Rooting for the Romans (Bedford Purlieus Wood, Cambridgeshire) | Series 17 Episode 13 | Time Team

welcome to bedford pearly woods in cambridgeshire it's the kind of place you think would be the enemy of archaeologists because you can't see anything because of all these trees but take a look at this this stunning aerial picture was taken by firing lasers between the trees it shows all the lumps and bumps and you see this thing here could that be a building and another one there and there and there and there so is this some kind of complex well back in the 1800s an antiquarian noted the remains of some roman buildings in this wood and apparently some roman statues nearby so could this high-tech picture be showing us those remains and a lot more besides maybe some kind of extensive roman settlement over the next three days time team are going to risk being bitten to death by midges and small spiders as they attempt to solve the roman mystery in the woods [Music] [Music] bedford pearly wood is in the nene valley in cambridgeshire about 15 miles from peterborough eighteen hundred years ago this was one of the wealthiest areas of roman britain and our site would have been on the outskirts of dura breve the main trading center in the region but while most roman sites around here have been damaged by modern ploughing it looks like whatever's hidden in these woods could be really well preserved [Music] our challenge is simply enough what were the romans doing here but thanks to the trees finding out isn't going to be that easy it's a nightmare for gfiz as you can see we've streamed a lot of the open areas but we can't stream them all because the other problem is this is a national nature reserve and there's lots of protected plants here john you having a good day wonderful for once though we don't have to wait for geophys because in some places we can actually see roman walls on the look surface is silly you can't have archaeology just it's sticking above the ground it's not under the ground no doubt this is why the site was first discovered by an antiquarian back in the early 1800s and it's because the remains are close to the surface that they've also shown up so well on this lidar picture the colors by the way represent height with green marking the low ground and white the highest and we know that some of these buildings are roman because a few test pits have been dug but not enough to work out what was actually going on here so we're opening these two trenches to try and solve the mystery this change here is an extension of the test be to see more of what's left of the road so look at the condition of the roman remains this one is right at the other end of the site to see if it's the same type of structure down there it's great to see the trenches started so soon especially for the local archaeologists who invited us here and is perplexed by this site i mean the first thing is it appears to be huge from the lidar i mean it's a massive site isn't it but there's a fairly distinct range of what appear to be buildings running roughly north south here and you can possibly spot individual rooms within them and then there's a probable courtyard out here and then there's a whole load of of pockmarked these pits here these quarry pits from the from the iron working industry that we know was in this area all right then at first glance what do you reckon it might be oh is it a massive villa is it a massive industrial complex is it a military complex or all of those or all of them all right and then there's the iron work as you said all the pitting around it as well well if anyone can sort it out my money's on phil who's now extending ben's test pit and opening up a much bigger trench [Music] this should give us a far better chance of working out what type of buildings we have here [Music] we've also got this detailed plan of the earthworks drawn when the test pits were dug but i'm not sure it's any help to us there's a huge mismatch between the neatness of that map and what i can see on the ground but look at that is that an earthwork or is it part of this root system or just a tumble of stones or something i can't see any buildings here at all phil are you sure we're digging in the right place what do you mean we're digging in the right place well look at that lovely and neat look at that chaos i don't actually regard that as extremely chaotic come and have a look sorry there's a rather large archaeologist in my eye line look we've got a nice long straight row here it's all built of stone and look we've even got one stone on top of another stone no then what would you call that it's a wall thank you i eat my words that's right what did we've got here well you see this is the problem you've got that plan which shows a series of earth works yeah it is very very easy to assume that all the upstanding bits are walls now when they dug here a little earlier on they know for a fact that whereas sometimes where the earth works there weren't walls sometimes there were walls and there weren't earthworks it is not as clear-cut as that drawing suggests we don't also know whether or not it's the same phase so there was some sense in my point just looking at this tumble doesn't necessarily mean that you can interpret where the buildings are that is not your question your question was are we digging in the right place yes we're digging in the right place all right wrong good digging moving quickly on over in our second trench matt is investigating an area that's never been dug before essentially we need to know if this earthwork bank is part of the roman settlement or is something else entirely i think we've actually got a stone wall coming here you can see there seems to be a face there yeah i haven't quite got the other side but i imagine that it pretty much stops at this side just here all right yep and it follows the bank oh it's just a bit of uh tile isn't it it's just in the rubble to the line of the wall there oh right yeah well i'd say it's a floor title that looks that looks like roma floor tile roman floor tile yeah promising very good so matt's wall is roman and i have to say it does look suspiciously like it belongs to the same range of structures that phil's digging some 80 meters away the guys have gone off for a tea break now but i've got to admit phil was right have a look at this wall so crisp so well made so well defined it just goes on and on in that direction and maybe in that direction too and all the archaeology is just below the surface who knows what we'll find mind you the way phil's going won't be long before we find out i just have to be very careful how i ask him questions in future things i have to put up with [Music] welcome back to bedford pearly woods in cambridgeshire where thanks to laser technology we've been able to see through the trees to reveal evidence of a large complex of roman buildings and so far we've opened up two trenches to try and find out what type of settlement this was it's early days yet but in phil's trench we've got lots of roman walls to puzzle over while in our second trench matt's got his own roman structure to make sense of i mean while i'm off to find out more about the person who first discovered this site helen who was the antiquarian who came across this site a couple of hundred years ago he was a chap called edmund artist we've got a photo of him amazingly and he was a kind of gentleman archaeologist antiquarian he was actually interested in most things he also was an expert on fossils and geology and in 1828 he made this completely fantastic map of the area and the bit we're interested in our wood is up here now you can see we've got this lovely red horseshoe shaped roman building and he's also put these brown dots on which he codes as iron works and i think these must be uh pits dug to remove iron ore did he actually do any digging well i have been trying to find that out and i can find no concrete evidence that he actually dug a hole he it may have been he just came past and saw earthworks or even standing buildings stuart how does his map relate to what we can see on the ground well i like it i do because when i came up here this morning as i walked through i drew my sketchbook a ship that looks exactly like that this thing would have been visible when he drew it it's still visible now isn't it a bit bizarre though that he's drawn this horseshoe building bits of which seemed to go under the road well it's possible that when he came here that he could still see remains of bumps going under the surfaces of the road as it were but whether they carried on into this field we'll never know because if you look over there it's been quarried out and now it's being used as landfill so we'll never know whether these range has actually extended into that area unfortunately edmund alatis never published his written reports so i guess we'll be finishing the job for him over the next three days and it looks like giofiz may be able to help they've managed to survey this clearing and have picked up strong signals to the edge of it but annoyingly they can't go any further because of the trees it's really frustrating i mean we're actually getting some good results you can see really strong responses i think they're probably actually metal working ironworking sort of responses but they're just i can't get that bigger picture but noise is good well ironworking suggests some sort of industrial activity possibly a nearby furnace it could also help explain all these pits dotted around the site so using a different technique john's going to pinpoint the source of this potential metal working 2 200. now let's get this right this is telling you that there's increased magnetism in the ground caused by human activity that's right if there's a roman furnace here this is the only way to find out that's barbed wire is that your anomaly hold on here is that what you were detecting oops ah clearly gfis have more to worry about than just trees [Laughter] i think i'll give up my job you wouldn't believe that would it but at least we've got our high-tech picture of the lumps and bumps to guide us and stuart's insisting that the only way to look at it properly is in black and white and in 3d this big regular horseshoe the building range you said this is what artists drew on his plan quite clearly this is where phil is digging in this building cluster in here there's clearly other buildings and structures coming up along here and at the north end this is where matt's trench has gone along there i mean you can see there's a regular courtyard as it were the range coming along the south here this has never been spotted before there's clearly an area there which is another possible isolated building if you come away from the site there's a rectangular area showing up there which looks like either a building or a big compound very definitely a building sitting there well we can't just sit around speculating and watching a square spinning round thanks to these high-tech results and stuart we're now looking at a site that's much bigger than we originally thought so we need to choose our targets carefully as over in phil's trench we've already got plenty of roman archaeology to deal with we're actually starting to get some map work i think that's a roman key in it you're quite right it's a key but it's quite a simple type of key but where there's a key there must have been a door and some are worth locking up so i was right about that one but i don't know about that this is one of those things that you know academics are tearing their hair out exactly what this sort of thing is it some people think it might have been a stylist for writing like you know old pens with nibs on the end but it's very crude for that the other possibility is that it goes on a piece of dowel for shoveling along an animal poking along a sheep to get it moving as well as bizarre sheep handling devices there's also more building evidence that's part of the flooring that's a huge great floor tile it's much too thick to be a hyper coarse tile or a wall tile it's probably a much bigger piece like that there's still lots of rubble to remove but already phil's discovered the walls survived to some depth and in places are built with fragments of stone and tile creating a herringbone pattern [Music] 80 meters away in our second trench matt's finding that the walls he's unearthed are built in exactly the same way there's quite a few bits of floor tiled out of there all right i think these were actually built into the wall and performed a part of the structure right because you get layers of tile in roman walls yeah that rather suggests it is a building i think yeah and there's been a few minutes of pottery as well oh that's good because there's very little from elsewhere so what have you got the local wheels yeah that's uh roman neen valley yeah um and uh which are good and we've also had a bit of iron ore as well oh no that's good because we've got a metallogist coming tomorrow so you can you can have a look at that yeah but as we approach the end of the day there's another intriguing aspect of this site that's got everyone talking and it's the edmond artist recorded these two statues being found in the woods here in 1845. however guy's a bit doubtful he's not sure they're actually roman i'm always a little bit suspicious about very classical types of sculpture like that being found in this country guy you skeptic of course these are roman they were they were made of varnic rag stone which wouldn't have been used in the medieval period or after the medieval period for this type of statue plus other ones have been found in this area as well at simpson just down the road but it's precisely because they are so unusual in this country that makes it very difficult for us to put them in automatically into a context and say oh we definitely know what that would have been from we put them into a bit of a context though because we've got the other things that are found with them we've got the uh the the pot with the bones in it and we've got a couple of other accessory vessels so we're pretty sure that it's some kind of funerary monument i think the most likely thing is a two more mausoleum and the crucial thing is that they're both so similar in spite of any misgivings victor's had a bash at picturing how the statues looked complete they were probably meant to represent charioteers and might have been part of a roadside tomb built for a wealthy landowner your point is that it would be really rare because you don't get much roman statuary in england right ah there might have been a lot more it's just that very little survives but more could still be surviving in the woods presumably that is quite conceivable given the fact that this building seems to have been allowed to fall down in its own right rather than be demolished and cleared well it's not often you hear talk of possible roman statues at the end of day one and given the preservation here who knows what we might turn up in these woods tomorrow day two here in what looks like being a pretty wet bedford pearly woods where we're investigating some roman buildings which have been hidden here for the best part of 2000 years mick you love these woods don't you i do yeah when i when i started out in archaeology we used to think that the woodland was the bit left over beyond the settlements and the fields you know they were just bits that people hadn't got to yet to clear them and it actually was it was only when a lot more work was done that we realized they were part of the picture people in earlier times cause needed woods much more than today all the constructional timber came from them the firewood wood for charcoal because that was the main fuel for metalworking and stuff like that so they were a very important part of the economy he's on the prowl as usual i hope he's going to find me one of these pits that we can have a look at this woodland dates back to at least the 11th century and has protected the second to fourth century roman settlement that's been hidden here by the trees incredibly this laser scan has revealed the stone structures spread across this area and in phil's trench we're slowly starting to make sense of a collapsed building that could help us work out what was going on here in roman times ah it's gone i mean you had a big stone in here didn't you yeah now that's come away you can see there's a nice clean clear cut edge there so it looks like there never was a wall in there so we've got a doorway very nice to help us understand this long range of buildings we've overlaid this more detailed earthwork plan and we're now opening up another trench here stuart pointed out there's something very different going on here i think what we need to do is get into the interior what's going on inside that area what we really need actually you got a problem well not really a problem so much as we've got a load of rubble coming up again just like phil's trench and what i need to know is whether i can get the machine in take this down further or whether you want us to do it by hand well i think your problem is the route isn't it this is a national nature reserve and we've agreed that we won't cut any roots more than one centimeter thick good news for the trees bad news for faye so we can take out all the the little rubbish but just leave the one a little rubbish all this stuff is vital for the growth of the trees but he's gonna have to dig it by hand am i digging underneath this big root then you have to that's that's gonna be interesting and you'll have to do it by hand meanwhile matt's trench has done its job it's shown that the roman buildings extend along here and all part of one settlement so we're closing it down and packing matt off to investigate this large earthwork it appears to be a building that stands alone which might mean it's important but again gardening comes before archaeology do you want to save the badly up here uh no we don't the buddha is a species here we're trying to control by cutting and removing it so we're quite happy if you cut some of that but only a few meters away from here there is deadly night shade which is a species what you want to conserve it's important we don't damage those plants so is it all right if we put a trench in here provided we don't put the spoil over where the deadly nightshade is yes that's fine yes well that's perfect because we're right on this sort of mound this sort of tell-like platform that looks like a building yeah i mean presumably it might be well preserved if it's a big mound like this yeah and right here i mean there's tile just under the surface so it looks like a a good place to start so as matt gets his new trench started i'm wondering if all the walls and tiles we're discovering means our mystery settlement is a roman villa exactly as edmond artist predicted back in 1828 so this is an original copy of the artist's book that i've been looking at photocopies that's right yes original copy and artist certainly knew roman this massive villa was dug by him at nearby caster the artist talks about caster as a major villa where he looks at bedford perliers as a second order villa and that's a bit confusing really and i think probably the answer is that caster is such an enormous sight and by comparison what he saw of the roman remains at bedford perliers was not unimportant but lesser when compared with the villain caster but in spite of artists description of a villa here there may be a chance he got it wrong i'm in two minds actually it looks as if it could be a standard roman villa but the plan is suspicious and i suspect the linking with iron working is very intriguing john's persisted in his search for evidence of metal working he's been using the mag sus that's a magnetic susceptibility machine to you and me and he now reckons he's getting very strong signals over here on the western edge of the site i've agreed to meet mick out there and i shouldn't get lost if i just follow the signs two men and two signs oh yeah don't take a nose at the sides i wanted you to see this test bit here a couple of years ago we had a little test pit here it's been fertled around by animals now but you can see there's a bit of walling here but very importantly this produced a couple of bits of of slag it doesn't look much but slag is a byproduct of making iron and it could mean we've got a roman iron smelting furnace nearby there's a big enclosure around here i mean it's it's probably too big for a building ben isn't he well yeah i mean unless it's a very big isle barn or something like that it's certainly very large john have you managed to cover most of this well we've done half the survey so far and what's really interesting just show you the results look the test pit is down here and that's where you've got a bit of walling but i'm getting really strong readings here in red and i've done half the survey so far and i'm sure that this is the concentration of the area of burning and just look at the soil look here it's really grey whereas in here in amongst the trees look it's in silly see the red clay this is the concentration of the burning but professional to the end john wants to finish the survey before we start digging i'm confident this isn't barbed wire fence good well fingers crossed but if we do find a roman furnace this time it could completely change our view of what was happening here because there are also an awful lot of pits showing up on our lidar picture and quarry pits can be classic signs of roman ironworking so maybe we haven't got a villa here but a specialist industrial site so to help us find out we've invited an expert in roman metalworking to join us and he's going to start by looking at one of the pits that seems to have a spoil heap around it you can see this spoil that's been dug out dumped on that side and you can see the spoil dumped out here roger as well yeah mostly there's a lot of stone yeah you're absolutely yeah you're absolutely right i mean the thing we can say straight away here this sort of uh it sort of excludes one uh possibility and that's it it's not geological yeah this is not natural this is man-made you can sort of see the spoil uh sort of back cast there and these these sort of stones here um this is the waste material they didn't want as well isn't it that's the problem with mining archaeology and like most archaeological people tend to sort of deposit stuff on top of each other in mines yeah you're taking stuff away but what we hope is that we can sort of uh find small amounts of what they did can you tell from this what they well you can see here i mean if you look at this and the orangey color tells us there's a little bit of line in there but not enough to be worth smelting right this is some stuff we found down the road just in a cutting and you can see feel the difference in weight look at the colors i mean i could i could spot that as i end straight away it's very different to that isn't it this will occur in bands underneath this and stuff so you've got to get this overburden off you've got to get through this potentially to to get like that exactly with so many pits to check it looks like roger will have his work cut out but what i find most surprising is that we could have so much industry close to what we suspect is a villa interestingly we're getting evidence that people lived and cooked in the buildings phil's investigating cracking absolutely cracking what's it like on the other side get some of that muck off the other side oh yeah that is some part and it really i mean fantastic isn't it [Music] this mortarium would have been used for grinding food like corn or maize to make bread and it suggests that we could be close to a kitchen in fact we do seem to be getting the sort of fines you'd associate with a roman villa the problem is we're not finding very many of them everything we'd expect to find on a villa site is here both in terms of sort of range of material and dates but in really small quantities what do you think is going on stephen the other way to look at it is to ask the question what are they doing with their rubbish in the first place i mean if for example we've got evidence of iron working here could they be digging pits to extract the oar and then chucking their rubbish down the pits to get rid of it and that would be a very simple explanation about why there isn't much material on the site full stop which is another reason to start digging those piss exactly yeah but and this is typical just as i point out the shortage of fines news reaches me that max trench is starting to look really exciting he's finding huge quantities of stuff and it's all much posher than we've seen anywhere else look at all this brick and loads of tiles this this is hyper coarse heating flutter look with the with the marks on it where the plaster sticks on you've also got lots of roofing material these are these are the clay tiles off the roof one like that and a curved one over like that so you know it's all looking much more like a a sort of high status building than we thought is that painted plaster yeah you've actually got stuff with patterns on it look and red patches and there's even more coming out where matches you've got more of it there and you there's actually a piece there in the top of this rubble there with a black painted line across the top you've got the trenches of the day without any doubt it's coming up with the goods isn't it so it looks like we could have found the first evidence of a fancy villa here in matt's trench but it's clearly something very different to the much coarser buildings that phil's digging it would seem life was better for some here than for others what we're starting to see are different sort of character zones in this complex you know we're starting to get a sense of the different activities that went on the different sort of lifestyles even in one great complex so what's the lifestyle here the lifestyle here is obviously not quite as good as the lifestyle just over there they had heating over there and painted walls and they don't have it here so servants quarters um maybe maybe little sort of compounds little workshops something like that we still get into grips with that aspect of it but if there are workshops here could they be connected with iron working well there's some tantalizing evidence in phase trench that suggests they could be we could be thinking about we've got industrial activity here you know it's either some furnace or some oven or something like that kiln or something that's why we put the trench here we wanted to know what was going on on the inside of the building and you've nailed it you've got you've got something that's that's giving us activity inside the building there's nothing happening i have no idea i've been trying to unravel it for last ten minutes but as the end of the day draws near it looks like it's phil's trench that's turned up the most intriguing find so far has that been worn by a rope around the top oh no i don't think so is it a very weathered piece of a statue is that an arm guard well there you go you see i mean just make it just make you look wonder whether that is some sort of an arm down there in it yeah i mean you've got something else we've got a nice piece of what appears to be possibly a bit of carved stone this is why yeah but what you can't see tony is around here yeah it does look like an arm it really does i wouldn't mind if it's roman and it's carved stone that would be a big one for us wouldn't it you were the one who was saying oh it's very rare to find things like that it is very rare but we have our occasional moments don't you wish at a moment like this with the 19th century antiquarians you could just tip it up we'd actually find out what it is what rip it out without bothering about well the archaeology can i point out that thankfully we are not 19th century archaeologists we are responsible 21st century archaeologists we want to do this properly have you got no sense of tradition basically phil's telling us to clear off and come back when he's ready to lift this piece of stone and crucially when we'll be able to see the other side of what he's uncovered here meanwhile carefully placed in between the ant's nest and the deadly nightshade bushes match trench is revealing the first glimpse of some sort of posh structure you can see the more yeah coming up yeah yeah look there's the edge of another one there yeah yeah well that could be a lead into a flu or something so this would perform some kind of floor heating or something like that yeah if it's a hyper course yeah that's sort of p lie within the room itself it begins to look ever never more structural and as the earthwork here is quite high there's a good chance that this building survives to some depth let's see if we can see how big these are this is there oh there we go end of it at last i knew it was down here somewhere well you found it so keep digging how exciting but if uncovering posh buildings and heavy industry wasn't enough for this site we could be finishing day two with that rarest of discoveries a finely sculpted roman statue oh dear well no no no let's have a look there's this thing here it just seems very very strange and then there's this as well that that just doesn't seem totally natural could that just be weathering i think you probably could that's the problem isn't it the reality is that this stone is as much of an enigma as the rest of the site will we sort that out will we sort the site out we'll know tomorrow day three at bedford pearly woods in cambridgeshire where we're trying to make sense of a large roman settlement that's been hidden here for nearly 2 000 years so far we've uncovered lots of roman walls belonging to fairly low status structures which are part of this big range but then we've also got a much posher building here in matt's trench to puzzle over thankfully this morning one of our experts now thinks he knows what it is stephen you think it's a bath house don't you i do why it's a heated room to start with um it's got box tile and flue tile there's a piece of box tile here look and i mean the exciting thing is it even got ash on the inside look from the last or some of the fires that were being burnt here so this is the central heating system with the hot air going through it that's right but is it just a heated room or is it a bath and there's one tangible bit of evidence this rather scruffy piece of limestone's got rather crucial really it's called tufa it's a very lightweight limestone and almost always they're using bath houses it's been cut look with a flat surface there by a saw and they would have cut these to form an arched vault over a bath house i think that the question still is if it's a bath house and you know your arguments are convincing is it in isolation because we haven't really seen anything to go with it of of with wall plaster and tiles and all the rest no this is the high status end of the whole site yeah and what's it doing stuck out here just a wood yeah well we've got one day left to answer those questions so we're going to widen matt's trench to find out more about this bath house but we also need to work out how the buildings fit in with the iron working we suspect was going on all over the site so we're opening a trench here where gfis have detected an area of burning that could be the site of a roman furnace if there was a furnace and then the spread was around it i i can think of places where it's been central where it's been on the periphery where it's even been set aside so there's some help here this red blob shows what jif is detected so ben's decided to make a clean sweep of the site which should allow us to see the burnt ground surface and spot any clues to what was going on here what's that so we've we've got fragments of burns all here or as well yeah so we've got slag we've got all it's smelting oh that's fantastic that's good news it's not in vain i could be here sometime the plan is now to open up a test pit to find out exactly what part of the metal working process was going on here and people say i'm mad let's have a look at this then one person who knows all about the different processes involved is our own phil harding way back in 1998 a fresh-faced fill took part in an experiment to try and smelt iron using genuine roman techniques the iron ore was collected locally as was the clay used to make the furnace the same type of furnace we'd expect to find on this site we call it a shaft furnace a typical type of furnace that's been in britain since probably the late iron age at the earliest so we've based it on an archaeological excavation roughly the right size thickness walls the right sized diameter the height is something we've got to judge because that never survives archaeologically they also made a makeshift roasting half again something we might find this is a process that dries out and cracks open the iron ore making it easier to extract the iron from the stone one two three phil and the smelting team had to get the temperature up to a thousand degrees hey underneath don't feel like a slave driver oh there we go oh look at that now that slides that's slag look at it look at it come in the molten liquid running out is what's known as slag and contains silicon and other impurities that are separated from the iron it looks like a volcano in it look at it coming i'll tell you what jake you work up a thirst on this job oh yeah we'll sort that out later right can you pull that one out yeah there we are no that's oh wow hopefully we've got something on it there he is there it is okay eventually phil got to see the end product a sponge of malleable iron known as bloom oh that's right and then we ended up that's it we just we ground it up 11 years later and phil remembers how much work went into making just a small bar of iron let's have a look at that in the sunshine then yeah yeah find the sunlight phil yes yes that's the boy yeah look at oh yeah look at that you look a mirror like a mirror i don't think you look any older phil no i'm weathering pretty well weathering pretty well really you know our expert in metal working is now starting to think that iron could be the main reason this settlement's here because he suspects the raw iron ore from pits like this one is a very high quality so what's it actually doing well what it's doing now is shining x-rays onto the rock and the different elements in the rock will sort of reflect those x-rays back and if we look at the intensity of them we can say what's there and how much is there right so that's nearly 50 percent there good solid iron that is absolutely i mean that's almost pure iron oxide really ah if you look here look we've got almost two percent manganese what's significant about manganese well manganese is one of those things which really helps slag form it helps like form it helps it flow oh i see see and iron smashing is not just about making iron if you can get your slag to flow nicely it means your furnace keeps working doesn't get all clogged up so this is fantastic all not just for its iron content which is very high but also the other bits and pieces in with it the other elements some of that manganese fantastic water smell having established that the pits with the spoil heap around them are to do with mining for iron ore we now want to check one of the other shallower pits which could have been dug for a different purpose meanwhile over at the posh end of the site matt's now extended his trench over the bath house and is making quick progress but ideas are changing there are several things actually i mean um one is that this the orientation is wrong it doesn't look like a the plan of a villa that i recognize from elsewhere as a standard courtyard villa the new theory is that this bath house is not part of a roman villa but built for a manager or overseer who was looking after the ironworks here is it possible that we're looking at some overseer here who's working on behalf of the state right and the state of course i think have a very very large presence in the building underneath caster village oh yes yes and it could be some procurator there who is not only superintending finland um estates but ironworking estates as well and how far is fantastic because it's only a few miles and this was also excavated by our antiquarian artists spent many years excavating at caster where he found enormous building complexes uh underneath the modern village it's a good idea our site controlled from caster could have been one of several iron production centres situated on the outskirts of dura breve the main trading center in the region irman street the m1 of its day literally ran through the town and with the river neem close by iron could have been dispatched by road or river to almost anywhere in roman britain and if this bath house was for an overseer it looks like he lived in fine style judging by these chunks of painted plaster that showed the colour scheme of the walls of this building sixteen hundred years ago it's a stark contrast to phil's trench where there's no sign of painted plaster or luxuries like underfloor heating but we did find what looked like a carved stone here yesterday and now that our experts have had time to carefully examine it i'm curious to know what they think it is it's a stone a stone a stone but not just any random stone phil thinks it's been definitely shaped for some purpose or other take a look at this one here now that was found just outside in the angle of the walls there yeah look how that ordinary stone has been used as a whetstone to sharpen tools and it just goes to show that every stone you find on a site like this you have to look at it think about it to make sure it's not an artifact thanks i think that's a very good lesson to learn from someone who was sure that was a statue last night it looked very good at the time but at least phil's trench and phase trench put in here have given us lots of useful detail about the actual buildings in this range basically we've got a collapsed building how colorful is it it's great isn't it you can just see where you are there you've got these collapsed stone stone wall and beneath it we've got this tile layer which is our roof yeah and then here we've got more of this kind of collapsed roof building material it's very black isn't it it is i mean this building's been burnt down right although there's a lot more to learn about this range we now have some idea what these buildings look like this is a reconstruction of the area where phil was digging which we now know was a series of rooms based around a courtyard we think these were workshops or living accommodation for the people who worked here a workforce probably of slaves which would explain why we didn't find any coins or items of real value here the question now is have we discovered the main iron smelting area up here on the slightly higher ground time's ticking away and mick has called me urgently from over here somewhere because he desperately needs roger our man with the suitcase what's the problem mick we've got some material down here that we're not quite sure what it is we need you to look at it rods and tell us because we think it might be bloomery stuff in which case you know we're in a furnace but it may not be maybe just slag what can you say there well when you feel it it's very very dense yeah this certainly is yeah it's also quite porous it doesn't look like slag i mean could it be the bloom it's either that or roast at all let's have a look see what you've got now this is what i call a real expert someone who'll look at a lump of crud like this and tell you what it is i i would be thinking more towards a roasting hearth i think it looks like that so that means you can really take all that out there isn't it so we can get old yeah that's pretty efficient you didn't even use your suitcase i didn't even need to see it we'll keep digging to make sure but it looks like what we found is remains of where they've been roasting the ore like this to prepare it for smelting and the actual furnace won't have been far away it's a great result we now know this enclosure is a roman iron smelting area and we can now identify what looks to be another similar enclosure just here but with time almost up how does our posh bath house fit into the story we know we have a building that collapsed when the site fell out of use in the 4th century but it's proving tricky to interpret sorry could i just um there's appears to be another stone on top of this one which makes me think perhaps we might have a robbed wall as opposed to floor so but i'm still over the floor of another room possibly so you've actually got a wall running with that still means that could be a door jamb and that looks like the corner of where there was a door so [Music] there's a room there and there's a room there but no wall wall has gone robbed away a lot more works needed here but we can get some idea of the extent of the bathhouse from the size of this earthwork and if our theory is right about the link with castor then it's possible that our bath house was laid out like the one shown here in artis's picture which means we're talking about a building that would have looked something like this it was probably a stand-alone facility used by the official overseer on what would have been a state-controlled iron working site [Music] our dig certainly given me a newfound respect for this man edmund artis who was clearly a very good archaeologist for his time but died before he could publish his written reports his map of the archaeology drawn in 1828 has proved to be largely accurate and it's not just the buildings but also the pits he recorded that are key to understanding this site goodness me it's a journey to the center of the earth what we now know is that in roman times a lot of the rubbish was being thrown in these pits so basically this pit was open at the same time that those buildings were being occupied and used and this looks a bit clayey to me so is that what they're going for the clay yeah there's no sign of iron stone or any bands of iron in iron stone in this at all so it must be clay for some purpose and the the little sort of pock marks and things i can see in there is this sort of root activity well some of it is but some of it some of these dark patches you carefully clean them back you can actually see adds marks or picks marks where they've actually levered the clay out from this pit fantastic we now know not all these pits were dug for iron ore many like this one would have been dug for clay to build and repair the iron smelting furnaces so at the end of three days we can now picture this long-lost roman settlement as it must have looked in its heyday around 200 a.d what's been hidden in these woods is a massive iron working site with the furnaces and ore roasting pits on the slightly higher ground while the mining was going on here chasing the seam of natural iron ore the workshops and living quarters were not far away and were very much second class as mentioned by edmond artists but there was at least one fancy roman building a bath house situated well away from the industry here on the eastern side of the site but our story is not quite over because for the next few hours our archaeologists will be measuring recording taking photographs and eventually they'll write a proper archaeological report on this site which is really rather nice because we'll be finishing the job that edmund artus for whatever reason didn't complete himself and then when we've all finally gone nature will take over this whole site again just as it did nearly 2 000 years ago when the romans finally left this place [Music] 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 [Music]

Channel: Time Team Classics

Views: 152,733

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, time team full episode, time team season 17 episode 13, time team bedford purlieus wood, time team cambridgeshire, bedford purlieus wood cambridgeshire, british history, roman history, dig site

Id: mpyaqTRqBTc

Length: 47min 39sec (2859 seconds)

Published: Sun Oct 17 2021