The Boat on the Rhine, Utrecht (Netherlands) | S13E05 | Time Team

[Music] if you were a roman soldier guarding the northern frontier of the empire which would be worse facing the warring pits on hadrian's wall or stuck in a tower like this in the marshes of the netherlands watching over the river rhine the main supply route into britain here in utrecht archaeologists are making some amazing discoveries which detail what life really would have been like here on the frontier and how hard the roman army had to work in order to keep the supply route to britain open time team have been invited to the netherlands to help uncover that story and you'll understand why we're just a tad excited when i tell you that one of the things that we're going to be digging over the next three days is a perfectly preserved roman boat [Music] [Music] [Music] utrecht in the netherlands was once on the northern frontier of the roman empire which at one time extended from hadrian's wall in scotland all the way across to the black sea in the netherlands the frontier followed the course of the river rhine which was the main supply route used to get goods and soldiers out to britain the island on the very edge of the known world amazingly much of that story is preserved here in the waterlogged soils on the outskirts of utrecht even though the river rhine itself now flows further to the south in advance of one of the biggest building projects in europe archaeologists have been given the chance to investigate before some 30 000 new houses completely cover this area this picture is based on their fantastic discoveries so far which include roman watch towers forts and the frontier road all built alongside the river rhine [Music] we've had some fantastically preserved stuff here haven't you yeah why do you need us you've done a great job well um after a couple of years of roman archaeology um we're still left with a few problems we um hope to solve um which we've got time make with the building work well it's almost on top of you to be honest it's it's the last round of roman archaeology right the the building is uh getting close yeah okay so we haven't got very long what are the things that you want us to resolve for you um well we've got this zonfeld side we've got a collection of amateur finds and some trial trenches in the neighborhood suggesting a military side but we're not sure really you said two problems yeah there's not a problem over here that's a river bench we excavated one ship a roman ship a couple of years ago but now after that one was excavated we discovered another one and it's still there so we want to know the date of this ship so you didn't excavate we didn't excavate it's still there it's over there just a couple of meters down there none of us can quite believe it buried just two meters under here is an intact roman boat so where's the pointy bit the proud well we've found one end of the ship somewhere over here and well we expect it to be running 30 meters in that direction 30 meters what i mean in other words it goes right through those trees then well deep down under really i mean it's it's it's going down very steep in that direction eric i mean look at this this is so dry what makes you think it's still going to be well preserved in the ground well i hope it still is i mean it was there two years ago when uh the same conditions i mean it's it's waterlogged really you have the groundwater table is well this deep i guess at the moment you gotta find it first haven't we i think so let's just now he's hearing it and look we've got a digger let's use it let's get started eric and herrera discovered the boat two years ago but only had time to expose a fraction of it essentially our goal is to find out how old it is and personally i can't wait to get my first glimpse of a genuine roman boat but we're also going to try to help sort out what was going on at the zandveld site that was further along the river eric and herrera discovered a roman watch tower in this area but because of pottery fines in this field they think there may be a small roman fort here too they're hoping geophys might be able to locate it for them roman forts on this frontier were built within half a day's march of each other and several have been excavated the dig here at alfenfort turned up many well-preserved roman coins like this one which tell a story in themselves [Music] it had been assumed that the forts were built by emperor claudius on his way to successfully conquer britain in 43 a.d but surprisingly the coins have revealed that it was the emperor caligula who fortified the supply route to britain a few years earlier there was a massive amount of calligram coins for nearly 400 of them which is very impressive and in my opinion the whole fort dates to 40 41 a.d so what might caligula have been doing here he was the third roman emperor he only reigned for four years from 37 to 41 he was extremely keen to emulate the great military achievements of his father germanicus who was a general who fought up here very successfully along the rhine any trouble was that caligula was slightly demented in a bit of a murderous megalomaniac so although he planned to invade britain and he got all the preparations up and running here he ended up deciding that he was going to conquer the sea and he did that by telling his soldiers to go and take seashells away from the sea so he just turned around and went back to rome that's basically what he did with the seashells yes and of course the roman populace was not terribly impressed by this great military victory and he was assassinated but he did leave behind him all the preparations for an invasion of britain but this caligulan coin has more to tell because it's been counter-stamped with the emperor claudius's name it reads taberius claudius imperator he puts his name on collector's coins because after his death as guy told us his name was cursed his coins were no longer valid and by putting his name on them claudius made them valid again so to say so does this imply that these forts weren't just used for caligula's failed invasion but for claudius's successful one as well exactly caligula had made all the preparations for an invasion if you'd come here in around the year 43 you would have seen thousands of troops and all the equipment the barges and the boats ready for an invasion of britain just like the lead up to d-day in 1944. of course those soldiers had to be paid three out of the four legions used for invading britain came from the garrisons along the rhine so that's 15 000 men alone we actually know that we know that for a fact but proving the case for a fort at the zanfeld site is not going to be easy but our problem you see tony is that on that side of the ditch over there there's going to be a lot of dumping of material in the next few years we've got a few weeks left actually so we want to look there to see what these roman finds lower that were found earlier yeah on this side both of these fills are scheduled but we're only allowed one trench so we've geo fizzed in this field and we're going to geophysical but we don't want to take a decision on where to dig until we've got both lots done so do we just have to sit twiddling our thumbs until geophysics has been done we can start on that trench the other side excellent [Music] so as the first trench gets underway at the zandfeld site i'm going to check how phil's getting on locating our roman boat phil yo is this stuff what eric's guys laid down last time yeah this is the polythene that's directly on top of the boat this plastic sheet was put down to keep the moisture in the soil and help preserve the boat until this excavation could happen there she is look at that oh look at that can i come in phil yeah come and have a look at this i mean look at that you can't look at that i mean listen to that that's as solid as rock and it egg super yeah come on you're enjoying this certainly i mean that could have been in the ground for five years couldn't it but you know it's been there for two thousand years extraordinary incredible eh yeah i mean that's the beauty of it it's not just a piece of wood you know it is actually a boat i mean somebody's actually seen it they know it's a boat but there's just so much we don't know about it at this rate we'll have it in the water again by friday the boat that eric and herrera have already excavated was found just a short distance away and is of the same type as the one we're digging it means that we know our boat should look something like this this is a zamadam type river barge named after the place where they were first discovered these flat bottom barges were used by the army and independent traders to move cargoes along the river rhine most like this one have been dated to the second century a.d but according to eric our boat could be significantly earlier which would get the archaeologists really excited [Music] the preservation of the wood here in the netherlands is so exceptional the mick has sneaked off to see some of the special finds discovered in the waterlogged soils what's this in here then this post was once part of a roman watch tower a structure that would have looked like this when it was built around 62 a.d not only is this post the best preserved in the world but it also has something written on it for example here you have the eye right here is the t yeah and here is the a the funny thing is that they they made it and they just erected the post and filled it so it was not visible yeah yeah yeah and what about this stuff here we're talking about watchtowers you know we have these ideas of soldiers standing on guards on these watchtowers yeah but you know in front of their watchtower there was a river as you said these look like fish traps to me exactly these in fact are eel traps found in front of one of the watchtowers and something like 1950 years old the eel entering this little thing here the tunnel swimming through here entering the basket you know swimming around eating the bait yeah here were some little twigs here but i couldn't get out and to hold it on you know on place in a riverbed they put a lot of things inside as you said looks like a roman tile in that one and this is even better tile here rooftops just wipe it down yes made it down this one has such a fine little twigs look at these i like this one the most because it's so beautiful made and the preservation of the boat looks to be just as good phil that piece of wood must be at least a meter below the bit that you found i know but the main thing is we've now got the bottom of it and you can see look there's the join between two of the planks and it comes through underneath this this main rib there's a heck of a lot of it there i know could we have the whole of the boat here yep no one of the ends of the ship is missing we don't know if it's the four or the aft but it's above the groundwater table and completely gone and it only left the soil mark so all this is stuff that we've expected that you've exposed before yes okay so when do we get to stuff that's new archaeology in in an hour wow which bit the bit just uh under the feet of phil so you literally dug down one side of the chair but you never saw the whole thing right the way across phil what's that lump just below this new piece of wood well we've got one here and one there and another one there these are big chunks of volcanic rock and yap reckons they've fallen into the boat from the riverbank surprisingly there's no natural stone in the netherlands and it appears that the romans shipped in basalt rocks from germany to try and stop the river eroding the road along the frontier over at the zanville site the news isn't good the geophys survey hasn't revealed anything that looks obviously like a roman fort worth still having decided to investigate this intriguing blob on the plot our one and only trench allowed in this area has revealed what looks like modern rubbish it's copper it's a it's a can really but a particular strange form what's it no that that's not fair so that wouldn't explain no that wouldn't explain your signal but the bit of wire could of course there could be more here than just bits of wire there could be roman fines deeper down in this trench and we'll find out tomorrow but there is some positive news from this site because raksha's trench put in here outside the scheduled area has found some roman pottery to compare with these pieces that were found here some time ago that's a piece of first century stuff isn't it flavian you know these two pieces tell me straight away we've got two totally different dates haven't we that's well on into the second century that's perhaps up to a hundred years later and that flagon this all screams roman army to me this quality of assemblage yeah i mean we've we have a few hundred pieces of pottery and normally if you have a native side you you would have expected 30 40 of handmade wear right and there's nothing i mean not a single piece what about the stuff you found richard well um i found quite a lot over quite a long date range um there's this oh yeah another 1st century piece very distinctive [Music] more of the white flagons but we do have something here that eric and i are very excited about well that's an ordinary plain samian cut but it's got um it's got writing on it not just that though i think i have little present for you does it say one try this one it's the same one isn't it yes it is it goes together there you go yeah we've got a whole word there scratched on there we've got c c e that's a cursive form of e with two vertical strokes p t u s acceptors and if there was an a it's been rubbed off and that must mean the accepted one so i wonder if that's the name of somebody who lived here it must be unless it's just saying it's not a reject and then there's another avg org underneath isn't that wonderful yes beautiful i mean this this points you military present i would say yeah reading and writing that's there's always far more of that on a roman military site out here in these remote provinces like britain and and on the rhineland it's extraordinary so we're not giving up at the zanfeld site just yet but right now as we reach the end of the day i have to admit that my attentions focused completely on our roman boat in fact what you hear see is the top of this plank the upper plank that's that one there yeah that one there so what we've got is the full height of the boat in the trench yes normally when we excavate anything roman it comes out of the ground looking pretty ancient and bedraggled but this is completely different look at the angle of this boat it's like it was moored here yesterday and the quality of that timber it could have been cut last spring it's fantastically well preserved isn't it it doesn't look ancient at all does it it's so modern and that's just at the end of day one i can't imagine what this is going to look like tomorrow beginning of day two here in utrecht in the netherlands which used to be part of the northern frontier of the roman empire and we're looking at two sites a mystery military one over there and this huge trench here in which there's a roman boat which is coming out looking in my eyes really modern and pristine except last night i had a moment of panic suppose it is modern and pristine and not roman at all yeah there are no roman finds associated with that boat i haven't seen any roman graffiti on the sides of it and dating this stuff must be really difficult is it roman how do we know dating it now without general chronology the constructional features of the ship points to our typical roman boat for instance the transition from bottom to sides with one l-shaped piece of wood like half a dugout for instance that's typical room are there any other kinds of boat apart from roman ones that have that same kind of build no well that's a relief isn't it but i had to ask i can't believe how beautiful that is there is absolutely just and they took all the bark off the knees so everything is worked everything it is isn't it we're digging a roman river barge and it's got to be the best preserved structure we've ever seen it's only a pity that three quarters of it is buried too deep for us to get at on this dig this boat's on a steep angle and one end some six meters below ground too deep even for geophys to detect with radar this dig is all about exposing a 5 meter section of the barge that will allow the experts to find out exactly how old it is [Music] phil meanwhile has gone to have a closer look at the other roman barge found close to ours that's already been fully excavated it's being stored at the netherlands institute for ships and underwater archaeology [Music] joining phil on this trip is british woodworking expert damian goodburn unbelievable unbelievable this this is the bow end up there is that the front that's the front that's the main in that big block that's where the mask goes we didn't find it but there was a mess in there i mean probably carrying a sail but also used uh ropes for pulling the boat yeah i mean look the quality of the the the planking and i mean the the the techniques the woodworking skills incredible in it i mean you can still see some of the original saw marks where the saw used to cut the planks went up and down and left scratches on the surface here the axe marks preserved on the side of the frame timbers here the tool was being used in this direction to trim up the edges of this strengthening timber here to me it's the scale of it i mean it's big enough seeing half of it but when you think about what it's like full size it's enormous isn't it what phil's looking at is half the length of the boat which has been cut into two for ease of storage these barges are a bit like a punt and this one measures two and a half meters wide by 25 meters long do you know what they would have carried in this because presumably you could have got a hell of a car going yeah we did some um some calculations and actually when you would have dumped it full with grain of rice or something like that that would have been too heavy and the ship would have sunk so we think lose goods that you could place throughout the ship where we're digging on our boat is at an end let's have a look at that we've got look at the size of these nails yeah i mean the preservation's fantastic you can actually see some of the hammer blows of the smith that made the heads of those nails i mean there are like forty thousands of these in the ship forty thousand it's amazing and they go literally all the way along they're all perfect amazing now here we are this is our end of our boat and we're probably digging well you don't know that for sure phil i mean it may be but you know well that has got to be the crucial question then if we can find that block where the mass would have been then we know that we're at the bow end well it may be a while before we find out which end of the barge we're revealing because to piece together the story of this boat every bit of evidence has to be recorded even the basalt blocks scattered around the trench eric the high tech boys have moved in yes it's a drawing arm really it's a mechanical thing which you can follow the beams and planks and it sends coordinates to the computer so you see it's just mechanical and you just follow the lines of the beams and planks and does it do it three-dimensionally then yes so it's essentially for recording it's a recording it's a drawing arm we call it back in england we've got a bloke called steve who does that with a pencil the story revealed by excavating the other barge to murn one was that it had been sunk accidentally as it was discovered with all kinds of personal possessions still inside the cabin the cabin is a unique discovery in itself and it's been partially reconstructed yeah they had to dismantle it on the ship and this is a reconstruction of what was actually found and they with the dark line here they've indicated what was found in position and uh metal work and woodwork i mean it's absolutely incredible it's unique no other ship has this sort of cabinet i mean it's got all the creature comforts what amazes me too is they've obviously got somewhat worth pinching because that is a very efficient incredible lock yeah that means they could leave the ship overnight or whatever or at least for a while and keep the precious things secure inside the cabin well they obviously did have some worth pension the fines inside the cabin include a stylus for writing and military style sandals which have prompted the suggestion that the owner may have been a retired soldier but most impressive of all were a set of tools that included these wooden planes that even had the shaving still in the blade the wooden parts are being preserved separately but despite being just over one thousand eight hundred years old even the metal looks as good as the day it was made i don't know is the original lock isn't better than the reconstruction it really is and there's just such an array of tools i mean you've got shears entrenching tool boat hook it's just stuff that you instantly recognize i mean this this crowbar here is just about the same as what you can actually buy today i know but amazing then again you get things like that what on earth is that well if you compare it to this one you see it's a it's the same kind of handle as this key has and actually they reworked it into a chisel and they worked with it as a chisel because here you see yeah they really hammered on it most of these objects they look very sort of domestic they look very peaceable but then on the top of that when you've got a spear well actually if you look at all the wood preserved in the ship if this was a spear the wood would have been there and it wasn't so it was on board for another reason maybe a knife or something maybe a knife whatever but it wasn't used as a spear because we didn't find shaft it certainly got me thinking about what surprises this barge might have in store for us and with the battle rocks now being lifted out of the way the diggers can set about revealing more of the boat itself [Music] it appears our boat was abandoned here on a bend in the river and one of the reasons it's preserved so well is that it's been covered by the wet river silts laid down as the rhine gradually shifted over the centuries eric in fact believes that the roman army's biggest challenge here on the frontier was battling the natural forces of the river and that our barge may be part of that story it's only now that we've got the basel blocks off that you can see what a dramatic angle the boat's at nobody would position a ship uh against a revetment with an angle like this in a riverbend where the strongest current came yeah so all this points in the direction of intentional sinking of the ship but victor's drawing them not sinking it but pulling it out well they would have had to fix it its position on the bank and um well with these ropes yes we draw it um on the bank a little and maybe throw in all these bizarre blocks so are you suggesting that they put it in that position for a particular reason like being a peer or a key or something like that well what we know we have this we've done a lot of research in the environment and we know the river was threatening uh the roman road in the background around 100 a.d this construction was made in 100 a.d we have dated the the polls of the construction yeah um and its shape suggests that it was um meant to protect the road from erosion eric thinks that the boat was used as a barrier to stop the river eroding the bank the roman engineers seemed to have fought a constant battle with the river as it kept shifting position but they'd no other choice because they were surrounded by marsh land and everything had to be built on this narrow ridge of sandy soil so a critical thing presumably is going to be whether the date of this in relation to this i can imagine that you wouldn't use a new boat for this would you you wouldn't eric what's the oldest boat of this kind that has been found so far well we have one uh other boat this type it was found in sunton that's post dated 98 a.d which means they didn't measure the uh what do you call the sapwood subwoofer which will give you an exact date so it's a post a bit after 1998. could be 40 years after it could be 40 years so if we do get an early date this would be the oldest boat of that kind that could well be found could well be wow but to find out the date means doing something fairly brutal to our boat [Music] shocking i know especially as we haven't revealed the full width of the boat yet but i'm assured it can all be pieced back together again apparently they need to take quite a few samples in order to get a dendro date and we'll find out more about that later [Music] mapping the changing course of the river has been crucial in developing an understanding of the frontier but as you might imagine the archaeology is a tad complicated in places this is especially true at the other site we're digging here at zanveld eric and herrera's excavations found the corner posts of a roman watchtower built beside the river in the first century but a hundred years later the river had shifted and pottery finds in this area suggested a bigger roman presence something like a small fort may have been built here in the second century sadly the two trenches we've dug here haven't found any structural evidence of a fort so is that the story of this trench do you think that it's it's mainly medieval features i think so we've got nothing sort of roman in here that we need to take we've got some aromas debris you know like little shirts or little pieces of roof tiling but yeah i think i think we have to declare this strange roman empty spot right there's little more we can do here except to say that if there is a fort on this site it doesn't occupy a very big area henry's been creating a 3d model to analyze the frontier system essentially the forts and watchtowers here weren't just about guarding the frontier but were carefully positioned to control movement along the river rhine i think the important thing is to realize that it's not only a military corridor all the forts here depend on their supplies to be brought in from outside and these supplies are coming up from switzerland and later on from britain this is the corridor that takes the trade to scandinavia and to france so this is the motorway of europe every bit of heavy traffic has to go on this river so we're basically protecting the motorway of europe here that's it that's it yeah and here you have the patrol system uh that goes with it i mean look at the chain of watchtowers well i don't understand that but with such a flat landscape why can't you just make do with one if you're just trying to watch that area of the river why do you need so many because you can't actually see in a river area like that if you're on the boat you need to know where the next bend comes and you need to know where you're heading especially in a system like this where you have civil branches at the same time so they're way markers but they're also they're also the ones that stop pirates getting through they need to be higher up to see further ahead right yeah so so what you're saying is that there's somewhere between um traffic lights or maybe like lighthouses yeah damian you don't do suspense do you well no i mean oh wait a minute that's fantastic look at that oh that is a bit god that is a bit nice isn't it some size isn't it this is it i tell you what when you see that against the the other one that we've just looked at that has got to be twice the size something like that yeah i mean you're talking about twice the capacity at least twice the volume of cargo and i mean what amazes me too is the condition of the timbers the timbers are every bit as good condition as what we've seen today aren't they yeah and the size of them too what's your first thought um well it's fantastic i mean we should be finding these things in england we're not so we have to come here to find they'd have had them in england well i think it's likely we've got lots of roman ports we've done a lot of work in roman port excavation especially in london we've got sea going ships of the period of demeanor one 140 a.d ish and we haven't found the river bars we've got dug out boats we've got sea gun ships and we're missing this link this is a missing link and now after a hard day's digging we're beginning to see the details of this boat phil's first question though is fairly basic do we now know which end we're digging i think there is 80 chance that we now know what end of the ship it is for um the the must step would be on a quarter of the length of the ship seen from the from the front end from the front end so does that mean it would be in here it would necessarily be in this trench if it was the front end so we can say 80 percent certain that this end is the stern yes the back end of the city that is amazing disappointingly there doesn't appear to be a cabin at the back of this barge but it seems our experts have spotted something that makes this boat rather special it's peculiar to see a joining of planks at least from the bottom planks with a mortise and tenon joint which is typical for the mediterranean oh it's gonna so you're saying you're it's it's in the bottom planking that the bottom plank oh my god that is unusual they're not saying more at the moment but they've promised to explain tomorrow tomorrow's also the day when these wood samples will be analyzed and we'll find out if the date of this boat's also special right now it could be the drink that's talking but the experts seem genuinely excited the app said to me about five minutes ago that every archaeologist says that their latest dig is unique but that this boat really is unique cheers phil and hopefully somewhere under that mud tomorrow we're going to find out why do you want a beer come on then beginning of day three here in the netherlands on the old northern frontier of the roman empire and one of the downsides of being here is that we can't show you more of this very beautiful country because guess where time team are digging right in the middle of a building site [Music] i don't think the archaeologists are even aware we're on a building site their eyes are transfixed on the perfectly preserved roman barge we're digging and today's the big day when we'll find out most about it but first there's still a bit more boat to reveal morning phil are you getting on absolutely excellent it really is somewhere else down here it's looking very impressive yeah i mean we've actually now got the full width of it now oh so this is the other side yeah and it's the full height of it so we got the full profile and i mean since i've been working here you just really get that sense of being in a boat it's quite incredible i notice you're digging with a different implement you know this is not your normal trowel but you see the normal trail is never far away what's that are you using willie is a a kitchen spatula oh right it's just wooden you see this is what to save damage in the woods that's right the other favorite tool is your hands and then of course to get it really clean you sponge it down what's this thing behind you that looks like a sort of i don't know it's a fence post or something well we've been calling it the match but we don't really see it now but we're serious about that well it does look rather round ah yeah yeah yeah but there's a good archaeological reason why it's not not the master no you see that we got those big blocks of basil oh yeah these are the things we were fetching out yeah that's right yeah well yap was saying he thinks that they actually tumble in from these from the bank and they've actually tumbled down across the base of the boat right yeah well now you see there you've got basalt down there but this pole is actually on top all right other battle so if the battle's got nothing to do with the boat this certainly hasn't so you think perhaps it's a tree stump or something just something that has just settled in and i suppose as the water level's gone it's it's it's settled against the side of the boat wow wow yes that's rather good isn't it this is a model of demand one the other roman barge already excavated in this area yaps brought it in to point out some of the differences with our boat as you can see the the general construction elements are the same but on the other hand this ship is two and a half meters wide and the ship we are excavating now was at least four meters eighteen almost twice does that make you think that the boat we're digging was actually longer than this one it's longer but it's not uh twice as long i think it's in between 30 or 35 meters long originally and i think more towards 35 than towards 30. these barges were the lorries of their day and the only cost-effective way of transporting goods some 20 times cheaper than going by road as i understand it these barges help to transport all kinds of roman goods heading through to britain but i'm not sure exactly how the supply system worked what we have over there what we've been looking at is part of the river truck part of that journey if you like utilitarian boats carrying bulk cargoes down the rhine of all kinds some of which were things like wine and so on later on that came over to britain and you had at least two different types of boat involved in that the the low flat vessels like we've got out there and then big much rounder vessels and i know victor's been working on a couple of drawings here a 35 meter long barge like ours would never make it across the north sea and the goods would be transferred to a sea going ship like this this particular ship black friars 1 was found in the river thames in the 1960s it's possible in fact that the goods were transferred from boat to ship here at utrecht the name utrecht means triactum which means the crossing point people assume sometimes it just means crossing from one side of the river to the other but it can also mean crossing from the river system into the sea and then do they cross straight over from utrecht to britain not quite it is easier to sail down along the coast into the delta so this is down here somewhere down here where the big islands are yes it's near the modern ferry ports of places like uh fleecing and flushing and it's basically from there over you get a good sailing straight into the thames estuary yesterday yap hinted that he'd seen things in this boat that make it a unique discovery and now he plans to show phil exactly what he meant by that he's been busy sticking yellow pins into these planks to indicate where they've been fastened using a mortise and tenon joint like this a technique that's never been seen before in any of the roman boats found here so what you're saying then that these these timbers are not merely joined to these but they're joined they are joined together through there yes by a piece of timber yeah and and these yellow pegs mark the the pegs that actually seal the joint yeah that's true yes that explains why you get pairs of them yeah against the joint what is actually the point of using mortise and tindersing on a boat well because it makes the otherwise weak bottom you see how distorted it is here it's not a very strong construction and it makes all the planks held together and so they don't move like that easily so they're less likely to leak it makes the bottom stronger and tighter so far we have excavated approximately 15 ships from this tie it's the first time we see a mortise and tenon technique to join the planks normally the planks are holding place by quite a lot of iron nails through the floors they probably used local people to make the aisles and the l-shaped pieces of wood chaps that were normally making dugouts those people were not used uh to have joint planks and the romans explained how to join so you think this is an early a very early example of a rhyme it should be but maybe we learn more about it by the denver updating so damian in a sort of scale of one to ten where on earth does this boat right in terms of importance oh it's 11. it's it's 11 because it's throwing all the accepted ideas up in the air it's that important oh yeah oh yeah oh yeah so important in fact that we need to take the chainsaw to it again apparently we need more samples to analyze in order to find out precisely how old this barge is [Music] this is done by a process known as dendro dating in simple terms this means analyzing the tree rings or growth patterns in the wood and matching the patterns with other ancient trees of a known date esther yansma and her team can compare the tree rings here with a database of trees from most of europe the problem has been that the sample bits of wood so far haven't contained enough tree rings how many do you like uh at least 80 or 100 right and did you get that from this well we got it from the from the kim sticker i don't know the english the l shape the else you know oh the brackets yeah the right yeah right one of the l-shaped um pieces and the bottom plank were very long but if you look at how many years of that then this one is 208 rings and this one contains 189 but when you look at the pattern you can see all these periodic dips in the growth even though these samples had over a hundred tree rings they haven't yet been able to find a match with the database which is why they need more samples the appliance of science is in evidence out here too what are you doing with your little pump we're trying to get some groundwater up why because we want to uh to analyze the water and see if the environment below us where the ship is is is good enough to preserve the ship what are they planning to do with the boat at the moment well it's going to be filled up again after the excavation it will be protected as an archaeological monument so what will be on top of it well on this specific place there will be a bicycle path but you'll be able to tell them whether or not they can do that without the boat degrading yes that's it one of the bonuses of cutting sections out of the boat is that we can now see one of the mortise and tenon joints for the past hour various groups of archaeologists have been squatting around this little square of wood like it's the holy grail phil why is everyone getting so excited about this because it is just such a revolutionary way in this part of the world of joining planks together it's a mixing of two different technologies we've got the very mediterranean feature of these little tongues of wood these tenons which are used to join the bottom planking which this is one of edge to edge to fasten them together to make one huge sheet of plywood if you like i mean we have boats built very very similar way to this on the thames in the 16th century and they too managed to make the bottom flanking fairly thin by strengthening it with these free but that's 1400 years later yeah this may be the great great great great grandfather of that technology but the main goal of the dig was to find out the date of this boat and now that moment has finally arrived according to eric and herrera this barge should date well before 100 a.d if their theories about this frontier are to be proved right to get the most precise date the sample has to include the wood from just under the bark as this contains the last growth rings in the tree that show exactly when it was cut down this sample didn't have the sap wood but it has given us an approximate date which ester is working on right now i can't wait to know all right i'm showing you here the last ring of the l-shaped piece dates in 52 idea the last ring 52 a.d 80 right at 25 rings you go to 77 80 plus minus uh plus minus six or something and then that's your first date so 77 so we're looking [Laughter] is no i mean it's it's just about i mean i said 85. yes she didn't know yes i had 55 so i'm way out i said i said 71. i said so you wanted yes i mean if you you asked me this morning i mean the only thing i could think of when was the first serious phase of construction on this land infrastructure yeah to my opinion it began around 85 a.d that's that's after seven years of research so i well that that was my guess so as well as all this infrastructure going in they they're getting the shipping disorder they have to bring those carriers were constructed so that was my i think they're quite happy with this justin esther always brings the good news it's a great finish to the dig and their project in this area [Music] oh now you can really see it's boats but given the importance of this barge i have to ask them is there any chance the rest of the boat will ever be excavated if the groundwater level lowers and we notice that you know there's degeneration of the wood i think you're called time team you think there's the possibility that one day we might get the phone call you might come and dig the whole boat i think we have to do we have to reschedule time team and do it in four days i think we might just do that okay thank you [Music] wouldn't it be great if we could just pull this entire barge out of the ground right now well with the magic of graphics we can do just that this way we can see the full scale of this unique river barge which measured just under 5 meters wide and something like 35 meters long this is the missing link as damian calls it the earliest example of a rhine river barge it was constructed most likely for the roman army using a mix of local and mediterranean shipbuilding techniques built around 85 a.d this barge seems to have had a working life of 15 years before it was deliberately sunk around 100 a.d to stop the river rhine eroding the frontier road a desperate measure by the roman engineers fighting a constant battle against the forces of nature and now there's just enough time to share the news with the people who did all the hard work ladies and gentlemen the dendro date for our barge is give or take five years 85 a.d which makes it the earliest roman barge ever discovered on the northern frontier [Music] foreign

Channel: Time Team Classics

Views: 90,972

Rating: 4.9523983 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, Utrecht, Netherlands, archaeologists, Roman ship, time team, time team full episode, time team season 13 episode 5, utrecht, netherlands, utrecht netherlands, time team utrecht

Id: xm54srcoLis

Length: 47min 38sec (2858 seconds)

Published: Wed Apr 07 2021