The Priceless Roman Mosaics Buried Beneath This Field in Somerset | Time Team | Odyssey

this channel is part of the history hit Network [Music] about six months ago a Somerset businessman here in the village of lopen decided to build himself a new driveway but when he dug down here he discovered this it's Roman it's late fourth century and experts reckon it's one of the 10 best Roman mosaics ever found in Britain it's a fantastic find a great story and it could be about to get even better because a mile down the road the owners of this field reckon they've found something pretty special too when they heard about the find in lopen they decided to dig a bit deeper and not to be outdone by their neighbors they uncovered this which I'm told is even finer Mosaic work than the one in lopen but how much of it has survived and what about the buildings that these mosaics were part of how lavish were they who built them and where did the money come from time team have been invited in to solve the mystery of somerset's secret Roman Villas and we've got just three days to do it [Music] our hunt for dinnington's Roman villa starts here in the field where that tantalizing fragment of Roman Mosaic was discovered the woman who found it was Farmer's Daughter Trudy ridger my husband humored me I said I'm gonna go and dig a hole and I came down Miss bayed and I dug here and as I started to get down into the um into the topsoil I was only down about four inches or so and I was finding more and more bits of tessery and I was thinking there's definitely something here and I'll just get more and more excited and then I thought I'd better not do anything else got the local archaeologist in because I didn't want to do any damage we scratched around in the bottom of the hole there were the pieces of tessery in situ which was just so exciting history hit is an award-winning streaming platform built by history fans for history fans history hit is your One-Stop shop for Quality ancient history documentaries with exclusive videos about our ancestors from ancient Britain to the hidden secrets of Karnak there's something for everyone we also aim to bring you the stories and legends that shaped our world through our award-winning podcast Network sign up now for a free trial and odyssey fans get 50 off their first three months just be sure to use the code Odyssey at checkout so fortified by a drop of Christmas spirit Trudy wrote a letter asking us to find out how much of the Villa survives in her field Neil we've got a piece of Mosaic the size of a quarter of a pound of cheese and a few surface fines it's not much to go on oh it is look at this this is an aerial photograph taken in the 1970s you can see these dark splodges these are surely the actual remains of the wings of a large building wow I think you can see it better if I lay this on top you see that so it looks like we've almost got free ranges around a central Courtyard does that say Villa to you oh definitely it looks like something we call a wing Corridor Villa but the real thing is it's about 150 meters across now even the fastest man in the world is going to take about 15 seconds to run through that so that's a that's a stately home-sized building it's a really substantial building it's more than substantial it's absolutely massive and we've only got three days to dig so what's Neil's plan start with we're going to dig a series of very small holes test pits in our jargon maybe only about literally not much more than the big size this Bonnet and the reason for this is it's very very important that we go down very carefully through the plail soil onto the very latest deposits there might be things above that Mosaic that we haven't seen so far with such a huge cover Neil reckons his Tippets will give us a shot of the archeology before we decide where to put our larger trenches it's not the way we normally do things and our diggers are itching to get to work David was saying he wants a big trench big Trend well something about three times bigger than this but Neil's the boss so we're gonna do things his way we'll be putting one of the test pits in the area where Trudy found her Mosaic the others will be dictated by the geophys of the West range which is looking pretty spectacular what I think we've got is a big range coming down here possibly 20 meters wide there appears to be a corridor on this side and a whole series of rooms coming off now if we look at the results the red is showing the wall foundations we appear to have these rooms here and this big corridor coming down this being the full range that will make sense wouldn't it I mean it's a classic biller Arrangement and what it does do it tells us how to put the test boots because I think basically one there one there one there one there one there and perhaps one is the corridor I want one on the floor of each room The West Wing of the Villa including the area where Trudy's Mosaic turned up last year if those mosaics are anything to go by this area should contain some of the Villa's grandest rooms although we don't know how well they'll have survived the centuries of plowing that must have taken place here but we're about to find out because within minutes of starting to dig the test pits fills uncovered a mosaic there it is [Music] geophysics isn't it amazing how that can just survive you know that near the surface with Phil digging through it as well yeah I mean really that is still incredibly compacted when you consider it just how close that is to the bottom of the of the plow soil and you lost a good Mosaic fill to be quite honest I don't know that we ever have not a nice one like this anyway let's hope Phil's Mosaic is as nice as the fragment that turned up here last year David what is it about this piece of Mosaic which makes you say it's an exceptionally fine piece of work well because the test we are so fine notice these are about five millimeters across do you think this is a figure it's almost certainly a human head this is the temple these black lines represent here and this row curved row represents the eye foreign this fine-figured Mosaic dates from around the 4th Century so whoever was living at the Villa then wasn't short of a bob or two oh Neil I've got the pattern bit oh yeah look at that there's the red yeah which is tile plate and then and then the white in that summer house it's good isn't it oh we we got to see more of this haven't we now that we know how deep the Mosaic is Phil's expanding his test pit to form trench one as well as mosaics Trudy's come across a lot of other Roman finds in the field most of this is third and fourth Century but some of the coins suggest activity on the site in the very early years of Roman Britain that's nearer incredibly decadent improv but it's a brilliant portrait this coin was struck between 64 and 68. it's hardly seen anywhere at all this coin's been lost probably within a few four or five years at the most of it being struck so that takes us right back to the first century right and there's also um this Bitcoin here this local tribal coin yeah that's right the dirotriguez tribe so that doesn't really fit does it with a lot of the other coins which are mostly third and fourth century I suppose then just to complete the picture we've got they key perhaps the front door key to the Roman house again yeah yeah it's got real mixture haven't we yeah total yeah but no early Pottery no no in the Villas West Wing the archaeologists are still beavering away in Neil's test pits but at least we've got one proper trench opened Phil is this lovely or what it's quite amazing Tony isn't it really I mean it's very very badly damaged but already we can actually begin to see the pattern you see it's alternate checkerboard of gray and red squares and what we're actually in is in a corridor and it's running this way it's going right back past where Kerry's digging is that's right it's extending all the way up there and where Alan is here is one wall of the corridor that's in there so beyond that is the yard and then in here we're going to be into the rooms of the wing of the of the Villa that's that's it no it's not but it's legitimate because what we actually did we demonstrated that there was nothing above the Mosaic before we actually got the machine in but here look demolition Rubble starting to sit down and a floor and now look at this ah a mosaic oh fantastic yes on day one on day one ah should we have a flower pattern and that looks much finer in the Mosaic in the other trench doesn't it well it's much finer 2D look at this oh my God if I brush this give you some idea of the the pattern that's emerging here you see some of these spirals which I was explaining you notice this little crest and it's here the pattern it continues we hope we've got to see more of this new Mosaic too so we're opening our second trench here in the Villas West Wing the mosaics we're uncovering tell us there was a really Grand building here in the 4th century this was a period of real prosperity in Roman Britain with fabulously wealthy landowners plowing their money into grand houses like ours at dinnington and there are lots of other Villa sites in this part of Somerset which was the breadbasket of Roman Britain but ours is starting to look like one of the biggest of the lot I think we've got to get a handle on how our place compares to other Villas and whether we can get any clues about where to go here that's our aerial photograph but I've printed out some plans of other Villas from Britain on the same scale this is big nor in Sussex one of the biggest and best known Romano British Villas but look at theirs because yeah when you think of bigner as such a big Villa but in fact ours is bigger again isn't it now big North is particularly interesting because there is the original house at Big North that grew out into these wings and I wonder if the place we've got here is the same sort of thing growing out from the middle because that happens doesn't it from a very humble start you've been attack on your expensive new extension over here you know these things do grow organically over what 200 years or so so our Villa might all have been built in the 4th Century by a rich newcomer to the area or it might have grown out of a more humble earlier building a sort of status symbol for a local Boy made good Neil thinks the best chance of finding an earlier building is here in the north range where Jeffers have extended their survey what we want to do is look for the range of buildings on this side that we've now got in the geophysics now we actually want to put the test bit in here this is the south facing range looking out up the up the valley is it possible this could be actually the early core to the building but I'm Keen to go down in this structure a bit and find out when this building starts but wouldn't it be better doing that by digging fewer holes and more considered trenches no because I think what you're getting with the test pitching is you're actually getting wider coverage so we're actually looking in different rooms we're assessing each room when it's Merit we're not saying it's pure coincidence that we're expanding The Trenches when we find a mosaic that's not it's not like that at all what we're actually doing is we're expanding The Trenches when we know what we've got just revealing the actual Mosaic is incredibly satisfying and a real privilege but you keep getting really interesting added presence look this is lovely this piece of plaster and you see it's got these grooves in it they're actually where the plaster whacked onto the wattle of the wall so it shows that the walls themselves were actually made of wattle but the most likes best the more we uncover of this place the better it starts to look lovely pieces of painted wall plaster that's right and normally of course we only get pieces this sort of size surviving but here we've got a real number of very large pieces and there are more pieces down in there are these more pieces here we've actually got this other paint Applause as well not from this trench this is from Kerry's trench but it sort of adds to the picture you know you could perhaps see the red sort of Base Rim running around the bottom of the wall pompe red and then higher up you've got this highly more highly decorated plaster that is beautiful have you got anything else about this one particular piece I wanted to show you it's yeah Roman green glass bead that's beautiful so beautiful isn't it I really like things like that so what's the plan for this trench now um I think what we've well the decision we've come to is that because we've got so much of this um painted plaster here we've decided it's got to be associated with a wall yeah so and because because of the position it was in the ground sort of face up it suggested me that in fact it's falling off a wall it's all sort of slipped down the wall um so bearing that in mind we've decided to extend the trench another meter this way we might be able to find the wall here and it might be the wall which is associated with the Mosaic the Mosaic room over there or it's an entirely different room so David's test pit becomes trench three amazing day not every day you get something like this and I think in most archaeologists career this is a a red letter day and it's obviously absolutely brilliant to find something as great as this but the truth is it doesn't actually tell us where the place came from or how the owner got to the point where he had the time and the money to put this in and I think that's what we need to find out you are such a spoiled spot I'd be quite happy to spend the next two days just clearing away don't you want to find out how somebody got to this stage in their life well yes of course I do how are we going to do that well we can have to go down aren't we I mean what we're looking at at the moment is literally eight inches below the surface you know we are literally tickling the top of this archaeological site there could be a lot of deposits underneath this yeah we're looking at a fourth Century Mosaic a fourth Century house now is this a new creation is this new money or is it developing out of someone's ancestor who lived in a much humbler house in the first century made some money made some money made some money that's actually a crucial question so tomorrow we're going to go down to see what the archeology can tell us about the whole story of this Villa and we'll also be seeing if we can reveal the full extent and this fantastic Mosaic join us after the break we came here yesterday looking for evidence of dinnington's secret Roman villa and boy did we find it down here we've got this Exquisite Roman Mosaic with this highly patterned area right in the middle and a lot more of that is going to be revealed during the course of the day but that isn't all over here we've got a second Mosaic in white and red checks the mosaics are all situated in the grand West range of the Villa but we've also opened trench four to find out more about the buildings in the north range we're all finding it really difficult to tear ourselves away from the mosaics but this end of the site is just as important if not more so because it could hold the key to the whole story of the history of this Villa why is this area so important well this could be where we think the early house is because you know it'd be quite common to have a house that starts off quite humbly and then develops you know they get a bit more money they build a building extension on there a bit more money they build another Wing up there a bit of money building another Wing up there so you know being the south facing range could be the key to the early history of the Villa but it's really dirty dirty and Confused here but over there it's phenomenally clean yeah now that's interesting and I we don't really understand that yet which I think is pretty easy to extend the trench and is John's walls likely to be in here somewhere yeah they should be turning up at the back there if we're right and I think we can just start to see some stone work coming up so this needs a bit more work but hopefully we're gonna get the main wall of the Lake Villa here have we got any dating evidence yeah some nice early datable uh samian wear and so this Tony is a nice little wine cup and the key to this is it dates to about 200 years earlier than the Mosaic Dave has been digging up about 150 A.D so we're going back in time all the time now while trench four is taking us back into the second century over in the west range we're still firmly in the fourth in French one Phil's found evidence of a hypercast the underfloor heating system for the Villas Grand winter dining rooms he's also uncovered more fragments of the exceptional figured Mosaic that would have covered the floor and we're revealing more of the patterned Mosaic in trenched too because it's so near to the surface it's been badly damaged by the plow in some places but elsewhere it's remarkably well preserved and we're about to find out how big it really is why is this part so significant well because we'll find out whether the Mosaic is just a simple Square panel or whether it's going to be a multiple of the pattern that you see here so it could well be through them so that's what we'll find out in a minute so we could nearly have finished the job or it might go on it will be three times bigger yeah there we go oh oh there it is yeah there's the turn there's the turn so it's just a small panel simple panel with the money to pay for mosaics like this you'd think life must have been pretty cushy for the family in our Villa but money didn't always buy security in 4th Century Britain the kind of chap living in this sort of house he would have probably been one of the top end of local Society perhaps sitting on Urban councils parceling up the local economy for all their advantage maybe passing laws that local laws that kind of thing getting Advanced information about currency changes all the sort of thing that helps a rich person stay rich and get richer so your ancestors had it made really didn't they well I don't know about that because the trouble is you're very exposed aren't you that top end of society and there are a whole series of people in Britain and and across other provinces in the northern part of the Empire who try and set themselves up as Emperor there's one not very long before the time that the Mosaic goes in chap called magnentius and the Empire sends an imperial secretary to get his supporters in Britain and we actually know from the written sources that this chap Paul took away property seized property off this kind of person if they'd supported the wrong man so no it wasn't easy street you could have all this could disappear overnight over in the north range Neil wanted to find evidence of the early Villa building and he's got it these walls were probably built in the first century at least 200 years before the mosaics were laid this really is an extensive site isn't it I mean it's enormous it's 150 meters across this range so we're still walking over the north Ranger we're still walking through someone's house you know in its late period this is an enormous country house why are we stuck in another little test bit here this is a little bit of Keyhole surgery which has been dictated by the geophysics now that we've identified the earliest Villa building Neil wants to pinpoint the place where the extension was added as predicted what this is surely is a house isn't it an individual structure which predates the rest and the rest is up the extensions added on so you're putting in this little test pit here to try and work out whether this does join onto that bit in this separate building yeah if we can prove that that wall is later than that wool we've cracked it and if you can't back to the drawing boys in the incident room karenza wants to find out where the raw materials for the Villa were sourced and how they were transported back to the site Stuart and guy are getting to grips with the landscape story see how the Villas actually sat within this nice nice Valley down here it's a natural Bowl isn't it it is Ray Sands gathering information for his computer reconstruction we're coming up to the building now right and then here's the wall along this line and the 4th Century patent Mosaic entrench 2 is starting to show its true colors credible is so so beautiful just can't believe the colors that are coming up or all the different Grays and different shades of red and all the hours it must just take it it's so vivid yeah absolutely very lovely colors you're quite emotional see how beautiful the lavish interior of our Villa shows how affluent this part of Somerset must have been in the 4th century and running through its heart was one of the motorways of Rome and Britain I mean the first way is very visually striking isn't it it cuts across the countryside it does yeah one thing that is becoming very obvious looking at the maps this is how this straight road actually crashes straight through all these field alignments and it looks very much as if these field patterns are essentially here when the Romans arrived so what Iron Age yeah yeah and that the the Romans are actually basically starting to impose themselves on the landscape that's already been farmed at the time once this road is in the landscape of course that would then attract the Villas close to it because of the easy access out to the principal towns and settlements so we're all on the road system this is an enormous building isn't it yes this is one of the biggest in the country really it compares to some of the really biggest Villas like big nor in Sussex or Northland Oxfordshire It's On a par with those it's up in the sort of top 10 almost the largest Village in the country wow it is a fantastic discovery our five trenches are only scratching the surface of this Monumental site to understand its Origins we need to get much deeper into the archeology but that's not happening as quickly as some of the team would like the more this dig goes on the more we've realized we're creating a rod for our own backs the site's getting bigger and bigger it stretches Way Beyond those cars over towards that hedge over there and we've stretched our resources almost to the Limit Phil have you got enough people in enough time nowhere near enough of either Tony literally not enough I mean look this is one of the trenches we opened up this morning look we haven't even got it cleaned up yet we've got two experienced diggers in here look at the problems I'm actually just trying to clean it up with all this rubber here you just generate so much loose we've got fines trays all over the place loads of fines in them but none of this is coming from stratified context it's all from just the plow saw and just the cleaning layer when we started at the beginning of this dig you said when was this Villa started the only way we can answer that is to go down and at the moment we haven't got the time or the labor we're just not going down this is not just Phil having a mode we really are on the horns of the Dilemma on one hand we don't want to stretch ourselves anymore but on the other hand John keeps coming up with Juicy targets with his GF is it's all your problem we're only finding what's here and look at this now same three ranges but look at this coming across here and then in the middle that point there what could it be now well it could be a Gatehouse couldn't it you could have like a perimeter wall to your courtyard with a grand entrance to give you views into your house but we can't just keep putting in trenches can we I mean we're over halfway through the Dig is there any way we can get the most interesting parts of this but focus in to stop film Wheaton steaming at the end but we still we've still got to go down you can go just keep on opening up new areas you can have your way Phil well I'm just I just trying to I'm just trying to put afford a rational argument you you you give me the problems the only way to solve those problems is to go down the good news is the other two stretches in the north range are going very well and I think we're about to shut them down maybe an hour or so freeing up some diggers extra labor into here and let's go down and try and find the origins to this building well that seems reasonable John what about the Gatehouse we'll come back to that one so we've decided to focus our main efforts on the west range of the Villa where we're going to search for earlier phases of building the extra labor will come from the north range when Neil's got exactly what he hoped for in Trench 5. this is the middle range of the villa and he wanted to know whether the whole of the middle range was built in one phase or whether there was a discrete Central bit that was older than the rest have we managed to solve that we've actually got some very nice black and white archeology you've clearly got a corner here with a great hamstone block on it you've got the older part of the building in that direction and butted up against it you've got this very poor later Rubble filled wall so that maybe date for the fourth century and this one well the same is just second century so once Stuart's finished recording can we pull him off from here and get him helping Phil sure close it down anything that does that the walls in trench 5 tell the story of a key Moment In The Villa's history when the original house was extended to reflect its owners increasing wealth and status but even before the extension this Villa was on a pretty massive scale if the remains in trench four are anything to go by have you managed to crack it do we understand what's going on I think we know what's going on now I'm stood in a big a big room and there's a wall on one side down here and over by Kerry is the back wall where's your wall carry it's running across the trench this way so is that the full width of the wall it is about just over a meter wide it's a big wall presumably that means they're exterior walls no no we're in a room in the building I'm sure what this means is we're actually talking about a two-story building you know one meter wide walls so perhaps what we've got is like almost like a very high Central block two meters high perhaps then we've sort of single sold porticos neither side that's extraordinary because for two and a half days I've been assuming that we've got three rooms like Barracks I mean it's the big tall buildings these are country houses so what's this bit here well I think I'm actually stood inside an earlier phaser building I think we've got a wall here at right angles the corner of a building and I'm stood inside it so maybe this could even be a sort of a single story house replaced by a two-story house what about this stuff here could just be a very narrow slot that held a Timber beam and that might even point you into Timber building so it might have gone on Old Timber building first stone building two floor building three phases the family who lived in this early house were almost certainly local Celts but judging by the scale of the place they knew a thing or two about how to get on in Rome and Britain the right decision to make for a Celtic tribal person early in the Roman period when they come down here is to side with the Romans because then the Romans will give you a position in the local Town Council you get on that gravy train you've got a slice of the action because the way they worked was to hand power back to the people who already here you exploit the existing hierarchy so long as those people are prepared to play the game the Roman way people did really well out of that he did so well out of it he was able to pay for expanding his house to accommodate his growing family and all the support staff and servants that went with it on condition they did it the Roman way it's nearly the end of day two and we're working frantically to uncover as much as we can about the villa we'd like to pursue the possible Gatehouse in John's geophysics unfortunately we simply haven't got the labor but there's still plenty to go for in the west range where we're uncovering more evidence of how classy this place really was [Music] oh Britain that's gorgeous this here is a piece of ceiling plaster how can you tell that we can tell that because we seem to have we've got this octagon shape here and this is not found at all on the walls it's always found on the ceiling and also inside we've got what looks to be a stylized bird with a tail why have we left this whole mess here because the Mosaic does actually go under it doesn't it it does but across most of the Mosaic there was this very compacted Rubble demolition layer that was put down on top of the Mosaic after occupation presumably this tells us about what was going on before the Mosaic was laid this is particularly interesting because this is almost certainly an earlier floor and it's been painted with what we call Blue frit which is a powdered glass and it's going underneath the bedding for the Mosaic itself so we've got two floors period one period two and can you tell anything about this floor well because it's blue for it I suspect that it could be the floor of a bath house changing a bath house to a dining room is quite a radical rethink even the Villa's West Wing didn't escape this family's appetite for Home Improvement this came out in the last half hour or so it's a 4th Century Roman Broach it's probably the nicest find that I've seen on this side if that is virtually the only find that I've seen on this site because we've been so spoiled by the structural archeology that we virtually ignored the bag loads of fines in that tent all the fines that are being cleaned over here we've got three four trays of fines here we've got another three associated with this trench in fact we've got fines over the whole site and tomorrow we're going to look at them in much closer detail to see if they can tell us more about the actual lives of the people who lived in that beautiful room nearly 2 000 years ago join us after the break the beginning of day three in our quest to uncover the huge Roman Villa at dinnington in Somerset so far we've concentrated our efforts in the west and North ranges of the villa [Music] but today in the East Range we've opened a new Trench where Bridget thinks she may have found a Roman kitchen hi Bridget what you got hey what we've got here we've got this creamy mortar layer here which is coming out of the bulk and it comes down here and you've got these really you know very distinct edges and we're coming down here and it keeps going down and I think these are the base this is the mortar that it was the foundation for a wall around a flue so what's the flu filled up with well the flu is filled up with all this Burning there's loads of charcoal loads of slate bits of Fallen really burnt Stone any other finds Bridget yeah we do we've got this pot here which is quite domestic looking that's nice well this is a South Somerset storage job with a kind of pie crust room but look it hardly curves at all because the actual top of the jar is about that wide so this is a big storage jar so just kitchens are just storage okay we've also got this samian oh right this is fourth Century ad this is tableware this is what you'd be picking your grapes out or drinking your wine so this is this is this this and this don't really go together because this is dining room that's kitchen so I guess our trench would go one alive Away really over in the west range Phil's still not getting things his own way he wants to dig deeper into the archeology but he's been asked to expand trench 3 instead because Geoff fears reckon they found evidence of a bath house no sign of that so far just more pottery now all right yeah this is the black punishment cooking pot you see you feel that the Rim's quite crooked over in the early Roman period the rims are virtually upright as it goes through time the rim goes further and further over so this is quite a crooked one so that means it's a it's a late one right good day indicator then yeah fourth Century that does the oxygen part great coins pottery-like fills is an excellent way of dating the archeology and you'd think that the vast quantity of other material we've been turning up or to tell us a lot more about life in the villa but it's not quite as simple as that well the trouble is that although we've got Stacks and stacks of fines the vast majority of them actually fit to the building rather than the things used inside the building but we have got some interesting bits recognize that same in gorgeous same and that's right imported wine cup great thing about that is you see the profile and the line around the edge that means it's a tight from the early second century imported used in our early house on the site so this is right back from the early days of our occupation here wine drinking but these are bits of beakers from later on the third and fourth Century this is really beautiful I love the look of that but this is for beer drinking a more Celtic British type of habit but something I want to show you base of another Beaker you see the finger marks there and there that's where the Potter has held it to dip it into the slip it's a real reminder this is a handmade world it's not a machine mail World they put up with the kind of imperfections that we wouldn't accept because remember that the Romans thought a poetry in a different way to us um it wasn't as special to them they'd used pottery and then Chuck it away when it's finished with so that's why there's so much in Roman size absolutely but not in this one what we've got here is we've got bits of rubbish being left but we haven't got any of the good stuff yeah the pretty clear picture we're getting this this is a place that was systematically demolished and cleared so why did they do that I mean it could be political upheaval the land could have changed hands but if you've moved out you've been told to move up because you've been told to leave the country or something you'd take everything that's valuable to you out of the house that's what's happened here we'll never know what forced the family to abandon their Villa maybe it was political upheaval maybe a more personal crisis but whatever the cause it must have been hard to say goodbye to a home as magnificent as this Phil's finally started to get deeper in trench three and he's got his reward with a first glimpse of some masonry what a great decision to go down that looks superb well I mean this is a serious War absolutely serious War I mean looking at it look there's a look there's a step in it look you've got a step there and then a little plinth and then that one in the next one there in the sequence and you've got another little plinth there so what what do you think is it is in between the two I mean are we looking at what have you got a doorway or do we have what do we have no I think that's all been robbed out let's be rubbed out what I can't understand still can't understand is why we've had to come down quite so far to get it it's a hell of a way down either we're into very very deep foundations that have been robbed out or we're into a Terrace big enough to be sort of foundation these are these are serious these are serious stones and if they were quarrying out bits of stone this big yeah and moving them in from a quarry no matter how far away that's a big undertaking the masonry in Phil's trench almost certainly came from a quarry here at ham Hill just a few miles away from our site but some of the other building materials used in The Villa could only have come from much further afield Neil I've been looking at the materials coming out of the site in terms of sort of really how the site was built how it's provisioned How material came into it so it's our site here as the red square and you can see some of materials actually could have been got hold of very locally the Limestone and the mortar to actually bed the mosaics in but other other stuff has come from really quite a long way away we've got the lead um the nearest sausage Charter House up there roof stand up at pensford near bath the Slate from exmoor so it's a huge area really is being exploited to build the Villa a lot of money going into that and although we don't know that these are Roman quarries as such the evidence has all gone they are the nearest sources and if we take off the supply lines and then put the Roman roads on all right look at that it really looks quite convincing doesn't it because all these sources with the exception of that one but all of the rest of them are all sort of straight up or down the Roman roads I mean it's also quite interesting isn't it this is a big agricultural area you know this Villas got its status on wealth from Agriculture and look you know going down the fossway you could be taking your produce out to a Porter's Seaton on the south coast and from there along the South Coast towards London or maybe even across the channel to ghoul but equally this is an important route because it's a very important room in Port here I'm a bit of a parrot and that will then give you access to the Western seaways around Wales maybe even up as far as Hadrian's Wall so in fact Philip dinnington has massive sort of local and international contacts really when nearing the end of day three and the race is on to mine as much information as possible from this huge site even Trudy the landowner's daughter has been roped into help meanwhile there's trouble cooking at the other end of the site in trench six Bridget thought she'd found the Villa's kitchen but now a rival theorism emerged David and I are just discussing what's going on and we've come to a disagreement my warning Bells Are Ringing here Neil because I'm wondering if in fact what we're looking at is a grub Hut a Grub Hut well we we have to investigate to be sure so we're saying we've got an Anglo-Saxon house with a sunken basement and this is what you're saying might be which is later in the Villa dug into the ruins of the villa if David's right and these are the remains of a later Anglo-Saxon house sitting on top of the Villa you'd expect the walls to continue in this direction and form a rectangle Bridget's not entirely convinced I just don't think with any justification that we can even consider this a Grub Hut at the moment I mean I don't even think that this is the shape I mean of a Grub Hut I creep me if I'm wrong but my understanding of a Grub Hut is that it is a rectangular standard rectangular well this is rectangular I don't see that I do not see this as a rectangular feature I'm I'm not convinced by the grub hat though we don't have to say no but we need to know that it isn't one before we go down into it vigorously let's just see if we can trace this Edge again if it is a rectangular structure well okay I might buy a Grub Hut they're very rare in the west country that'll make it even more important you've done a great job in here for two days Bridget let's not ruin it now let's keep it nice and focused two hours good luck so lots still to do in trench six but in the west range we're starting to close down trenches in trench 2 we found this wonderful patterned Mosaic the floor of the Villas summer dining room in trench one we found the fragments of an even finer figured Mosaic that would have graced the heated floor of the winter dining room we've also revealed two walls which enclosed a tiled floor it's been badly damaged by plowing but there's enough left for us to reconstruct what it might have looked like in the 4th century an impressive Corridor which ran the entire length of the West Wing linking the most important rooms in this grand villa including the one Phil's been racing to uncover in trench three Phil yesterday afternoon you started saying to me I want to get down I want to get down well you've gone down was it worth it totally justified Tony absolutely I mean this is probably one of the most crucial pieces of evidence that we've actually got because it tells us so much about the structure of the Villa from this wall the sheer size of it this is sufficient to say that without a doubt it was a two-story Villa what are these bits of stone here these are all part of the war well I think actually where I'm standing is where these similar blocks have actually just been robbed out and the two bits on either side are just bits that have been left in yeah so the actually what we've got is the foundation quite incredible and we've got the turn of it as well that's right that's right so pretty much this is the end of the villa and then it's going to start turning off and going that way so you chose the right strategy totally Vindicated because like what can we actually say about what the building here was like now we've just about finished work well we know from what we've geofaced and what we've excavated here that this was a really enormously substantial house for around a thousand Villas or more known in Roman Britain but this is one of the top 20 so it's a really important Country House yeah brilliant and we know from what we've found that it was very plushly decorated one of the most exciting and exceptional things we've got here is this lovely piece of wall plaster and it's not just a simple one color panel this is a much more complicated sequence of decoration you can see this decorative border here so what would have been in here would have been a picture maybe in a mythological scene or maybe a rural scene the kind of thing that Romans loved yeah all right and what sort of date range have we got in the material now well the pottery Pottery is fourth Century we've got some very well dated poetry from the fourth century and also a lot of four century coins as well we've got some jewelry that the women might have been wearing to show off their wealth as well I have yeah we've got this lovely pen annual approach which has come out with full Century Pottery so we're pretty sure by relative dating that it is of the same date brilliant well I think that's absolutely fantastic thank you so much it's nearly the end of day three and our picture of this Monumental site is almost complete but not quite the diggers in trench three don't look ready to hang up their trowels just yet oh my God no it is oh it's not a fragment it's oh and looks like I'll have to keep an eye on those two and in trench six there's still one unanswered question has Bridget found the evidence she needs to prove this was a Roman kitchen but we found it we've got an oven it's an oven it's an oven definitely good I'm really sorry no it's good it's really good news it's really nice what we've got here we've got this flu coming in down here and on the base of it we've got this clay and it's been heat affected and that's why it's the white color it is and then we're inside the oven so we were on the upper deposits of the oven and the charcoal you know previously the inside of the oven then continues out along here and then it comes back in and you can see it there's dark on this side yellow here it comes down to here where we've got the corner here the oven's going to have a head of Dome on it gone out of use collapsed in so you've got all this building debris well it's it's good to fit that it's been resolved yeah and what it says to me is you know we've proved here we've got an oven suggests cooking eating food preparation absolutely so it's a domestic area and I guess it dates to very late Roman period from the fines but yep you know that's great we you know in two hours we've actually resolved that problem you're happy David I'm very happy now we've we've resolved exactly what it is nearly 2 000 years ago a Celtic family chose this fertile plot of land to build their Farm it started as a humble one-story building but as the family's fortunes grew so the building expanded until by the fourth Century it covered an area of more than 100 square meters and at the heart of this display of wealth and power with a wonderful mosaics with which they adorned their grandest rooms [Music] you know that thing about waiting for a bus for ages and then three come along at once well just as we were about to go home this came up is it what I think it is yeah fantastic mosaic David is this Mosaic as good as the one we've already found oh far better quality we're looking at really high quality workmanship here I imagine roughly 300 ad300 I mean it really is a high status pavement I don't think Trudy's field has seen its last archaeologist this fantastic last minute Discovery is at least three foot deeper than any of the other mosaics we've found here it looks like underneath the really lavish building we've spent the last three days uncovering there's an even grander and better preserved Villa just waiting to be discovered all of which means that when this Villa was at its peak it wasn't just any old Villa this would have been one of the finest country houses in Rome and Britain foreign

Channel: Odyssey - Ancient History Documentaries

Views: 123,259

Keywords: ancient history, classical history, ancient civilisations, classical antiquity, history documentary, classical documentary, roman britain, time team, ancient rome, roman empire, tony robinson, time team full episodes, time team official, time team season 13, roman villa

Id: v76SowXuDgg

Length: 48min 45sec (2925 seconds)

Published: Fri Jun 16 2023