one of the problems we got on this site is a small amount of digging that has taken place because they've been written up but you've got all the finds in the museum that's right you see them all here uh here is an uh piece of stone from an arch it would have set like that as a column and the arch for the gateway would have sprung from there just shows how monumental the building was and then back here we have some painted wall plaster and you can see the decoration the designs on here so do we know where that's from i know it's from trench bb and i'm not quite sure where that's from so that's something hopefully you you will be able to find out so it does suggest that there's a building of high status presumably plaster maybe with a hyper course that kind of thing could be yeah coins are always important in looking at roman sites i mean philippa you've gone for all of them what they look like well first of all they obviously give us a really good chronology for the site we've got a late iron age coin here all the way through the roman period right through to this early fifth century coin here and where's the horde fit in here well the horde would fit in in around the 270s 280s and it's at a time when roman britain is really prospering these rich pickings covering a 400-year period have triggered a tantalising hunt for trench bb laid out immediately south of trenches [Music] back out on site we've now identified a second target we're in the middle of the ward town and there's this massive building which we think is emancio oh that's one of those hotel type things that high status people used to stay in when they were wandering around the country that's right it's a building made up of a series of rooms and it's ideal for radar to work on so we thought this is the best target for us to try if we look at mike's computer we can actually see the results on screen already i mean you've seen these time slices before we've put all the results together and what we can see are several rooms here and we think this is part of the mancio so the plan is to put a trench across one of the walls from inside the room into the courtyard see if we can get some dating evidence um and see the state of preservation so our investigation expands from trench one looking for the southern gateway to trench two which takes in this substantial building in the interior and the radar results are good oh as we're straight down onto the archaeology your work here is done i think but with trench two looking to id this building i'm concerned that we're overly confident it's emancio well in the aerial photographs there is a very clear large building which has lots of rooms within it arranged around a courtyard and these you very often find in towns and so this looks like a mancio it's in the right kind of place for an nco therefore it's highly likely to be one what do you mean it's in the right place do you mean that it's slap bang in the middle of the town inside the walls well you actually have to imagine that the walls aren't there um because if they're sort of fourth century then the mancia was probably built before this so what i mean is it's right in the center of the where all the roads are coming together all the major roads are coming together and joining what you're providing is somewhere for people to eat somewhere for people to sleep and somewhere for them to change horses so you have a whole sequence of bedrooms um very often or at least in the earlier stages of them the bedrooms were two different sizes as to whether you've had important officials staying or the commonwealth gardens soldier or messenger or postman staying if what we have got is amancio what does that tell us about this site it tells us that it did have a formal function within the roman imperial system if they're right then connectio was built around a roman travel lodge with important visitors coming and going on a daily basis but proving it has just got a bit more difficult as the heavens have opened and the drizzle is now a deluge so to make sure the search for the mancio isn't interrupted trench two gets its own rain cover but trench one and its hardy diggers have no such luck but their toil in the mud is paying dividends by giving our metal detectorists a bonanza of small fines is that all coins you got there yep i've got 13 here where have they come from they've come from the four heaps just around this trench but they've all just come from this trench yep i mean have you any dates well there's one here that dates to about 270 and that's a coin of gallianus but the rest of them really tightly date to the middle of the fourth century so around 320 to 340 a.d i mean i suppose i mean it's a lovely little collection but the sheer fact that it's all from the spoiled tip it's all unstratified it actually only tells us that the romans were here in kunatio at that time that's true but the interesting thing here is that 20-year period that the coins come from and i'm wondering whether perhaps at some point a plow has hit a little coin horse pass another one yeah another coin horde from punetio see i mean i said when you say that i was thinking this morning i mean tony said he had a handful of ten coins and he said that constitutes a horde you've got 13. yep so what we're looking at here is another case of potential treasure wow but the weather has caused one major setback rain has seeped into the radar machine's computer forcing it to retreat from sight gfis have lost their ultimate weapon [Music] man will have to triumph where machine has failed under the marquee though work goes on unhindered can i come in your trench yeah quick get under the tent it's getting worse and worse miserable you know i think you're in the best place this is where we thought there might be a man's house yeah and i'm pretty sure we've got it i mean over here we've got this lovely packed chalk surface in the middle we're just starting to get the stones of this wall coming up and that goes straight down this way behind me there on that side what is courtyard area or yard service looks like and on top of it in front of cristo there can you see stone roof tiles slid straight off the roof and landed right there so we know we've got a building yeah we know it's roman yeah but we don't know it's a mansion true but this fits in perfectly with the geophysics so i'm pretty sure that we've got it so you're happy to continue oh yeah i'm well up for it i'm not surprised you're the only dry people on the side back in trench one phil has now confirmed the stone wall but the gatehouse remains elusive iraqi edge of our trench is coming about there really we should be about where you're standing the action on the entrance into the roman town should be and maybe we might actually find a tower but whatever way that was two should bees in a maybe [Laughter] we're nearly at the end of day one although quite frankly we can't do much more anyway because i don't know if you can see it but the weather is really grim now nevertheless it has been a really good day archaeologically but i can't help feeling that there must be more good stuff around here particularly if you look at some of the fines from the 1950s the problem being that they were found in trench bb and no one's got the faintest idea where trench bb was although given that stewart has wandered over to this end of the field i can't help thinking that you might have a hunch bit more than a hunch i think we can say quite confidently where trench bb was it was down in that hollow down there this is what sir annabelle was looking at and he put a whole series of trenches in to investigate that i've been going through with them and you can see one of them here is quite clearly labeled bb bb that's clearly on the edge of what he thought was an apps here but there's a whole load of stuff going on here he thought this building down here was something not domestic is it a villa type of building is it a religious complex down there i'm going to stop now just come here a minute take a look at that these are the conditions that we're working in i think we really need to call it a halt but will we find trench pb we'll know tomorrow beginning of day two here in this giant field just outside marlborough in wiltshire and under my feet there's an entire roman town you can just see the beginnings of it coming up in this field one of the tasks that we set ourselves over the three days was to get a picture of the entire town and you may remember that yesterday in order to do that we deployed some cutting-edge technology and the good news is they managed to geophys half this entire field in just one day the bad news is the weather was so lousy that the rain got inside the computer and all the information they gleaned is trapped inside it and we can't retrieve it so for today we're going to have to resort to the old-fashioned methods of geo fizzing which is basically jimmy trudging up and down looking a little bit sad you want to keep your hat on today mate so the water doesn't get inside your head i think we'll have to make the most of this sunny spell for certain it is rather good isn't it the foot soldiers of geophys have at least managed to survey stewart's building in the northwest corner of the field so there is now hope for another trench john we've got really good crop marks in his corner with the villa type building he's on the geophysics how's it looking on that look at the detail we can see the main front corridor there all the rooms behind and then the back wall and the apps in here what we want to do is try and test this area out annabelle put in a little trench i think he called it bb and we know from that there was good chunks of painted wool plaster so i would have thought maybe something like a sort of 10 by two taking in that room and a bit of the apps okay we'll mark that out for you great so while trench one continues to search for the gatehouse and trench two tries to id the mancio trench three goes in to date the posh building in the corner of the field and judging by previous finds in trench bb there are high hopes for classy stuff here oh look there we go and the first grapes are promising yeah so that's going to be 4th century yeah late 3rd into 4th yesterday it was tipping down with rain today it's really windy and the problem is inside this tent which now they put the sides on does look a bit like something from a wedding reception is matt's trench and because of the wind it's really noisy in here hardly hear yourself speak most of the time can you but matt this trench has really come on hasn't it yeah it's really clarified itself now um i got the courtyard in slightly wrong position yesterday it's actually over there you can see this wall coming straight across here straight across there we've got the corner of a building like that and this is the building that we think may have been the mansion that's it how does what matt's excavated tie in with your geophysics well it's brilliant from my point of view because it is confirming the yellow lines of war lines and now i know that when i look at the bigger picture i mean there's so much going on now a whole series of wall lines rooms we've clearly got a massive building here and the problem is there's just so much going on on picking it is just so difficult but unpick it we must so we put another trench in on the strongest anomalies in the building amancio would likely have had both a bath house and heated rooms so if we can find them then we've as good as got our id back over in trench one phil's confident he's finally found the gateway what i've got here is the end of the wall that john got on his geophysics you can see here these flints set into the mortar where the flint's that way or just in loose soil what i'm wondering is whether or not this this wall here or this lack of wall here is where they've actually demolished it or whether in fact we might be looking at mark's original entrance when you say so demolished i mean are you talking about perhaps there was like a big archway coming through here or something well that's exactly the sort of thing i am thinking about the point is that if there is a hole in the wall that could either result from them actually punching a hole in it when they demolished it but equally it could mean that there was a hole in the wall originally like a gateway and maybe there were some rather nice stones here that they thought were worth having and that they robbed away so it's crucial to find out what sort of a tear line we got there so plenty more digging down in here then plenty more to do there the geophys teams still without their speedy radar on wheels are putting in the miles and getting the acres done that should line up with those defenses and their survey is gradually adding key features to the rich tapestry of our 3d map but we've got another somewhat surprising source of information about our field local boy phil harding has previous on this site of course the one thing that we haven't mentioned about this place is that you've been here before haven't you i've been here all my life tony i mean i went to school down in marlborough used to come through here well we used to do cross-country runs and then of course i've been digging here as well when were you digging here coin ord you dug the coin oh no i didn't dig it up i cleaned up the mess after they dug it we went in a mobile neck i remember and there was coins everywhere there was coins in buckets there was coins in bowls there was coins in blankets curtains and you go into one room and there it was all over the valley place it was a stunning sight but he'd never seen anything like it this feels a little bit like an episode of this is your life but uh oh wow oh i know that one oh wow yeah look at that see hard at work again oh and that's where the pot come out of and you haven't had your haircuts no that oh yeah how old would you have been there oh that would have been late 20s i suppose yeah have you been back since yeah well i did a job i watched a water pipe um from all down to maura and uh that was sorry from where minol where's milo well you know you've been there for even filming down here no no no no no if you want to go to melbourne up here to the north m4 m25 for m11 that's in that's in east anglia and you call this one minor no we call it minor this is this is how you call it i never thought i'd be taking english lessons from phil harding back in the real world our posh building has appeared in trench three this trench has really moved on tracy i mean much thicker you know than i was thinking yes i mean it's certainly a two-story building it's got to be to be that thicker worn so you're actually in the room in front of the wall here so do you think if you dig down through this you're actually going to get to floor levels underneath it it's possible i mean it could seal floor levels it may even be that it was built up originally and they've gone but uh we'll have a look once we've got it all cleaned back i think and ian what's you're in the app store area what have you found there just there a little roman coin right nice little bronze coin we've also had this bronze brooch oh that's lovely isn't it tiny but that is nice isn't it fines like these are going to be invaluable in our quest to date the building and work out its function there's no such luck in our search for the mancio though with no sign of a bath house in trench four just a complicated series of floor layers and nothing that will positively identify the structure but 20 meters away on the other side of the roman courtyard matt has at last pinned a date to the mancio you know matt the thing about this trench was it had a great plan didn't it and it absolutely matched the geophysics like a dream but we didn't actually have any dating for any of it but looks like it's changed yeah indeed we've just done this tiny little hole up against the wall here must be at half a meter by about 30 centimeters we've got pottery from the floor itself this chalk floor that i'm kneeling on we've got pottery from the kind of layer below the chalk floor and there's another layer below that and there's pottery coming out of that as well so there's plenty of shoes from well just a quick inspection the immediate thing is it's not late roman you know samia ware was always classically sort of first and second century a.d that looks like to be second century so it does suggest that these flaws are being laid around about the second century a.d but there's absolutely no late roman pottery at all and noise only sort of later floor levels but it sort of suggests doesn't it but this building was built around the second century a.d but perhaps by the time that the stone walls were going up and the fancy house in the far corner was being built this could be out of use yeah pretty sure it was we've now spent a lot of time investigating the walls and the buildings of the town but i'm worried we don't yet know much about how canettio fitted into the roman urban landscape you had your major administrative towns the big towns then below that there's a whole range of what we call small towns the most basic level is a roadside settlement and that's just a few houses springing up beside a road so that's not what we've got here no what we have is the next rank up which could have a specialized function so some of them might have a religious function such as bath which is just down the road from here or they might have an industrial function so be involved in metal working and salt extraction or the final level they might have an economic role serve as a market town because the roman state is extracting taxation from them so they're increasing their agricultural productivity and then bringing their goods to market to sell to exchange for coin which then goes to the roman state well we haven't got any evidence of industry so no no so what kind of town would you put your money on i reckon it is one of these small economic market centres a bit like marlborough today just down the road yeah exactly so if canettio was a market town and taxation center that may explain why there was so many coins around in the third century but can the incredible horde discovered in 1978 shed any light on connection well maybe if we can locate where it was actually buried straight on is it taking me up to the right right back on yourself a little bit this is really nicely surveillance oh it's brilliant i love it [Music] this is the british museum map of where the coin hoard was now i've rectified that into the computer so i can get some coordinates four two one 596.65 [Music] john i hear you found our coin hold plot yeah well henry's marked on the ground where he thinks it should be from all the records we've done a block of geophysics and look there's a massive responses a whole series of pits and so on but look at this response here it's a really strong spike and that particular response actually coincides where he marked on the ground the wall of the town is over there isn't it so we are outside we're well outside and what surprises me there's still so much going on there's so many strong anomalies masses of pits and other features but to actually get a spike where henry marked on the ground we've got to look at it we're going to dig it definitely trench five takes our investigation outside the town walls for the first time but if we can find the exact spot where the horde was buried we might give it some context perhaps a building temple or yard and from that work out why so many coins were buried in the first place with his mancio trench closed down matt steps in to oversee the digging i know it's been a struggle guys but this gfiz is absolutely fantastic isn't it i mean it is a great survey isn't it and i absolutely take my hat off the john and his team for doing it but there is a problem with it it's a bit of a mess really what do you mean it's a bit of a mess it's 400 years of history squashed flat onto a piece of paper because what we've got is lots of different features which never actually existed at the same time we've got the stone walls we've got the mancio we've got the fancy house in the corner so what you can do is actually recreate the history of this site how do we do that john well as neil says what we need to do is ignore this fourth century stone wall we've confirmed that now in the trenches so if we do away with that then if we look at the landscape that the geophysics is showing and what we can concentrate on is the earlier town so tomorrow we're going to try and recreate a picture of this valley when 55 000 coins were buried here 1750 years ago [Music] beginning of day three here in north wiltshire and under my feet is the entire roman town of canettio which is pretty exciting but it's also very complicated because what we've actually got is nearly 400 years of continuous activity just behind me are what we've established are the fourth century town walls so what we're going to do today is try and find out more about the earlier town and a big clue as to what that might have been like should be in matt's trench matt why have we put in a hole here well we were trying to find the original uh spot where the coin hoard was found the way you're saying that it sounds as though we haven't actually found where the horde was i mean it could be within meters of me here but it's certainly not in this three by three square but you have got something yeah you can see you've got this chalk wall coming out there it goes out along that way and then there's an arch of burnt plaster or something going around there what kind of building do you reckon they might have buried our hoard in well i think a horde like that would have been used a lot like a bank account people have been dipping in and out of it all the time so it would have been in a large building a stronghold almost you know they wouldn't have buried the horde up in the woods somewhere so we recovered years later so could matt's building be a strong room that once guarded the horde or even a temple with an offering to the gods one thing's for sure there's plenty of early occupation evidence outside the town walls leading stuart to go back to basics in the search for early connectio and there are some major clues in today's landscape looking at the wider map what we've got is this main north-south route i've marked through coming through here and the main east-west route comes through on here if you mark those in and translate them to our site that gives us the actual crossroads in this area in here which is actually outside the wall town it's this focus of activity here i mean what date do you think this sort of primary crossroads would have evolved by if that's one of the major route ways coming through roman britain that's going to be in existence by the end of the first century at the latest but it could have been as early as sort of the 80s a.d when the roman army is marching on into wales and heading out towards kellene in that kind of area and so you get the road being formed as part of the extension of the frontier and you can see sort of a pattern of lanes and roads all in this area and it's very different from this area up here well that has more of the look of a plant roman town in that you have one major straight road and then you have these coming in at right angles to it well that's really nice because you've got this focus here which really does suggest this is the earliest part of the town then a secondary phase with all this yeah and the town sort of moves up there and then finally it's final phase a wall is put around and that becomes the town it's like moving towns isn't it central to that middle phase is the mancio which neil is now bold enough to identify so we've we've got a date for the building no bath house no heated floors yeah we still don't know what it is no we don't i mean what do you want do you want an inscription that says welcome to the mensio yeah well you ain't gonna get one um all you can say is it looks like other manchester but if it's not meant so what else could it be yeah no so before huge walls dominated cornettio the heart of the town was a mancio with its many bedrooms stables and bustling kitchen providing an important staging post on the imperial highway to the west it was somewhere on the road heading south from that mansion that the massive coin hoard was buried and matt seems to be a step closer to finding its location for this has just come out wow the ground down there it was just in the subsoil kind of churned up kind of leaning up against the structure here well it's the earliest coin that we found in the past three days definitely it's an ass and it's the emperor nero so so what date is that that's 64 to 68 18. it's pretty precise so uh how much is that worth then what could i what could you get for that in the first century well we know from graffiti and literary sources that you could either get yourself a haircut or an hour with a lady of the night with one of these well i do need my haircut but get off that backpack while matt ponders his newfound wealth i joined two respected academics to well play with a pile of coins is this really 55 000 coins not a penny short because we got them from the bank so it must be right when you saw the original horde did it look like that yeah i mean obviously they were green and dull because they were roman coins but in sheer quantity i'm told there was three and a half hundred weight of coins and that's 200 kilos you see let's see if that's anywhere near three and a half underway that's not very bad acting is don't ask three enough three and a half hundred wait let's have a go it's seriously heavy how on earth would they have buried all this stuff well we know that they buried them in a pot and we've got a pot here that's very similar to the one in which they were buried so going on the idea that three and a half hundred way into one pot would be a very heavy object to bury we reckon that they must have buried the pot first come on you show us how you're the digger why is it always me because you'll do it as we bury our own 21st century treasure matt's excavation can now reveal that the building framing connections original coin hoard was rather more mundane than a temple or a stronghold just from the top here they have had a few bits of this chunky pottery it's a big storage jar rim likely to date to the sort of second third century so that would put it uh when the the folks of the town is over here before it moves over to this yeah before big stone walls are put up in the fourth century so we've got here is this oval coming around like that set into this chalk structure you can see the chalk blocks coming around then it looks to kind of be coming to a point around there i must admit looking at the shape the way it's emerging neil oven is what springs to mind you've got potentially then a sort of oven set inside a building domestic occupation and probably earlier rather than later i would have thought so neil up up here yeah so we're in someone's kitchen as phil heads underground my questions are on the money during these were buried in panic it's a possibility and that's the traditional interpretation of roman coin hordes that they were buried in a time of unrest and then the people would come back and collect them when things had calmed down do you believe that well it's a possibility but i think there are lots of other reasons why coin hoards might have been buried like what who might have access to this kind of money well i don't think it's going to be one individual but money lenders maybe would get this sort of number of coins or we could look at this as being a sort of community collection and that it's been buried for a religious reason and that they've come together to give this all to the gods well we're ratting that's about it it's not very deep is it the room's practically at the surface ah but you've got to remember the original qnetio horde was was roofed over with a slab and that slab probably was at ground level so this is probably what it looked like well if it had a slab on top then maybe it wasn't the kind of horde we've been talking about maybe people just put handfuls of coins in as they were earned and then covered the slab up again well why don't we open our account ready [Music] the biggest hoard currently in britain i think mind you how long did that take us three quarters of an hour i think so yeah if there's one thing that surely we've proved is that the original connetio horde wasn't buried in a panic with this valuable experiment completed and day three nearing a close it's time to conclude our last couple of trenches what are you excavating right there now well we've got these layers of demolition that come off either side so the idea is to put a slot down through these thinking that you know there was a chance that they were going to be covering intact floors but unfortunately it looks like this is actually build up and the floors would have been higher so we've lost them so it's certainly a very high status building but we're not going to be able to tell just from this one trench no unfortunately not the dating evidence for this substantial building points to activity in the third and fourth centuries the same date as the stone walls so it's likely to have played an administrative role over the late town we've had some really fascinating archaeology from all over the site we've got the man co we've got the big high status building that stuart identified we've got the building where the horde originally came from but we keep being drawn back to this trench for one very good reason this wall it's huge isn't it mark it's monumental we knew it was big but to actually now see it exposed is incredible i mean you've got the front face there just here yeah the rear face is here and then we've got another big foundation beyond that probably for a gatehouse i mean it's absolutely astonishing but when this gate house was at its apogee yeah what would it have looked like well let's go and stand up where we would have been in the middle of the gate so we're roughly now standing in the middle of the road you've got a gate that's at least five to six meters wide then you're going to have a great single arch coming up four to five meters high the wall itself is going to be six to eight meters high we've got the block behind us telling us there's a kind of tower structure so there's probably another story above that it's very impressive we believe that this place is being used for a regional tax collection center so we could envisage carts of grain coming in through here after the harvest let's say your name is lucius ludacris you're a local farmer you've had your tax demand 25 bushels of grain you'll come up through here in your cart i'll be standing here in all my great late roman regalia i'll tick your name off yes okay his paid is due you can go away now my good man right i'm off [Music] with dates for the buildings and walls of canettio we now understand the phasing and can complete our 3d picture of the town through time so can you just get rid of the walls yeah for sure mancio dates to 120s that gridded layout of roads is probably contemporary with it but some of these houses would probably have then built up afterwards and philippa can help us complete the story of connections remarkable coin hoard these are really lovely but they're not from our site are they these are from the british museum yeah they're from the british museum handling collection and they represent what would be a good selection of coins from a site in the first and second century's a.d so what have we got so we've got two denarii here which are good silver coins and here we have a cistercius a dupontius and an ass and these are all good solid bronze coins so these the kind of thing that were found in our hold no these are the sort of thing here they don't look as good do they no they're what archaeologists call grot and these coins are actually called radiates and that's because the emperors have these little radiant crowns why are they so different to the coins at the top well they're much lower quality for a start they don't have that metal content that the denarii have here why are they so grotty well in the 260s 270s there was there were real problems in the central empire there were barbarian incursions and quite a lot of coin didn't really make it to britain so people had this demand for coinage but they weren't getting any so they started minting their own the coin hoard that we buried was 55 000 1ps wasn't it so presumably that was worth 550 quid how much would 55 000 of these be worth well these are the coppers of the roman period so they're probably not worth much more than one p each so what we're looking at is probably a hoard of about 550 pounds in roman terms it's a bit of an anti-climax really isn't it there's no such disappointment with the gfiz though as our footslogging team have pulled off one of time team's greatest ever triumphs when you first pick one of these things up it seems pretty light but the more you hold it the more you can feel its weight in your biceps and for me in the smaller my back and yet you guys have been going up and down this field non-stop for three days yeah well you've just walked about 20 meters yeah if you kept going for another 55 kilometers in total you'd have walked what the team have walked in the past three days i mean they've collected just short of a half a million data points and survived 27 acres of ground i mean it's the biggest survey we've ever done on time team and the result has been an entire roman town is there anything about it that surprised you or you didn't expect there's just so much going on it's unbelievable you know there's the enclosure ditches the defenses the trackways the fields the paddocks the buildings a complete plan and it's coming right through the field and we've not actually found a limit to the archaeology it's quite brilliant you've actually got 400 years of history on one piece of paper so our findings suggest that connectio began in the first century as the roman army drove a road west a small settlement grew around a major crossroads and early in the second century amancio developed to cater to passing travellers attempts to formalize the town resulted in a gridded street plan but all that was done away with in the fourth century when town planners slapped down huge walls and cleared the interior administering the town from the big villa in the corner all a far cry from the field today phil why do you reckon connectio eventually disappeared under the ground whereas other roman towns like siren ancestor survived well the way i see it tony probably in the early romantic british period you had a perfectly peaceable prosperous little community throw even here everybody going about their local business minding their own business and getting on perfectly well and then in the later roman period you have the might of bureaucratic administrative rome coming here and building this whacking great wall bringing in the taxation their administration and all those nasty things and i reckon that killed the local community they cluttered off and then of course when the romans went away well the locals didn't want to come back today so where did they go well if they look at me they're probably going to the pub should we go now i think that's a very good idea where's the nearest pub then mono down in the village what milton hall oh my no i keep telling you it's mine m-i-l-d-e-n to ensure you catch all the latest updates please do subscribe to this channel follow us on social media and sign up to our newsletter and join us on patreon

Channel: Time Team Classics

Views: 74,218

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, time team, mildenhall, time team potted history, time team series 17 episode 6, roman history, british history, time team full episode, time team series 17, time team digs, dig sites

Id: zf6NFWMLpDE

Length: 47min 51sec (2871 seconds)

Published: Sun Dec 12 2021