The Perfectly Preserved Roman Town Hidden In Wales | Time Team | Odyssey

[Music] this wall's pretty good isn't it and it's all pure rock-solid roman and if you think that's good you should see what's inside it because this is kyle wentz the best preserved roman town in britain [Music] and it's a cracker here's the plan look you've got a temple forum baths houses shops but there's still pieces missing here here here here absolutely nothing that's because those areas have never been touched never been dug until now we've been invited here to get to the very heart of the roman town uncover its secrets and fill in the blanks [Music] kyle wendt lies in south wales near the seven estuary in roman times it lay on the main road from gloucester to the legionary fortress kylian today this small rural town is the best kept roman secret in britain over the past hundred years archaeologists have been piecing together a massive archaeological jigsaw puzzle and now pub and post office rub shoulders with temples and villas fantastic sight neil isn't it we're walking down the high street one of the major roman towns of britain forum over there baths here temples here you know what could be better than that yeah except this is not a time team tourist trip what are we likely to find well i don't know but if you wanted to guess you know what would you expect to find your high street your local town fancy shops fast food outlets vegetable market meat market anything and it could all be in here right on the high street i mean look at it greenfield has never been dug or geophysics ever and yet we're right on the major street of a major roman town there's only one thing that's perplexing me why is mick aston here the famous medievalist who hates anything roman you're not keen on the romans but we're right next to the church there that's medieval so i think there's going to be a lot of medieval stuff here on top yeah but mick we've got three days in the center of a major roman town we can't spend all that time up in the top six inches looking for the medieval he's the boss this week right that's right so what are we going to do obviously isn't it geophysics first let's look at that and get a trench in we've got to do it quick we haven't got times against us yeah i still think we'll have a meter of medieval stuff on top though to get through mick we will get to that fairly swiftly let's see so under the watchful eye of our medieval policeman our conquest of kai went begins right in the heart of the roman town as the archaeologists investigate this field for the first time ever and while we wait with baited breath for the results helen's finding out about the town's history i can see there's lots of roman buildings here but what else do we know we know that um the romans called it ventus ilurum which means the marketplace of the uh sailors they were the local tribe who lived in this part of south wales so whether san luis friendly to the romans initially they were the opposite of friendly they were the most unfriendly of their tribes in britain and it took 25 to 30 years for the tribe finally to be subdued and to be incorporated within what became the roman province of britannia so how did these wild barbarians end up with a roman town because the romans thought that the only civilized way to live was in a town they founded towns and they relied upon the local elites to rule for them so the local elites restyle themselves from being warrior elites and instead become urban magistrates a bit like a town councillor [Music] so kyle went was both a market town and an important political center and this might give us a clue to what's going on in our field and as the digger arrives the geophys is hot off the press but it's causing some confusion what i'm not sure about is whether we've got a monumental building or a series of small buildings that's the only problem what looks to me john's you've got a range of rooms going down there rooms there rooms there another range going across there and then perhaps a central courtyard now because you're opposite the temple you might have public buildings and that wouldn't be out of place as a meat market but you're making a big assumption aren't you mix said that it might all be overlaid with medieval could this stuff be medieval no i think that looks roman but what you can't see i think i'm writing saying johnny is anything like burials on that no we won't see burials in these conditions well we know that there are medieval burials up to that wall coming in this direction we don't know if they come across this site so there might still be medieval stuff on the side problem what are we going to do well let's open a trench in here let's prove these walls test the inside of the rooms be at the courtyard area then expand accordingly looking at the geophys neil thinks this building could be a roman mccallum a type of covered meat market so we're opening our first trench here to test his theory and having barely scratched the surface phil's already struck it lucky even you know what that is tony knows what that is so i'd say some second century id first piece of paper pill oh lovely job why are we saying this could either be a huge building or a meat market well i guess a meat market has a fairly standard plan it has ranges of rooms almost booths if you like around a central courtyard and i guess in those booths you might have people selling cooked meats legs of lamb that kind of thing and i think the point is it's got a single plan therefore it's paid for by one entrepreneur who then rents it out to individual butchers so it's all about mercantile activity [Music] what do you think of that then is that mortar water that isn't it that's one wall line is this more or less where you're supposed to be yeah does it correspond with what you've got on the geophys well it's meant to come through the middle of the trench so we're not slowing off so much for our resident medieval misery guts it's only 11 a.m and we're right down among the romans not enough to convince me we've got a meat market yet but considering the fantastic ruins over the rest of the town it is pretty tantalizing because looking at the plan of roman caye went previous digs have already revealed a grid system of roads which surround blocks of shops temples and houses and at the center of it all the political heart of the town the forum when neil said the forum was here i was expecting something grand and towering with great roofs and columns and things but there's not much here really is there for roman britain this is actually quite impressive for standing remains this is one of the very few uncovered foreign basilicas in britain but look there's there's virtually nothing here i mean this can't be old surely no this isn't ancient but it was based on what was excavated and this has been reconstructed it's all this gutter around here so that gutter would have been originally yeah so what would this have looked like it would have started as this big open space for commercial activity and also an important political meeting space they would have had pillars at the front yeah and then there would have been an open space behind it and then behind that there were probably shops which you can see there there's one there so this is a shop this is a shop yes this bit here this bit there and when it was excavated there were a lot of oyster shells found in it so it might have been something like an oyster bar really with these impressive steps in front of the forum yeah they may well have been lined with something there may well have been statues flanking on either side leading people into here which is the basilica what's the basilica the basilica is the sort of political chamber that's attached to it a bit like a modern cathedral in that you have two side aisles and a central nave and you can see where you've got those really big wide walls there yes they're so wide because they have columns going up them huge columns to give this aspect of height so this is really the heart of the political activity in the city well that's quite enough talking politics of course over the road phil's exposed more of the possible meat market it's a phil looks like you've got another wall there yeah it's it's quite a narrow one this one it's only that wide look it's just running back in that direction okay so that's kind of a right angle so this one which you got earlier on isn't it well but i think it's more complicated than that because we got this face of a wall in there look you can still see that's running down there but we seem to have a face in there and one out there i wonder whether we ain't got two walls yeah built on the side yeah it springs up all manner of of interest in you know problems and questions lots of walls great lots of problems not so great and it doesn't look as though things are about to get any easier since john's got the geophys results for the rest of the field look we've extended the resistance server and there's phil's trench and now we've got this really strong high resistance anomaly so what is this a wall or a ditch well it's a wall a substantial wall by the looks of it look at the overall plan within the town this wall we've got it is on that sort of line so it's almost as if that those thin properties we're picking up the same in here perhaps now i mean maybe what you've got is you've got your linear strip shop because you're a fairway back from the road here maybe what you've actually got here is a more high-class living apartment you don't even smell the noise at the front right but you can't live out the back so we should certainly put a trench across this thing oh yeah i think something in there on the corner don't you think yeah right on the corner i thought you might say that oh he's done it already look he always does that i'll get on with it so we're cracking on with the second trench but i'm feeling a bit out of the loop having turned my back for a minute neil's given up on meat markets now he's talking about shops and living rooms the wall should be kind of coming up on this line according to the gfiz there should be a face here okay another one about there so if we can get that we know we're on the money as digging continues everyone's beginning to home in on the romans at one end of phil's trench matt's got an amphora while phil's absorbed in an intriguing oval dish but although the finds are coming in thick and fast they could have come from all sorts of roman buildings and we can't tell what we're digging yet what's more there are lots more gaps in the roman jigsaw puzzle so we've sent geofiz away from the hustle and bustle of the high street to the outskirts of the town we're wondering whether this might have been a quieter more residential area and surveying it will help get a fuller picture of the town layout looking at this plan i find really interesting because there's five little grids along this way and four down here so that's 20 in all and the whole town is described in this very neat rectangle it's almost as though the planners pre-ordained what they were going to do and just laid it onto the landscape is that what the romans did essentially it's exactly what they did one of the oldest laws in in rome was that the dead could only be buried outside the town walls and so you needed to demarcate the urban limits so there are various ceremonies and rituals that they employed um while laying out these towns that involved um soothsayers and also the plowing of a ritual furrow around it with a brown ox and a white ox and all sorts of things there is one floor in this perfect plan though if you look at this north gate and the south gate they're walking that's when we're describing it all sorts of factors can affect how you lay out that that kind of roman template there's a very interesting quote from vitruvius who's an architect and engineer of the period they will be properly laid out if foresight is employed to exclude the winds from the alleyways cold winds disagreeable hot winds favorable moist winds unhealthy so the literally i don't want the winds whistling down the alleyways that might affect how the orient things how things are laid out i want to try and understand why you've got a wonky gate system why the layout of the town is the shape and the size and why it's here back in the town center we've thrown everyone at the trenches although still confusing clear wall lines are beginning to appear and what's more we're now finding evidence which might tell us what the buildings were used for come on little devil just keep rocking it give it plenty of support underneath and up she comes and then fantastic yeah what'd you call a fish dish fish dish yeah see that man lovely you what do you got there by your knee this i'm just cleaning down here it looks like the rim of an ampere i think so that might be for oil yep so we've got food stuffs everywhere we could have a chip shop come with the oil and the fish well it's just a suggestion and quite frankly the archaeologists don't seem to have much of a clue but over in trench two the walls finally seem to be coming together rich you've been a lot of activity in this trench what's this big feature coming through here well that seems to be what the geophysics was picking up it's just the old crappy material that's been thrown back in but i've got high hopes for an intact wall being under there then you've got this another wall here well that's it i mean this was a really unexpected find an intact wall that's actually 90 degrees to this this robbed out wall and interestingly i was talking to tracy and we realized that of course they line up in this direction right so potentially we've actually got one building running all the way back to here back wall along here i mean that's quite a sizeable building isn't it it really is so end of day one and it looks like we might have a huge long building running right down the length of the field but what on earth is it this is our first trench trench number one and it came down bang on the money there's roman structures everywhere we've got a wall here that i'm standing on and next to it there's another wall but that seems to be of a different period and we've got another one here but that doesn't seem to tie in to this one here and we've got a little wall here is that part of this wall here and it's that wall there part of this one here that's parallel to it and either of them have anything to do with this one which is underneath them and how deep are we going to have to dig in order to find out the answer to any of those questions no one knows the answer to any of that yet but look at this gif is which john just did in a quieter more residential part of the town can you see that there could be the wing of a house maybe something along there something up there could it be a roman villa what about this here is that a hyper course to roman central heating system and what about this enigmatic black blob could that be a mosaic floor we'll find out tomorrow beginning of day two here in south wales where we're trying to fill in some of the archaeological gaps in kyle wentz the best preserved roman town in britain yesterday we put our first trenches in here slap bang in the middle of the roman town and people were talking about a great municipal market or long rows of shops and we were getting very excited although by the end of the day all we'd got was a tangle of walls actually what we've got is still very difficult to work out if you want to guess i think we actually have one shop here and then perhaps another shop back there behind faye but the other alternative yesterday was that it might be a load of retail outlets under one massive roof the walls are quite flimsy they're not that well built i think the market you'd expect bigger walls more monumentally constructed to me it looks like private enterprise you know one person here one person there so it's more oxford street than smithfield but it is early days yet isn't it yeah absolutely we've got to excavate down in this in this area here this is perhaps the living room where people were living at the back of the shop selling at the front digging in here we'll find fines you know what they're eating what they're drinking and then we need to open up a trench up there why what might be up there well that's what actually selling and that will tell us you know was it fish mongers was it cheese mongers so we're opening our third trench by the road hoping to find the shop front and what kind of roman retail outlet we've got because at last neil seems to be confident that we're dealing with individual shops with living quarters stretching out behind the shop floor he thinks our first two trenches picked up the walls in those living areas and as we continue to dig we should learn more about the lives of kyle wentz romans looks like it's continuing down a little bit nope here we go all right this is sort of two rather sharp prongs off the end of it sometimes um with these things they're part of toilet sets and they were cleaning under your nails with you maybe get a set of tweezers and a little ear scoop it's like having a cotton bud but without the bud on the end and it you're supposed to scoop the wax out and then maybe that's a cleaning and clean your nails and your ears at the same time okay we wanted to get close to the romans but that's just a little too close as part of our quest to fill in some of the gaps in the plan of roman kyle wendt we're not only concentrating on the center of the town so stewart's scrambling over the walls looking for clues to understanding the layout of the town while louise is hauling a somewhat bemused helen into the village church i'm not usually dragged into a church by a romanist well i brought you here to show you this inscription oh isn't that lovely what a fantastic lettering yeah it's absolutely brilliant and it's set up to a guy called tiberius paulinus and he was in charge of the second legion augusta which was just up the road at caroline so this is gusta yeah what's this doing at care went then well this is where you get to the next bit of the inscription because it says here that it was set up by a decree of the town council of the ciliares and so they've set it up to this guy the way that a sort of small town like cowen would have fitted into the roman political system was they'd have had somebody important to intercede on their behalf at rome to sort of put petitions to the emperor or the senate and what it shows is that these people the salutes really know how to work within a really big complex political structure this third century monument is the only record in britain which documents a roman council at work and proves just how romanized we brits had become and since we've got a whole forum at our disposal it's a perfect chance to experience the cold face of roman politics mind you it took 30 years to civilize the local barbarians so if you guys are town councillors one of the things you have to do is show that you are good men morally virtuous men and you do that through the way you were raped to what to make a speech in a roman manner it shows through your moral worth so what do we have to do well you have to give a speech following certain gestures which we know about from a second century a.d handbook so some of the things you have to do is the way in which you gesture you extend the arm with your shoulders well thrown back and still with your head up touch your thumb to your middle finger and extend the other to three fingers right and you might use that to denigrate your opponent or to make an emphatic point is this the sort of thing that i would gesture on a roundabout if somebody cut me up or something like this you go like that but you only have to use your right hand ah because otherwise your toga might fall off together now this is the first mention of the word together particularly if you want to make a sincere point perhaps like that or you grip your toga as you're getting more and more into your speech you might let it drop slightly off your shoulder there will be no falling off of don't and also for emphasis another thing you can do is you can slap your thigh if you want to make an emphatic point oh with your right hand with your right hand again but not quite so panto well the mark of a very good sincere speech is that nora should look slightly more disheveled when he finishes than when he started those two more disheveled unlikely that said i think everyone's going to get a little grubby if we're going to make any impact on the town plan all day yesterday we were digging right in the heart of the town round about there but this field here which is right behind our incident room is this one up here which is at the edge right by the wall and it's where yesterday evening john came up with this really tantalizing geo fizz which seemed to indicate that there might be some kind of villa here which i found particularly puzzling because i thought that a villa was essentially a country house not something you'd find in a town not necessarily look at the town tony you've got these big houses in the corners of the roman town one there one there away from the noise and smell of the high street all that hubbub it looks like we've already got one in our field does that mean that a villa's already been dug here one yet just behind you over there it was excavated about 20 years ago and john's done some geophysics over here and what amazes me is the results are so clear you can see a range of rooms here coming along and back down this side all set round this courtyard what about this checkered dog tooth bit here you'd like to think that could be a sort of hyper course system associated with the villa it's a massive building which rather poses the question and how much of it are we gonna dig about one percent i should think tony um we're just gonna have to evaluate it so a single trench coming in across the range yeah so we can get the central courtyard let's look at these rooms are they really posh have they got hypercoarse so we're opening our next trench over john's gear fizz to see if we've got a villa i have to say it seems like he's reading a lot into a few fuzzy blobs but yet again the diggers hardly scratched the surface and phil struck it lucky look at that then that ain't bad for a start of the trench is it nice twisted little bracelet yeah bit small for you very fetching phil but not all the finds are so easy to identify most of them are caked in mud and dirt and it's a painstaking process to identify the real gems you know this really did look like a piece of bone and in fact actually now that i'm cleaning it up i think it's more likely to be antler it it looked like these two tightly entwined lovers gazing into each other's eyes but you know now that i'm looking at it closely well it's two gladiators tightly enclinched in combo while bridge continues to do battle with her fantastic gladiators we're still busy trying to understand the building in which they were found tracy that's a lot neater than it was you know two or three hours ago yes it's really coming up it's looking a lot better but it's not what we expected so what's going on well we're not sure yet we've definitely got a bit of surface though down just below where you're sitting all those small rounded flints and that's a nice surface that may be pavement in front of the shop so the actual shop is further that way ah right so what are you going to do now well i think at the moment we're just going to carry on cleaning back and then i think we think about going that way okay day two three trenches open but i can't believe we're still being defeated by a few roman retailers i mean it's so complex this isn't it why do you have two walls side by side i suppose if i had to guess one explanation might be that this is an original shop here coming along turning the corner and then a new shop is built next door and perhaps you know a bit of a boundary dispute here so they actually build a new wall to the side of the shop here so this is shop one little alley way or gully here this is shop two here so it's a bit like a frontier where they're they're pushing each other back and forth like your boundary dispute yeah what i think they're making it up as they go along yes we've had some lovely finds but in reality we're still dealing with a mess of walls you said to me both of you said this is the best preserved roman town in the uk and yet when i talk to the archaeologists all they tell me about is walls one wall parallel to another one underneath another and i'm getting no picture at all of what was going on but that's why i really want to show you these shops tony that excavated 100 years ago i mean look at it it looks like an absolute maze of walls and hard to understand but really what you've got is actually a very simple story you've got an early shop here but then you get lots of later activity complicating the picture and this isn't a tiny little narrow room like this this wall was built first this goes out of use they build a new wall to replace it and cover this with a floor so can this kind of jumble of archaeology tell us anything well it still can because what you have is a large workshop that's fronting onto the main street so the street is well out here somewhere yeah that's the main east west road running through cowent with this gully in front of it yeah exactly and then the shop starts here somewhere somewhere around here and then as it goes on you you come through this way so this is all one bill into the big main workshop come shop itself yeah so you've got the family making the goods and selling them from the same place and there was a forge found in here so you can imagine the blacksmith working away sort of banging away at his anvil with sparks flying everywhere and the back wall of the workshop was all the way back here and then behind you've got a couple of rooms for living quarters where the family would live it's a big place doesn't it it is quite chunky yes that's not all this is louise's shop okay i'm next door in my shop now i'm selling i don't know vegetables or i'm a butcher just imagine the smell and the noise you know i'll be chucking out my rotten meat and my rotten vegetables into the gutter in front of the street think of the noise again you said oxford street to me tony that means actually anything like oxford street it's more like a bazaar in the middle east you know people are living above the shop just imagine babies crying people going to the toilet you know smell smell and the noise looking around here the different phases of development are very complicated but living quarters workshop and shop fronts are quite clear and neil thinks that this is what we've got in our field but it's afternoon of day two and we've also got a possible villa to deal with yesterday evening i got really excited because of this geophys which seemed to show a roman villa there although it is quite eye of faith isn't it that's magnetometry and today john decided to run the radar over it and this is what he found isn't that spectacular if that isn't a roman villa i'll eat my hat except when we put a trench in this is what we found nothing nothing nothing nothing phil harding rubble phil where's the villa who's here i'm standing on it what do you mean you're standing on it there isn't anything there mate so what's that hard surface and if you really want class that is class so that's plaster with red paint on it yeah yep and that's got red and white on it that's right so you reckon that we do have a high status building here i don't think they come much higher status than that tony thank you phil that is something of a relief finally one of our trenches seems to make sense and what's more bridges find has turned out to be even more stunning than we first thought well this is actually the decorative handle of a roman folding pen knife how do you know that because when i started cleaning it up you could actually see this groove that runs down here and that's where the blade would have folded up into the handle for safe keeping when it's in that roman's pocket it's two figures isn't it it's actually two gladiators and they're jarring up against each other you basically got what seems to be the heavyweight and the featherweight of the gladiators this one here is called the mermaloe and he has got this what is actually a fish-shaped helmet over his head you can just see his eye poking out there he would have looked through this heavily armored um coming down and he's holding the short jabbing dagger and the other one well that's it this is the ratarius and he really is the light sprightly gladiator he would have been holding just a net in his hand with a pitched fork but on his shoulder there he's got a protective piece of metal work which is the only thing that would have been protecting his face and head you can actually see he's not wearing a helmet at all would you agree that it's important oh goodness yeah i mean i've seen any one of these elsewhere in roman britain and that is of a quality that could easily go on display the national museum of wales back at the villa trench and the fines just keep on coming ah peter oh yesterday can i give that to you wow look at that roman broach isn't it copper alloy almost complete the spring is up here and there would have been a pin to attach it to your keep that in place up there that's lovely a fantastic find to end a great day and i know a couple of would-be romans who'd be very grateful for that toga brooch well the next lesson is voice coaching your tone of voice has to be very agreeable very persuasive and part of the way in which you speak is also to do with sort of exercise so you might want to go for a bit of a walk before you give your speech or you might want to rub down with some oil i'm up but you must abstain from sex before you give your speech i'll manage that in those costumes i think finally you must avoid any trace of a rustic accent oh no chance of that that isn't dearly me i think this is going to be nearly impossible [Laughter] beginning of day three here at kyle went in south wales home of the best preserved roman town in britain yesterday was a great day with some superb finds and some really good gf's which predicted that around here there would be a huge roman villa maybe 60 meters across so what do we do we put in this puny trench about as wide as a flamingo's leg why is it so thin coming to the 21st century this is modern archaeology we're doing this very scientifically very carefully all right i've been told off but what about my hyper course your hyper course has actually disappeared when we actually looked on the radar it proves it's a very superficial deposit there's only out in the top six inches so probably it's just like a load of old horseshoes or a bucket of iron nails but hey we've got these fantastic results down here all these very clear rooms and evidence of burning and in here the radar suggests very deep deposits this probably is a bath house where's that on the ground it's just behind us over there at last it looks like we've got a really juicy target so we're opening another trench over the possible bath house shown on the geophys but it is day three and i hope we haven't bitten off more than we can chew because we've now got two trenches open here and we're still struggling to identify our shops in the center of the town [Music] we don't seem to have anything that looks much like a wall in here yet peter i've got this little coin here back in the villa phil's having more luck fantastic you can see at the end you've got a sort of few lines coming out from the top i will do if i put my glasses on big rocks i can see that's part of the emperor's crown and this kind of coin was made in the very end of the third century sometime between 275 and around about 300 so that should give you quite a nice tight date for the destruction of this building this is a copy probably made in britain so it's a forgery uh it's not a forgery because the intention wasn't to defraud anybody the id these are known as barbarous radiates and they were made locally because the roman state wasn't making enough money so people took it upon themselves to make their own well everybody was just turning out money almost yes yeah me too we might be on the money in phil's trench but not all of the finds are exactly what some of us expected i hear we've got some human bones at last we have indeed but not everybody would necessarily recognize them as human because they are so tiny because these are from a newborn baby this is the tibia that's the big shin bone yeah and you can see this it's got this same basic triangular form that it has with this ridge down the front that's the bit that if you get kicked it hurts why are these found in the roman buildings then well the thing about individuals of this age that's individuals of less than six months which is what you class newborns as being is that they would commonly at this period buried within settlement areas rather than out in the cemeteries with the rest of the dead so it's almost as if with these young individuals because they've had no life of their own they were kept within the realms of the living i love anything like that you know that gets us really close to people at the time doesn't it and the other way you can do that if you look at this piece of um ceramic building material yeah can you see the finger impressions oh crikey yeah look at that looks like you've actually got fingerprints there's a lot lots more than mine there might be a child or something like that yes that's wonderful it may be wonderful but it's mid-morning day three and everyone else is busy trying to solve the problems in the trenches except for stuart who's dragged me off to play with his new toy stuart my instinct tells me this isn't a rotary clothesline this is a roman surveillance route it's called a gromer and one was found in pompei in 1912 so we know this is the instrument they use for setting out roads and the grid patterns in streets now how they do that is using this grommer which basically is like a cross at right angles to each other what you do is you line these three strings here when you stand back from it you line the three up i've put a pole at the end of it down there yeah so that's that's my baseline that's the line of the road effectively so what i would do is come over here hang on i've seen the design floor already it's really windy today and this is swinging around like a conqueror we actually know that the romans used wind breaks and they also used to make the string heavier by putting almost like ceiling wax or olive oil on it to make it more rigid so if you could now be my glamorous assistant you're debbie mcgee that's it with that pulling that bit of string yeah which is exactly 88.71 meters long because that's 300 roman feet yeah the exact size of the insula there and we'll set out the forum [Music] got a long way to go yet tony at least three times that distance ah i may be some time [Music] but over at our potential bath house at least they seem to be cracking on nicely [Music] i'm there going right right stop that stop that does look pretty square doesn't it it is i've checked it with my modern survey square and it's pretty damn close actually what it does demonstrate is that when you're setting out something as the romans did they could achieve very good regular grids with this but you've already shown me that there were flaws in this roman perfection in cairo yes i remember you talking about the wonky gates as you call them it's not because they're badly set out there's some other clues there's an earlier route way through into the town through here before this wall is put in here and the continuing the use of the same route way also this group of of buildings just here but that's so badly offline and what that's actually showing me is there was a route way that came through here before this grid system was actually made the roman surveyor would have never tolerated that in a plant system with that grid you certainly wouldn't if you want to learn more about how the romans laid out their towns log on to the time team website [Music] while stewart's ancient methods give us a great insight into the town's general plan ultra-modern technologies revealing the details of our filler so these are the radar results of the villa complex the time slices as we call them where we actually start at the near surface and work our way into the ground getting deeper as we move what jimmy's done is take this to the next stage and we start to get the ground plan but we gradually move into the ground and you can actually see the courses and going down into the foundations and and all the rooms coming into view really it looks like manhattan doesn't it i mean you almost don't need to dig it wow well i wouldn't mention that to phil right now since he's just been dragged into the bathhouse trench phil you're digging a big hole we only got two hours left i know but what i'm trying to do is restrict the size of it to enable us to get down we've got this edge this feature this wall coming round here what we want to do is drop a little hole in the corner here just to trace that wall around if we can see how it relates to this wall here see if we can get some depth to it i can see in the tray field we've got some hyper coarse box tile suggesting hyper course that's right at last we might have my hyper cost but we're really gonna have to crack on now and over in the town center we're still struggling with those shops has this trench sold what we wanted then tracy not really this has been a trench that hasn't quite worked out how we wanted so what what do we actually got now well we've still got the pavement running along here yeah but as you can see i mean all of this has been heavily disturbed and we've no evidence for the front of the shop in here really so there's a lot of archaeology here yes but it would take a lot bigger excavation longer time bigger area to actually sort out what it all meant then yeah i mean i think you'd be looking at a much longer and more detailed still of excavation rather than evaluation definitely disappointingly it seems that the shops have finally got the better of us but although the walls haven't revealed as much as we hoped the fines might have saved the day well we've come down to the shops in pound lane which were found in earlier excavations and i brought some of our finds that illustrate what i think it offers one of the major uh purposes of a town it's the market and the very name of care went ventricular is the marketplace of the of the tribe we've got things like the pottery of course that contained olive oil and things like an oyster shell which could have been street food yeah so you don't have to go home for lunch and then other things that represent um butchery we know um from the writings of somebody called plotus that butchers were famous for palming off elderly mutton as freshly killed lamb in fact we have got a series of sheep jaws here but this is just fantastic this is a cattle scapular so you can see that a hole would have been driven through there to let it be hung up on a hook also displayed in the shot right exactly exactly and another thing that a lot of the ancient writers say about life in towns is that it's incredibly noisy we get seneca saying things like the hubbub makes you sorry that you're not right here we have an object which the sole purpose is to make a noise it's a buzz bone a kind of toy where you you put a cord through and you twist it up and you pull it and it goes yes i've seen modern versions it's lovely to find that some annoying little child thought there wasn't enough noise yes so using a combination of fines foundations and the previous excavations i do think we've got a sense of the hustle and bustle and can build up a pretty vivid picture of the roman high street it's now 5 p.m day 3 and we're coming to the end of our roman investigation but has phil managed to find our bath house phil the time's moving on do you think you've cracked this trench absolutely tony what do you reckon you've got well it's been a hell of a struggle but it really has been worth it we do seem to have the plunge pool the bath house yeah yeah we've got this wonderful curving wall that goes around there and extends out into the field there and then on the back side we've got this straight wall so we've got this this lovely semi-circular plunge pool and the idea is obviously when you have your bath you can actually lounge your boat in there and you've got this glorious view out to the west the sun is coming in from the west a bit nippy but beautiful [Music] a fantastic end to a really tough three days and i think we've achieved our challenge filling in some key gaps in the archaeological jigsaw puzzle of roman kyle wendt more excitingly for me though i think our finds have brought us so much closer to the sights smells and sounds that we brits would have experienced in rome and britain but we've won final roman experience in store and i wouldn't miss it for the world ladies and gentlemen for your delectation and delight please give it up for matt williams and fighting phil hardy [Applause] matt will you please mount the podium i shall see kiss diligentius repute it in nulla parte operazia vita est try that again omnia animalia [Applause] ah at brutus at julius at victor ambrose [Applause] so ladies and gentlemen were you convinced by matt why are you convinced by phil [Applause] phil you have just persuaded them that water is the greatest drink and alcohol is just for pack animals i didn't mean it i didn't read it they paid me the pain they'd take me baby to say this [Music] you

Channel: Odyssey - Ancient History Documentaries

Views: 203,474

Keywords: ancient history, classical history, ancient civilisations, classical antiquity, history documentary, classical documentary, time team, ancient rome, ancient britain, roman britiain, tony robinson, archaeological dig, archaeology documentary, roman history, roman architecture, mick aston, british tv, phil harding

Id: XNIJh9a_jG4

Length: 47min 32sec (2852 seconds)

Published: Fri Nov 12 2021