The Roman Treasure House Under The Cotswolds | Time Team | Timeline

one of the great privileges of working at history here and making films together with our team at timeline is the access we get to extraordinary historical locations like this one stonehenge i'm right in the middle of the stone circle now it is an absolutely extraordinary place to visit if you want to watch the documentary like the one we're producing here go to history hit tv it's like netflix for history and if you use the code timeline when you check out you'll get a special introductory offer see you there just under the surface of this field here in the cotswolds lies a complex of roman buildings how do i know well you've just got to look around you i'm virtually tripping over lumps of masonry that are sticking out of the ground the whole place is strewn with bits of tile there's hundreds of coins and fragments of pottery and tesserae found around here but the biggest clue to the presence of a roman site of some scale and importance is this it's a mosaic even i know that and a very nice one too so what am i walking across is this a villa or a bath house or a temple and in an area that's crammed full of villa estates why are our archaeologists so excited about this one we'll know in three days [Music] we're back in the glorious cotswolds this time just outside the village of cobali in gloucestershire our site is in this 20 acre field flanked to the west by a small river running north south and to the east by the main road that links siren sesta with cheltenham we've dug roman sites in the cotswolds several times before but we don't usually get stuck in quite this quickly neil what's going on beginning of day one hundreds of people working we've already exposed the mosaic that's not what we do on time team yeah it's not typical is it but to be honest we knew the mosaic was there the local archaeologist did a small dig in 2003 and found part of it so we're re-exposing the moses egg there and then extending out the trying to find the walls the room the mosaic sits in and anthony you're going to help us make sense of the mosaic hopefully so what do you think of it at first glance well the motifs are pretty standard but it's it's interesting because i think it might be quite an early mosaic mosaic specialists are always so laid back it's the most saying yes i know it's amazing it doesn't want to be too excited at the moment because there might not be very much of it apart from what we can see they'll be loaded john you've done the geophys already unfortunately we haven't um geoquest have done this and they've got some fantastic results as you can see look there's the cops behind us this looks like the villa complex here and all these trackways and ditches beyond extending right across the field rather embarrassing question if we've already got the geophys why are you here well look no all geoquest did was a magnetic survey in the time available so what we want to do is actually a resistance because hopefully that will give us a clearer plan of the villa building itself but this is a done deal isn't it neil we've got a villa we've got a mosaic lovely lovely we'll find a few walls go oh isn't it amazing the romans had underfloor heating and go home well i like the way that you and john are both using the word villa you're assuming it's the villa aren't you because of the mosaic in the middle of the cotswold it's a villa do we actually know that i don't know that and there's some very unusual things on that geophysics i mean what are all these strange trackways and roads all about that doesn't look like a typical filler to me and then we've got the springs on either side that's unusual so don't just assume it's another villa it's all to play for quite rightly neil's not taking anything for granted so while john and his team start their resistance survey to try and locate the walls of our possible villa in the mosaic trench they're getting to grips with the dimensions and shape of the room this here presumably is the edge of the border and this is where the wall starts yes and do you see phil that they've reused flue tiles because you can see the grooves on these tesserae grooves to latch the plaster to on the walls looking at that if that is the edge of the border there yes that's about 60 centimeters what's it like at this edge right yeah give or take that's 60 centimeters so it looks like we've got a consistent border of this red tile coming all the way around the outside well the the interesting thing will be if this is 60 centimeters going this way because it'll give us the orientation of the room if this is more than 60 centimeters then the mosaic goes that way and the mosaic is likely to be larger than we suspect and also feel the material you're standing on if we can excavate that and get some coins or pottery that'll give us a date when the building was knocked down well exactly i mean if we think that this is an early floor it'd be very very useful to know how long the room was in use and in fact when it went out of use well it must have been in very good condition when the building went out of use it's hardly decayed apart from where the plow damage has got to it it's so quite pretty floor you sound like a salesman over recent years amateur archaeologists have recovered hundreds of finds from this field they provide intriguing clues to the history of our site well we've actually got quite a nice range of material here from tesserie from a mosaic box flue tiles indicating heated rooms stone roof tiles and then we've got a range of metal fines the guys who have been working the side have recorded over 60 coins and they give us quite an interesting date range the earliest we've got actually dates from the very time of the conquest it's a copy of the coin of the emperor claudius and we actually end with the very last coins that come into roman britain dated to about 402. lovely that's really nice we've got two brooch fragments which are late first early second century and a lovely little miniature fourth century bracelet it may be for a child or it could even be a little votive object so what do all these fines tell us about our site mark well certainly it looks from the finds that we've got so far that people have been living on this site since the beginning of the roman period through to the end and probably just beyond the end back at the mosaic they don't have any dateable fines yet but phil's been making serious headway helped by the fact it was partly uncovered in 2003. this mosaic is good isn't it it's getting bigger by the minute it's getting better tony we've got the room next door and it's got a mosaic as well oh i see yeah so is this earth in between is that the wall that's the wall between that room and that room it's not looking bad is it but it does raise a problem doesn't it how much of this mosaic are we going to expose in our three days i mean take a look at this bit here you've got this beautiful petal thing with inside this roundel it looks so lovely and there's this irritating piece of earth just in one section of it i'd love to whip that off not for good archaeological reasons because it would just be so lovely to see it well that one irritating little block of soil is gonna go tony because that is actual uh backfill from the other excavation so we can reveal that but where we're getting back to is just about the edge of where they got to when they when they stop their dig [Music] cool it's all happening on day one you turn your back for one minute and another trench has gone in what's got into people guys you put another trench in well you know i said the res was going to provide a clear plan of the building as they always do yeah it hasn't it's just not working why well lots of excuses i think the main reason is the archaeology is so shallow but i thought if something was close to the surface it would make it easier for you to find no we need a greater depth of soil so the electric currents can go in and actually sort out the rubble and the wall lines at the moment we're not succeeding so for the moment we're putting this trench in over this really clear response in the magnetics i'd like to guess it was sort of something like a plunge pool a sunken feature so basically you're saying it's the only thing you've been able to find so let's dig it well not only that tony you know how important it is for us to excavate down to try and find out when this building was constructed now if we can dig up against an outside wall of the building we can dig down find out any pottery from the lower layers how do we know where the outside wall of the villa is look that is the line of the main villa building so that actually comes through at this point here yeah we've only just started this trench tony but you can see where phil is over there we've got a mosaic in a room now i reckon there's probably a corridor coming out about where you're standing so if we can find out whether this is the front corridor or the back corridor that's going to be important for actually working at a plan in the villa and digging down will give us this crucial dating evidence look at this blob in a very vague bit of geophysics if that is a plunge pool i'll eat my shoe so a second trench is going in to locate john's sunken feature and find what neil hopes will be an exterior wall in the incident room we're looking at mosaics from other sites nearby they were obviously designed to be decorative but there are individual symbols on all of these floors that actually mean something this one comes from great whitcomb it's a third century mosaic and that's just a few miles away oh yes under five miles away from here this device is called a cantharis what's that well the cantharis was a wine mixing jar and at your evening feasts you would mix your wine with water and dole it out to your guests but the cantharus is also symbolic of bacchus the god of wine and entertainment and also god of rebirth oh so it would have also had a much deeper meaning yes this device is called the gordian knot the unfathomable knot representing the twists and turns of fate another good luck device is the medusa head that's amazing because i find medusa a very threatening image yes but to the ancient world the snakes were friends and the point of medusa was that medusa turned evil to stone and protected the household any of these things we may well be lucky enough to find if you want to find out more about mosaics you can log on to our website at the usual address it's mid-afternoon a quick tea break gives me a chance to have a natter with neil and try to get a sense of the bigger picture earlier on you said to me oh this is a mysterious sight there's lots of unanswered questions like what well a sight of his complexity tony you'd ask hundreds of questions but i guess you can actually sort of boil it down to two real points i mean function and chronology and so function is interesting because you know you can use sort of labels like villa or temple or shrine but really they just cover up the fact what are people actually doing here i mean if it was a villa were they farmers or were these sort of aristocracies you wouldn't have been seen dead out in a field and then in terms of chronology what we need to find out is you know when was the building constructed how long did it stay in use when was it demolished you know there's really important questions that's very comprehensive and really cogent but i have to admit there's a tiny little bit of me that's thinking so what what can that tell us about the roman occupation of southern britain well i think it actually tells you a lot tell us about wealth creation i mean the idea is the cotswolds are wealthy in the late roman period now is this because people are starting off in humble poor farms in the first and second centuries a.d gradually making some money then in the third and fourth century they d they okay let's spend their cash that they're harder and cash that our ancestors have built up with mosaics and fancy houses or is it the case that people actually coming in at an early stage bringing money in from outside into the cotswolds to build things and that tells you a lot about how roman britain actually functioned and where the money came from over in trench one anthony can now see enough of the mosaic to identify parts of it and more importantly work out a date look helen we've got a cantarus oh yes if you notice here we've got two handles this one with a snake's head and a broken one here what a picture we've lost most of you yes at least there's enough there to show us what they would have been yes and here we've got a gordian knot oh gosh that's simpler than the ones we were looking at in the incident yes so what date do you think it is looking at the overall design with this grid of red the poised squares of grey the mosaic is based on pink opus igninum oh now what's that it's it's mortar with crushed tile bound in to give it added strength i see and the fact that it has red borders which coming all the way around yeah in the cotswolds is generally a sign of an early mosaic i would think that um it was probably late second century to third century which would make it one of the earliest in the cotswolds but could the construction of our villa pre-date the mosaic we still don't yet know the chronology of our building you see where those cars are up there and the fines tent that's the way i come into work in the morning and when i do all i can see here is a field just like any other field but down here you can see immediately there's this flat well-described plateau and it slopes away down to this little valley here mark does that mean that this landscape has been deliberately sculptured there's absolutely no doubt about it you're quite right that area there has been level to take the structure and we've got this little valley which heads down to the river but the geophysics show that this entire valley has been framed if you like by this pair of massive ditches that come right up when where we're standing turns at the head of the valley and then run back down the other side why would you do that well exactly what's really interesting is that towards that clump of nettles yeah we know that there's a spring there or has been a spring there in the past and the fact that this valley is framed the spring at the head it does make you start to wonder whether there may be some kind of structure around the spring itself are we talking ritual we might be i mean you could envisage at least two contexts for structures here one would be a little spring head shrine the other if you've got a good force of water is a bath house if mark's right and the lines running around the gully on the geophysical ditches enclosing a shrine spring or bath house then our site could have a religious dimension over in trench two there's no sign of john's plunge pool and that's a relief i was worried i might be eating my shoe for a minute there but bridge has made a discovery that could help piece together the plan of our building looks like you and ian have got is it is it the wall it does look like it looks like the face of it coming along here just where ian's trout is and is it mortared yes a nice little this yellow here just puts a remnant of water in between well that's just the right position to tie up the geophysics to be the actual outside wall of the house so i guess you and ian are now actually in the corridor yeah behind which is the room which phil was in with the mosaic so at the end of day one we think we found the main outside wall of the building and we've got a corridor linking it to the two rooms with mosaics in trench one neil's convinced we found a range of rooms running north south across our site and from the gfiz he thinks there may even be two further ranges running east towards the cops good day eh fantastic day we found not one but two mosaics and just as important we've got this long wall here which marks the western extent of the building but what exactly is it frustratingly none of our archaeologists are prepared to commit themselves let's hope we get some clues tomorrow right here beginning of day two here at cobbley in gloucestershire where we found this fantastic roman mosaic look at that isn't that gorgeous but the question is what kind of building did it originally sit in some of our archaeologists have been speculating that it was a villa others have said a temple others a bath house we've even had this dreadful phrase building complex which neil has been using what what exactly do you reckon it is i don't know yet no but yeah i'll find out later on i think the key is to get to the plan of the building now on the earlier geophysics what we thought we had was a range of rooms going across here and perhaps a wing coming up here and a wind coming up here so that's where phil's mosaic is and that's where bridge's back wall is but this in color here this is john's new resistivity and can you see these big anomalies here this looks like a range of rooms going back the other way which makes much better sense because potentially perhaps you've got rather than having a video like that you've actually got an h-shaped villa facing down the valley towards the river so what i think we might have now is actually rooms going off in those directions so you might imagine a villa it's kind of an h shaped and therefore phil's mosaic will be kind of in the cross of the h niels also identified a location for a further trench if he can get dating evidence here where the end of the roman building appears to lie on top of an earlier ditch running underneath he's hoping to establish when the building was constructed so while john goes off to look for two new ranges towards the river trench three goes in now is it just me or do you get the feeling our experts are having trouble making their minds up i can't believe it that still none of the archaeologists will commit as to what kind of building we've got no i can't believe it either it's a villa well i thought it was a villa yes course it's a villain why won't they say well because archaeologists they just love to disagree don't they i mean you know what what would you call a group of archaeologists um a doubt an argument of archaeologists a confusion of archaeologists this is a bit more like a ian back in trench three it looks like phil's got off to a flying start uh you lovely little thing you you're a big piece aren't you a big whoa what's think of that then nationally nice rim on it phil and if i have some loins decorated lines on it too around here who needs a metal detector when you can see coins like that then oh you like a kid in a toy shop yeah well i know what else we got here must have loads of stuff over in trench one we're scratching our heads over the mosaic it is a shame about all this plow damage how could they have ripped out this whole bit here with one plan well you know i've been having second thoughts about that because um you can for a start this damage here is underneath this demolition this untouched demolition and it doesn't seem to be much power marks through this so this would have protected it and also you can see this damage here it's circular and all the other plough marks are straight going off in that direction so i think this might be something else anthony if it's not plow damage what do you think it might be well i think it can be one of two things it can either be damaged caused by the collapsing roof and walls or it could be iconoclastic damage what do you mean well if you notice there's a cantharis jug there that's the mixing bowl yes and if this is a nine panel scheme the most pertinent person to put in the center would be the god backers god of wine and of course his image would have been an anathema to christians so when you say iconoclastic you mean it literally smashing up icons like cromwell soldiers used to do when they came into the churches and cut off the faces of the martyr absolutely but i don't think we'll really know until matt has excavated this area and we see if the damage continues i think that's a hint from both of us if the damage to the central panel is evidence of christians wrecking a pagan icon then that would add a fascinating twist to the story of our building after a promising start phil's trench now seems to be going nowhere there's no sign of any fines let alone a roman building or ditch phil's not happy down in the gully for some reason we appear to be digging more trenches i mean hopefully that meter will cover it no one tells me anything i'm about 100 meters from our site and what have we got here not one but two new trenches what's going on guys is there a breakaway faction from time team starting a new program last night we were pretty gung-ho weren't we about how things were going i think the best way to describe this morning has been challenging the travel start in feels trench we position this trench to try and catch this ditch coming through which we thought might underlie one of the buildings of the villa but bizarrely there's absolutely nothing in the trench at all why not john we can't explain why we can't find it in phil's trench so what i've suggested is look let's move away from the area where it's complicated where we've got all the roman building material on top and let's take a section of ditch that is far clearer for us to investigate what we're trying to find tony is material that predates the construction of the building so what we've just done we've opened up a trench here across one of these ditches to try and get some dating evidence is it early roman is it legit roman could it even be iron age and we've also got another trench in here trying to examine these anomalies could it be industrial could it be a bath house who knows but the key is if we can get pottery and coins out of these layers which relate to these ditches evidence from here helps us understand the date of the building over there that's the stuff neil not put off by his failure to get results from the main building he's changing tactics down in the gully he's putting in two further trenches one to find evidence of industrial activity a spring or a bath house and more importantly a second to find dating evidence in the double ditches back in trench one the store is moved on again is that a pattern that you see there yes it's the top of a cantharus a second cantharus another wine jar that's right it's in much better nick isn't it than the other oh yes it's a much better cancerous as well so what's this thing here ratcha well you know that we had this big hole in the middle of the mosaic well we've got more now there's another one appearing there and this one is quite curious because somebody's actually cut into the floor this absolutely beautiful mosaic floor and then they've built can you see these these are roman roof towels for foundations of a wall and there's some stones mortared in there and on the other side it's mirrored just there they've cut into the floor again and there's more blocks and more mortar it looks like it could almost be a kiln or a fire or well that's the thing what what is it has this lovely mosaic area gone out of use and they're using another part of the villa are they using this as an industrial area we just don't know yet it would be a tragedy if your theory of iconoclasm proved not to be true because it's such a fantastic word but it looks like it might not be right well it may not be right in indeed if this is a press or something like that put into the these old rooms then it could easily be worn away by industrial process what's so intriguing about this trench for me is that every time we come back here there's a slightly different story and we've still got about one and a half meters left to clear i'm sure it'll change again too give us two hours tony meanwhile john's struggling to find the double ditches that run round the galley there are small bits in it but nothing like the quality we've got over there i'll go on through i think i mean it's such a clear response we've got to find an explanation for it if it turns out to be geology then so be it but i cannot believe that's geology it's too straight there has to be an explanation for such a strong response i'm depending on you at first glance it might appear our building was in the middle of nowhere but closer inspection reveals it was in fact strategically located sure this is a really unusual part of britain in roman times isn't it because we're right between two of the largest cities gloucester and sirencester and all these villas around here must have been connected to these towns indeed they must i mean here's our site here um siren sester is here and gloucester is here you can see it's very close to both of them and and the urban way connects the two and the location of our site just here is really interesting look at this minor road that actually directly connects at irma street here main roman road with port street over here it's a direct link between the two and on the geophysical survey you can see there's a trackway leading from here directly into the villa complex so in this kind of triangle of roads it's in an ideal location i suppose it's common sense because there's no point in having a villa with an economic base farming or whatever unless you can get your produce out and all those luxury goods that you want to bring back here absolutely though as an economic farm farming villa it's in an ideal location now we've just got to prove it was a farming villa back in the galley john looks a bit desperate i mean given that we've got several hundred meters of this can't we just hit it hard john there seems to be a lot of scratching of heads going on here what's the matter people aren't believing me that this is a ditch now if that is not a ditch then i might as well just give up and go home we're not i mean you don't get natural ditches that do this and you can't see a ditch well it's tony this stuff is so hard i mean it just i'm going to give john the benefit of the doubt which goes against my natural incarnation but my goodness if this is backfill this is so compacted backfield that this is almost like hardcore could it be that they just haven't gone down far enough yet ah well we're going to go down a bit further but i don't know you've got to resolve it absolutely right we're going to know one way or the other whether it's here or not but are they digging in the right place i hope they are i feel a bit under pressure john we're a team we are a team yeah there's there's no pressure no no no nobody will point the finger at you no no absolutely you remember that plunge pool i do yeah okay [Music] but just one scoop later we've just shot that what 20 seconds ago oh look just look at this face just say that again could i borrow you a second look hard rock and what have you got there soft plate soft clay with tile yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah this is not natural that is natural need to see a bit more of this what you need there's a bit of roman pot in it john you might just be right well done mate i never doubted you no not at all nobody in the whole shoot did okay ian a little bit more out i think so after some initial doubts we're getting roman fines in the double ditches just what neil needs to start dating the site and we're making further progress over in the mosaic trench oh man well there's a flash mosaic like that when earth are you digging a whopping great hole next to it well what we're trying to do here is establish where the walls of all this of this building are um and this we thought was our best bet for an external wall there's no wall there though no i mean it's been totally robbed out and you can see they've chucked back in all this yellow sandy mortar and these bits of rubbish stone but most interesting thing about this is its width look it's almost a meter wide there and i've gone down what almost half a meter and it's still going so if the wall was that thick it would have been easily strong enough to hold up an upper story yeah absolutely so i think that verifies that we've got one of the external walls here the likelihood now is that our building didn't have just one but two stories and mats also found a layer of rubble running all the way underneath the mosaic that could mean we've got evidence of an even earlier building [Music] at the end of a long day spent with his geophysical knickers in a twist john thinks he's cracked it look you two you've been giving me so much hassle i finally got the goods and if you don't believe me then that's it you had a bad day today mate so come on look this is the resistance you wanted i reckon we've got a whole new range along the brow of the hill there turning the corner and joining on with everything that you've had for the past day and a half neil it looks pretty convincing doesn't it i mean i guess what you've got is you've got your original h-shaped villa and that's your second century villa with your second century mosaics what it looks like really is we actually got sort of capital a shaped so what's happened in the fourth century they've added on this whole new range of the courtyard so if neil's right and the shape of our building has changed from a capital h to a capital a with an additional range to the west it's even bigger and more impressive than we first thought is it a villa well you know why change your habit for a lifetime and get off the fence tony but it probably is a villa but before i'm completely certain what i need to see is a trench in there tomorrow let's prove that that's fourth century and if we can get fourth century dating and maybe a fourth century mosaic then yeah it's a done deal so end of day two we've nearly possibly got a villa and tomorrow we're going to put the trenches in here to see if we can find the really high status rooms and who knows maybe another mosaic day three here at our mysterious romano british building in cobali in gloucestershire we've got a marvelous mosaic second to third century ad we've located one of the exterior walls and we think we found the big ditch that surrounded the whole thing this is so typical of time team one minute we can't find anything at all and the next we've got the most fantastic archaeology you got anything at all in yours phil this is glorious as well tony though to be quite honest when we stripped it off first i didn't think so there was nothing in this trench we were looking for a ditch and we were looking for the end of the villa i actually removed about that much material and look before your very eyes we have a ditch running through there and then this magnificent curve of wall going round there is that an abs that is the apps and this wall here matt that gives a wave see this wall goes straight the way through to mat and if you follow that round it goes down and it it appears in the war the other side of russia so we've got this wonderful apps looking up towards the main entrance the grand entrance as somebody approached it would see this magnificent apps hang on phil the wall is going through the ditch isn't it it doesn't that's the important thing about it it shows how long people were actually on this site when this app was built this ditch had already been dug used and filled up so have we got any dating evidence from the ditch we've got dating evidence from the top of the ditch which looks as though it could be early roman but what we need is material from the base of it it's a fascinating story and we've only got another day left we have indeed this is turning into a building of some grandeur with mosaics and now a posh curved end to the southern wing known as an apps it's likely this was matched by a further apps on the opposite side and neil's now busy putting in two new trenches to locate a further range of fancy rooms in a western wing [Music] that's your level there ian so i think just literally this pull the loose back i think i think that is the laminated bedrock down in the gully where john was looking for evidence of a bath house or industrial activity tracy's definitely found some kind of structure we've got stone walls running along up the hill that way um full of brick and tile and you've got evidence of burning on the internal edges of the stones here yeah so we're thinking maybe kiln i mean you've got the grey is the heat damage but you've also got that that pinky tinge there spreading into the actual stone yeah that's a sign of real intense heat right change of color there any fines ah well yep we've got some really nice wow look at that beautiful piece of molded terracotta what knife is it though um well it's probably part of an acriteria they went on roofs what is fascinating about this is that these things are so rare in this part of the world they're largely confined to southeastern england and in date they tend to be only first to about middle second century id really high status buildings nothing else um would would aspire to um having a criteria so this is this is a real find yeah a criteria are not a greek football team as you might think but decorations for a roman building perched either on top or running along the edge of the roof so what did our villa look like well a few depictions have survived from antiquity that give us some idea this filler was obviously built to impress yep and it's quite likely that we had fine dressed stonework painted in red we had upper galleries like this and corner towers large windows to let in the light we have one from neon stoke in hampshire that shows that the facades this is an actual facade that survives and it was polychrome many colored brick and stripes on a a white facade in fact the whole facade would have been really quite colorful so anyone coming to cobble in ancient times couldn't possibly have missed this villa couldn't i would suspect that it was quite a substantial thing in the landscape so what about the two trenches neil had put in to find a western wing well do you want the good news or the bad news let's get the bad news out of the way first from trench six no fourth century range no full century range at all we haven't even got one piece of roman pottery at this trench so that dramatic geophys wasn't archaeology at all it was just this rock yeah i mean all we've got in the trench is a shallow ditch running through here but no rooms mind you over here we've actually got something i feel such a fraud yesterday evening i turned to camera and i said ah tomorrow we're gonna have a fourth century range here we're gonna dig it tomorrow put in loads of trenches who knows maybe we'll even get another mosaic and what are we walking across dirt yeah well not all that goodness is gold with geophysics but this is gold look at this classic roman demolition pink wall plaster stones look at some of the finds coming out tony got these fragments of painted wool plaster with this nice purple color bits of hyper coarse box tile this will channel the hot air up the walls and these large bits of tile from an underfloor heating system so we've clearly got a room oh yeah without a doubt and what we need to resolve is what date is this because any dating evidence yes no not yet but with early days what i'm kind of hoping is that this might prove to be a 4th century bolton fourth century rooms even with fourth century mosaics so disappointingly no western wing and john can't find any trace of a longer southern wing either but we have now found a high status room in trench seven down in the gully we're finally able to confirm industrial activity on our site yeah it's looking good now isn't it good depth of wall on here a nice edge running around there for maybe the stoke hole yeah it's really clear isn't it the difference the black against the undisturbed yellow here got a very clear line of division clearly now this is the entrance into the flue running up through where ian is and this i think is actually the uh the ash pit you know where they raked all the charcoal out after each firing it's likely this kiln was where the materials used to construct our building were manufactured lime needed for mortar or terracotta tiles for the roof meanwhile bridge is getting to grips with what our villa looked like bridge when i saw you yesterday you're coming down to a mortar floor how's that worked out yeah no it's great because we're now getting down past the demolition layers and we've come on to two phases of flooring you can see you've got the latest one here which is this nice white hard mortar underlying it we've got the bedding makeup for it and then here this bright white is actually an earlier floor right now it must have gone into either disrepair or it collapsed because it's dipping in this way and they've had to build it up again and relay a new one you can see it comes to a dead stop right in front of me there that seems to be the edge of the room and then just beside it it's actually robbed out at the moment but there is a wall to the building there and how wide is that wall bridge well it looks about 60 70 centimeters wide so pretty substantial yeah the interesting thing is we've been talking about a corridor being in this area here coming down onto now what looks like an external surface you can see this these small bits of stone have been deliberately laid as if it's outside the building rather than inside the building so then what i'm thinking is we've already found this wall here could we potentially have the external wall to the building up here then from that we have a roof that comes over this external corridor and it comes to this wall here yeah i mean this seems much less substantial wall doesn't it i mean you might wonder whether this actually was open could this have supported like a colonnade or something well that's exactly what i'm wondering you see i've been interpreting this hole here as a robber yeah but in fact what it could be is where one of those pillars could have sat inside the wall that's holding up that colonnade this is great it now looks like there was a colonnaded portico or cloister within the main villa complex with a view out over the river valley beyond back down in the gully marx made real progress in the double ditches running round the site do we know anything about them yet we've been very lucky tony because as you remember this is one of those ditches that surrounds the villa and then around the valley at the back and we've had a lot of pottery out of it and we can date it go on it's all second century id and date including the classic samia wear imported from france so it looks like this stitch here is being backfilled before the end of the second century so what does that tell us about the story of our villain well it now demonstrates that you've certainly got roman period activity here maybe from the first century a.d there may well be another building because we did have those terracotta architectural features from over there this morning that are also early in days so it does point to an earlier structure we just haven't found it yet [Music] we're nearing the end of our final day neil's determined to prove the northern range was added on in the fourth century so he's putting in one last trench back in trench seven we're starting to get a clearer picture of the decor inside the room this has just come up and this is quite exciting um it looks like a road sign yes well what is actually this is the this is the clue to what it is it's a candelabrum a white scheme with these thin black candelabrum that come out into a sort of a lily shape with foliate designs leaves coming off right dividing the panels it's quite delicately done isn't it it's quite small scale yes here we've got a bit that shows us that they had colour schemes of this pompeian red white bands and a straight line between the two yes this might have come from a square wall panel or it could have come from a dado strip about three or four feet off of the ground going around the room time's run out there's lots of archaeology coming out of neil's final trench fragments of wall plaster and tons of rubble but none of it proves this was a fourth century addition to a second century villa it's so frustrating isn't it on the other side we've nailed down the mosaic nailed down the double ditches we've got the apps but over here it's chaos it is i mean i think we can show there was structure through here i mean look at the finds trays tony we've got masses of rubble there lots of building material clear there was a roman structure through here but it's been heavily demolished and i think as well in retrospect is that word again the main thrust of the building is further up here actually on the breakers slope this is rubble being pushed down yeah we've got the central bar with the mosaic in no matching range over that side and i know john still wants us to believe in his geophysics across the front there but i have to go what i can see with my eyes and there's just bedrock there have we got the shape of the villa now well he's gone from an a to a capital h to a small h virtually all the letters of the alphabet actually virtually and what letter is it uh half an h so at the end of day three we can finally tell the story of our villa the core of the building a central bar with a mosaic and a portico were built in the late second century perhaps on top of an earlier villa and then a short southern wing and a long northern wing were added on probably in the fourth century it would have been an impressive sight approaching the villa you were met by grand appses on either side of a main entrance it was a multi-coloured building with decorations around the roof inside there were centrally heated rooms one with painted panels and an intricate candelabrum design to the rear a collinated portico overlooked the river valley and what about our mosaic well on closer inspection the central panel appears to have been removed deliberately and then neatly replaced with stones anthony now thinks it may well have been christians destroying a pagan icon after all anthony you're a bit laconic early on but you've got to admit that's some mosaic yes i'm very pleased with it especially the cantharis it's the the finest one i've ever seen good yeah so what's going to happen to all this stuff that's good news the landowner the county archaeologist local groups have all come together to ensure that this fragile site's gonna be protected and also that further investigation's gonna take place well that's good news isn't it you know when i first came here i was hoping for something a bit exotic like a temple so okay we've got a villa but in fact it's much more than that it's two possibly three villas stretching over 200 years and it's covering this vast area from the kilns over there to the spring the lovely mosaic phil's posh apps looking out over the entrance all set in this beautiful landscape sculptured by the romans 1800 years ago makes you rather want to come back to the cotswolds again doesn't it you

Channel: Timeline - World History Documentaries

Views: 100,678

Rating: 4.9284496 out of 5

Keywords: History, Full Documentary, Documentaries, Full length Documentaries, Documentary, TV Shows - Topic, Documentary Movies - Topic, 2017 documentary, BBC documentary, Channel 4 documentary, history documentary, documentary history, time team, tony robinson, roman house, roman bath house, roman archaeology, roman ruins, british history, british archaeology, archaeological dig

Id: d2OiKnkhF38

Length: 48min 0sec (2880 seconds)

Published: Tue May 04 2021