The Roman Village Buried Under Litlington | Time Team | Timeline

hi everybody welcome to this timeline documentary my name is dan snow and here i am in a lancaster bomber cockpit one of the few remaining lancasters from the second world war to tell you about my new history channel it's called history hit it's like netflix for history hundreds of history documentaries on there and interviews with many of the world's best historians follow the information below this film or just search online for history hit and make sure you use the code timeline to get a special introductory offer now enjoy this show this is littleton in cambridgeshire on the face of it it's a quintessential english village you see the medieval church over there and right behind the camera over here there's the post office and village store and around this corner here the village pub i think i know a few people who'll be interested in that so far so what well there's more to this place than meets the eye because the people of littlington believe their village may hide one of the best kept roman secrets in britain and with good reason 180 years ago a local vicar put a trench in this field and decided it was the site of one of the biggest roman homes in britain but not only that another dig about the same time claimed to have found a beautiful walled roman cemetery a few hundred yards away probably part of the same complex so you've got this massive villa an elaborate cemetery this stuff ought to be in the history books only problem is nearly all the records have been lost i think it's time we spent three days putting roman littlington back on the map don't you [Music] the area of cambridgeshire will be digging over the next three days is a bit of a roman puzzle there's been very little modern archaeological investigation here in fact almost all we know is based on digs carried out over a hundred years ago but if we're to believe those century-old endeavors then the jewels in the crown have to be the cemetery and villa recorded at littleton on this 1836 plan it's got this amazing tantalising plan of the roman villa here and we don't know where this chap was getting his information from we have no record apart from this of any previous excavations at the villa what we do know from this is that people thought that the villa was of absolutely massive size i mean this is nearly 200 meters across which if you look in the paddock here 200 meters well in in any one direction could virtually fill up the entire paddock and of course we don't actually know that we're in this paddock entirely it could be that they actually running underneath these houses over here there's just so much like helen says that we just don't know what's your instinct about what we've got here i do i couldn't even begin to get at this point in time i mean it's it's clear there's something important here but this is a palatial building and we don't have villas like that in this area we've got some nice village but nothing on this scale well the first thing we need to do is actually find out just how accurate this plan is because if it's correct then we could be looking at one of the biggest villas ever discovered in britain but even if the gentleman amateurs of the 19th century hadn't reported littlington i'm sure we'd have ended up here one day lovely that is a very nice example of a roman hairpin because the locals have been finding loads of roman stuff all over the village for decades so that's huge roman title i mean look at it that's got to be part of a roman floor got to be including a lot of stuff in this small cops to the south of our main field we found these lying on the surface so we started to to pick them up and ended up with a whole bag full we've also got here a piece of roman hyper coarse tile so that's central heating and mosaic and heating tiles suggest a roman bath house secret garden this is absolutely crazy which is just the sort of thing you'd expect to find attached to a grand roman villa i'm glad you're showing us away yeah again as well so while we wait for a geophys target in the main field we're going to have a quick rummage in the cops to see how it fits into our roman story [Music] oh you're not using saws phil you're going straight for just full dose and that means we need to do a spot of light deforestation that's better where do you want to put it [Music] so with fines from around the village and evidence of something quite substantial in this cops it would seem that whatever was here covered a large area there's another one oh there's a peshawar yeah there's another one here it's obviously part of a roman pavement i mean whether it's whether it's in situ or whether it's just been dumped in here there's a sort of million dollar question and a villa is the sort of archaeological target that should positively scream its presence on the geophys results we're not seeing the villain in that data we're not seeing anything like the responses that we should be getting oh dear well that's not the sort of response i was expecting but there's a chance we've asked him to jio fizz the wrong part of the field because as stuart and helen are discovering the antiquarian map may not be as reliable as we first hoped there are bits of this map which actually look fine in relation to to later mapping and there are bits which look completely wrong it's like a half right map is this at the moment when you get further south here towards this road junction this is where it starts to go a bit a bit wayward because that's quite some distance from the modern south end of the village this map is from just one of many digs carried out here by antiquarians vicars doctors and the like who were the predecessors of today's archaeologists but although their intentions were honorable their record keeping could be somewhat poor in 1913 the cambridge antiquarian society comes to littlington to visit mr mclaren at manor farm because he's found a bit of a villa and they view the the um the excavations and they have tea in the garden it all sounds lovely do we have the report not yet and in fact i think we may never find one because they don't seem to have been terribly impressed at what they found they said although there was an extensive building there were only foundations left and um vines were only really pottery it seems crazy to me that we've got all these late 19th early 20th century references to this site but really no tangible written evidence what are we going to do well i think we've just got to keep digging through all the references and see if there's something buried somewhere in the library we can come up with although 1914 is not a great time to be embarking on post excavation analyses and i think that report may never come to light so we still haven't got a target for our first trench in the main field phil raksha what have you got down in the woods but our scratching around in the cops has just produced some lovely roman archaeology there's just enough here to indicate that we do have a floor and that that's where they come from this really is a cracking little discovery although it's much too early to say what kind of building this stretch of paving belongs to in the meantime there's still the small matter of the main field where according to the antiquarian map there should be a massive positively palatable villa we've done a really big chunk both magnetically all over this field and in the paddock on that side and magnetically we're seeing old ditches that are visible on the tithe map can you see anything else there that might be a roman villa nothing if there was a major villa where we've surveyed i'm sure we'd see it so what are we gonna do just keep geofitting the rest of the field yeah i think we keep looking this is getting so frustrating normally by now we've put in at least one trench but it's lunchtime day one and all we've done is furtled around in that cops we can't start digging because we haven't got any clear targets help this is littlington in cambridgeshire and this morning in this field i was offered not just a roman villa but a palatial roman villa 300 foot by 500 foot and the big news is we can't find it see that geoff is there's nothing there at all except these odd trackway things we can't even put in a trench because we haven't got any targets where's my villa look we're doing pretty well we've got stuff over there in the cops we've got a tessellated pavement there but i will admit we haven't so far got a massive villa in this part of the field so what do we do we're not going to give up um it's still going for the digital method though we're going to try the analog method and actually trust to the maps and see what they come up with what does he mean by the analogy i don't know if you're looking at me when you say it okay at the moment the only real evidence we've got that ever was a villa in this field is this one plan that was made in the early 19th century showing what looks like a courtyard villa so what we're looking at if we accept this as it is and we don't know how reliable it is that there is a rectangular villa type structure extending down towards that corpse under those houses and back up if we take that as gospel and it's the only thing we've got at the moment which actually says there might be a villain in this field so our first trench in this massive field goes in on the basis of a single 170 year old map [Music] it's hardly the most scientifically robust target we've ever had but then again hold on in hey bit of roman roof tile after the frustration of this morning it's good to know that we seem to be in the right place in spite of a complete lack of geophys evidence look at this underneath back in the cops our earlier discovery of a roman floor means that this is also now the location of a full-on excavation oh i mean look at the alignment the alignment of that wall is exactly yeah the same alignment as our pavement here so we're going to put in a couple of trenches in the cops to see if there is potentially a bath house buried under all this shrubbery [Music] there is actually a linear comes through on the geophysics at a funny angle area [Music] while for good luck steward's putting in a second trench in the main field to see if phil's walls and pavement continue towards the rest of the villa [Music] here ian hang on dessert number one in the space of a couple of hours we've gone from twiddling our thumbs to being stretched to the limit [Music] how about that that looks like a mosaic floor okay but it seems to be worth it huge amounts even if it's just to justify to the land owners why we're trashing their cops we've got a doorway a door yeah really check it out oh isn't that fantastic [Laughter] absolutely there we go a roman doorway absolutely brilliant the evidence we're finding in here certainly suggests we may be coming down onto something posh enough to belong to a high status roman villa oh that's painted wall plaster it's got blue and green on as well that's absolutely fantastic or maybe i spoke too soon just after lunch we put a trench in over here even though we couldn't see anything in the g of fizz because stewart had worked out that this on the 19th century drawing is where the villa should be so we thought well we dig it and see if the antiquarians were right although matt i can't quite see a villa there that's because there isn't a villa in there in fact there's not even the remnants of a villa anywhere nearby here so what's this recess here well what we've got here is what the geophysics showed which was a great big linear coming all the way through back up there there's a parallel one just beyond the edge of the trench there and we've also got another ditch coming straight across it just a minute isn't that roman tile that is roman tile and we've got a couple of bits of roman pottery so but it doesn't tell us there's a villa here i mean look at it it's broken it's rounded it could have been dragged from a very long way away by the player it could have come from anywhere it tells us there's a roman building in the vicinity that doesn't tell us that it doesn't tell us anything about what's going on in this trench the only recognizable archaeology in this trench is a medieval trackway there's absolutely no trace of anything structural slap bang in the middle of where we expected to find our record-breaking villa frankly this is a bit of a disaster it may only be the afternoon of day one but i feel i need to have some serious words with our site director i'm going to ask ben the question that no one else seems to have the bottle to ask you suppose there isn't a villa here at all i think we've definitely got a villa i mean you don't get that amount of building material you don't get the tessellated pavement the wall plaster all these fines without there being a villa here there must be a villa here what about the one tangible piece of evidence we've got the cops what's going on there clearly an important building or part of a building i mean have a look at this i mean we could be talking about a bath house for example typically a bit peripheral or or you know towards the edge of the of the area because of the fire risk um could it be that it's one of the reception rooms nice mosaic in there could it be even one of the main living spaces we haven't got quite enough to go on it might then acquire well ben's big shiny graphic imaginings are all well and good but they're quite a leap from the reality of the site that so far produced quite a lot of nothing although i will admit the structure in the cops has cleaned up pretty well oh ben this is it this is roman archaeology we can sleep tonight after all yes you didn't believe me quite did you but here we are tessellated pavement maybe the interior of a room we've even got what looks like a doorway there look worn by people's tread to and fro and a huge substantial wall chalk clutch wall running through here so no question about it we've got a big building here and where do you think it goes well yeah where does it go we've got a bit of a problem heading in that direction because of course matt's trench doesn't have anything roman in it it appears we also have to think about how far east does this building go so what we plan to do tomorrow is to extend do some test pitting and chart how big this building is in that direction by the east you mean into people's gardens uh yeah i'm afraid so yeah we like that don't we beginning of day two here in the little cambridgeshire village of littlington and we've gone from the sublime to the ridiculous yesterday we were trawling through eight acres of that field looking for a lost roman villa which we couldn't find so today we're going to be digging there and here and there off you go team these three test pits are just the beginning of a concerted effort to understand what was going on in roman littlington as the only thing we've really established so far is that the gigantic villa recorded in this 1836 plan isn't in this field but we're pretty sure there's a substantial roman building nearby because of the evidence phil's uncovered in the neighboring cops something that big that is a big foundation absolutely absolutely although we originally suspected this may be a bath house we're now thinking it's a suite of posh rooms we've placed our trench on the vital intersection of two ranges of one building we've got where that tessellated pavement is with the brush on is a corridor running through there with rooms leading off from there and you would come down the corridor you would turn a corner into this wing and you could go down this corridor and you would then lead off into rooms where fae is so theoretically i could walk down this corridor here open the door and there i am in phase posh room absolutely and they really are posh too because we've she's got painted wall plasters that show that they are really the top range rooms of the building so far phil's corner and faze plastered wall are the only reliable roman archaeology we've uncovered it may not be a lot but guess what it's enough for stuart and henry to come up with a theory they've now got walls in uh in fields and phase trenches so i've surveyed those in now i have extrapolated those a little bit looks to me like they're they're part of the same plan they suspect the antiquarians who made this plan did see a massive villa they just happened to draw it in the wrong place the alignment of that actually that that's the cops you've got in there the alignment of things you've got there are the same yeah they're going in that same axis so whether these are related different building of that or whether that's a misunderstanding the antiquarians and really that building was down there it's all a bit a bit up in the air at the moment if stewart's right and the villa is further south that would explain why bits of tile floor were found under these barns 20 years ago then again if the antiquarians got the position of the villa wrong they may also have got its size wrong and that's why the back garden test pits are so important uh nothing roman at all so how much further before you give up and say well that's it from this level i'm on now i would say another foot maybe or so yeah yeah then you'll give up then i'll give up because if we dig enough holes we should find the true size and location of the building that's produced so much roman archaeology over the years so do you think that's a bit of wall you found there then well i think we're definitely down to some kind of roman layer it's vital we uncover as much information as we can because the antiquarians left virtually no written records about their digs and yet surprisingly many of their fines have survived you come up here come and see the dead roman go you don't move back let the other let the other children come forward and thanks to the antiquities museum in cambridge many of them have been given a day trip back to where they were found but i bet you'd quite like to drink wine out of something like actually that's a little that's literal water in it as well i'm sure they just started off early so that's a little a wine drinking cup have you ever seen anybody grinding up food in the kitchen yeah that's for grinding food so that was once a roman lady's bowl in the kitchen she had to stand there and grind her food up maybe it broke one day and she chucked it out this collection of pottery is recorded as coming from the villa and grand roman cemetery at littlington and it would appear from these finds that the history of the cemetery known locally as heaven's walls and the villa are intimately linked so we're going to try and find the location of heaven's walls and unfortunately that means using the map that's already caused us all sorts of trouble the plant also shows a cemetery area lots of really juicy cemetery fines there were pots there were objects all sort of things even suggestions that something might here be a tomb so i would suggest that we start at the edge of those back gardens there and do a swathe of geophysics something like that between the stubble field and into the plowed field that looks about three days work on its own so gia fizz trudge off to another massive field to look for another missing antiquarian site i'm getting a feeling of deja vu here [Music] this is where raksha's doing [Music] hi hello hello how's it going you're really snowed under aren't you back up on the main site our first test pits have had mixed results we've basically found nothing of note in two of the gardens but raksha's trench has produced something so we've got this which looks kind of convincing very abraded bit of tetra and plaster this mix of scrappy bits of plaster and chalk suggests demolition of a nearby roman building if i was feeling optimistic i would say that we're slowly closing in on our target and that can mean only one thing raksha and our diggers moving into new gardens to continue the search for the villa should we do it together no no okay our villa is over there where those houses are in fact quite a lot of it's probably under those houses but somewhere in this field we think there might be a rare walled roman cemetery which would be associated with the villa except nobody really knows precisely where it is do they well i think we do know oh there was triumph in that tone why well we've done the magnetic survey look ben's got the results here this ditch here turns through a right angle and i just wonder whether that could be the boundary of the cemetery where would you want to put in a trench well look at the results in detail this is the ditch i'm talking about and i'd like to put a trench across that ditch and taking in one of the anomalies inside to see whether we've got a sort of pit or maybe even a grave cut [Music] so although we're really stretched up at the villa we're putting in a trench to establish whether or not this is indeed the location of the heavens wall cemetery just one little second [Music] it's tiny but it does look like a little beady rim there and that could easily be a little roman pot job done i think john's self-confidence is a little misplaced we've still got a long way to go to match the quality of the antiquarian finds from the cemetery because none of them were damaged by later industrial plowing here we've got a very early piece of samian wear made in ghoul it's right from the early part of the roman occupation very unusual to find that complete but i can see that being used as the lid to a cremation urn which they very often were these are probably grave goods too for um libations or food for a grave then we've got the samian cup which is probably a grave good holding wine or liquid or something for the deceased they really are in very good condition in those vessels aren't they they're exceptionally good and just imagine if we'd been able to excavate this site ourselves 200 years ago this is probably the sort of material we'd have found unfortunately we can only dream of making such discoveries but back in the cops there's been a breakthrough and phil now thinks he is digging a bath house but now we got down here we've got this concrete type block in here now this is and well i'm sure it's in situ it's not a piece of loose debris i'm wondering because it's in a hole whether i'm in one of the pools of a bath house well let me hop in here so i mean you're close to the sort of you know the mosaic floor behind you which is you know what you'd expect near to to that sort of structure within within a villa and you've got i mean it's definitely yeah i mean it's definitely sort of you know it's a brick stroke tile so what you're trying to say is i think you are right phil i think you do have a bath house you might be right absolutely let's hope so even if this is a bath house it would still suggest that there's a fairly posh home or villa nearby so it would look like our discoveries are tying up quite nicely with the fancy roman pottery uncovered almost 200 years ago but this being time team there's always somebody around to throw a spanner in the archaeological works guy you've got severe doubts about whether all of the fines from the cemetery actually are from the cemetery yeah i've got to admit i have i mean let's let's just paint that picture you know jump back 200 years time and you've got the reverend zone so around in littlington and he's known as the local empty aquarium or whatever and various people have found bits around here and they say oh mr reverend so i found this in my backyard in my field you'll probably enjoy having this in your collection and he said thank you very much it all goes into a box and he sticks it in his glass cabinet and shows it off to his friends and everything else you jump on about 50 or 60 years and the reverend so-and-so has popped his clogs and of course his collection gets boxed up and some well-meaning person sends it off to cambridge museum with a label in it or something like that jump on a hundred years to mr tony robinson and time team and these fines are looked up by which time of course it's all got jumbled up and probably the case is that some of these pots come from here but probably a lot of them come from other finds around here they're all over the place in date term so you know who knows so we could be making assumptions about this place on the back of the fines and actually we're making totally wrong assumptions yeah we're just forgetting about the fact that a huge amount of things and events and people have been involved in the last 180 years everything from all the building work around here to bits of paper blowing across in cabinets and therefore things getting mislabeled jumbled up and mixed up so maybe antiquarian enthusiasm has clouded our knowledge of this site oh governor iphone i phoned this partnering background why don't you have that in your collection his wife says oh i've got one too that's right and even without the dodgy accents we shouldn't rely too much on that antiquarian evidence the pit is there yeah then we've got much better to rely on the evidence we've uncovered in the trenches or the apparent lack of evidence in the case of the cemetery i mean could this be where they're just digging for gravel yeah and this being the backfill the stuff that they didn't want possibly it could be we now have archaeologists all over littlington turning the village upside down but we still haven't found any other major roman structure outside of the cops right down the bottom here we've got part of one of the baths that they would have got into which we're now fairly sure is indeed a bath house where i'm standing now would have been quite a big open room with certainly a pool in here you say bathsville you don't mean baths like we have i don't mean a six foot bath with taps at the end no the the romans had very very special ways of having baths they had at least three rooms and it was a real a real ritual they all used to bath together and often they didn't get cleaned out all that much and they would shave in the bath and all the hairs would be floating uh on the on the surface and they'd be all manky soap on the surface as well and then eventually they have to get some poor slave would come in and scrape all this stuff off it's a bit like my bath at home nobody ever told me that you had to empty it a little bit too much information there we've got one of 1887 so that sort of gives us a a time stamp of what was on the map at that time so if we use those but although we only have the bath house at the minute stewart thinks he's getting closer to finding the rest of the villa roman villa trying to put across where they think it is and they've also put another cross here saying roman payment hyper course found in ad 1881 quite specific yeah if you take the positions of those and transfer them to the modern map which i've done the site of the villa actually falls that cross falls in the back garden just adjacent to the cops there and the other one the hyper coast it falls just there which is in the back garden of number two anvil avenue so you can see they're both very close to each other and very close to to the cops where we're finding material too and would you believe it he may actually be right over there are the three houses with the back gardens into which we put the test pits this morning and unfortunately we drew a blank but in this back garden there is a trench which if you are interested in archaeology you just love to have in your garden john is that what i think it is uh yes tessellated floor does it look like the one in phil's trench uh yes it's just like the one in phil's certain training it's the sort of course tessary you see in these roman buildings so how far away do you write in his trenches well we're probably a good 30 to 40 meters away from phil where he is now so it's not the same building well it could be the same building could well be just means bigger building this is a small but major breakthrough so we're now going to extend this trench but not half as much as we're going to extend our investigation in the cops and that means weeding on an industrial scale we've now got just one day to get to the bottom of roman littlington you want to come and have a look and see what we done to your wood oh we've just given it a bit of daylight you see you've got to put a bit of daylight in here let's just hope the locals are still talking to us by this time tomorrow [Music] beginning of day three here on this baffling site at littlington in cambridgeshire where we're looking for a roman villa which we can't find and a roman cemetery which we can't find either and the one tangible piece of archaeology we've got seems to have changed character three times over the last 36 hours and it's not that i want to add any more tension to the mix it's just that in seven hours time i've got to explain the whole site to the entire village and frankly at the moment i wouldn't even know where to start [Music] which is why we're throwing everything we have at this site with countless trenches in back gardens and fields all around the village but at the moment the only thing we're really sure about is the bath house we've uncovered in the piece of scorched earth that used to be a cops say master philip this looks like a bit of an ex-cops this morning i want your opinion come on in here a minute my opinions are free no that's why i want your opinion because you don't charge as much as anybody else through here you've got more of this almost fired clay we've been calling that the bath it's in a hope of course does it this split arrangement where's the roman floor level the aroma floor level's there we've got the mosaics on it so it's a couple of feet higher than this oh yeah what do you see where the floor is so that might be the original floor service on a hyper course that's fallen through could that be i don't know i'm asking you at the moment phil suspects that at some point the original floor of this building which may or may not have been a plunge pool had a hypercoast a heated floor system built on top of it so far so good there obviously there's got to be a hyper coaster there's logically there's got to be a hyper coast in here somewhere only if there's it is a bath house and we don't absolutely know that for certain do we oh dear we've been tony's gonna love this when we change our opinions yet again he knew we would i think for his own personal sanity and mine phil may have to stop asking our romanists for their opinions and in the absence of any conclusive decision he's going to just keep on digging where do you find these tests raven just we just found them in this this corner here just in this corner yes also continued to put test pits in gardens that produced roman fines is this mostly roman that's coming up would you say it looks like there's another piece of chester eye oh yes right there oh fantastic and this game of archaeological battleships is beginning to give us a rough idea of how big an area a roman building could have covered here the thing is if they saw such a massive villa in that area why can't we find it and it doesn't really tie up with the grand plan the antiquarians drew they made sure and if they found a massive villa or they found a bit of roman stuff here and a bit of roman stuff there and a bit of roman stuff there and started to make a villa out of not very much yeah there's still there's still roman bits of roman stuff coming out of there i just had a piece of tile out of it and if dealing with one antiquarian site wasn't enough there's the small matter of the walled cemetery that we suspect may be associated with our roman building jackie can i come in yeah sure come down the stairs what is it you've got well we know that in this field the cemetery was discovered in about 1820 by gravel quarry diggers um and they found the cemetery the antiquarians came in they dug out what they wanted and they carried on digging gravel out of here for quite some time and then they would have backfilled everything they the holes had left behind and i was getting really despondent yesterday because we weren't finding any bits of material at all and fantastically this morning at about this level here i turned up a whole load of human bone oh fantastic they've got bits of femur and bits of tibia from the leg bones and even better we had a piece of pottery turner which has been dated at late late iron age early romano british so you're sure they're roman bones yeah this is this is what they left behind of the material from the cemetery that they didn't want to take away john looks like you were right there's a cemetery here after all yeah we knew it was here it had to be on the basis of our results don't crow what we've done this morning is expand our survey back in this field now you remember yesterday we had this ditch that turned through a right angle now you can see it extending and it's starting to form a really big enclosure you can actually see some detail now look at that point there have we got a little square enclosure with a pit inside and a circular wall beyond are we looking at the mausoleum so we're going to put it in another trench we've got to [Music] so we're putting in one final trench over jon's potential mausoleum as it would be fantastic to establish that at least one roman tomb has survived the 18th century gravel quarrying this looks pretty solid here's the wall that solid is coming down solid solid i think that might be the base of something so it would seem that we may have at last uncovered some solid evidence of the roman cemetery and with only a few hours to go it looks like we may have finally got a handle on this blasted villa your floor surface here really yeah look in that corner so how much more solid that is oh yeah it looks like ben's test pit strategy is at last paying off [Music] so thanks to a lot of hard graft determination and countless cups of tea we're finally beginning to work out how much of littlington is built on top of the villa thank evans i've found your action i feel like a door-to-door salesman what have you got there oh stew i've persevered for two days now this is the third garden i've been in this is the first third test pit i've done and i've actually come up with the goods oh wow what you got i found this amazing robbed out wall which is exactly what we were looking for and this is definitely in situ and you're confident it's a roman period wall yes we've had lots and lots of roman finds coming out of here that is so nice because this is your test pit in here yeah the blue dots and walls and we've actually got good roman buildings still sitting in their original position in the ground the orange zones are where we've got spreads of demolition rubble showing there are walls and things nearby now that actually starts to make sense if you take a corridor villa with two wings and this is one that's not that far from here really and if you put it over here it fits quite nicely with stuff in situ there stuffing situ here corridor going across that way oriented to the south which is exactly what you'd expect i think you deserve a nice cream for your perseverance so with more pieces of the jigsaw falling into place we can begin to put some of littlington back together again that's gonna go oh is that gonna carry on yes it is look although it may take some bits longer to recover bless them when they dug it in the 20th century early 20th century they just smashed their way through it jackie hello can you come over here for a sec back down at the cemetery it now looks like the antiquarians and gravelers didn't completely destroy the roman burial ground oh what timing well even i can tell that's a human skull there there was also in there ah that yes that looks awfully like a coffin now isn't it yes this is intact in situ it's not redeposited this is where the guy went in we've got somebody laid on their left side face facing that direction with matt's trench confirming the presence of the mausoleum shown in john's deer fizz it's probably safe to suggest at least one or two other graves may also survive beneath this field i think we can safely call that a result [Music] any ideas where it could be the one time in my life when i need a romanist and there's never one here but even at this late stage the romanists are continuing to frustrate phil's quest for a final decision on what's in the cops what is going on well i don't know that's why you're you're here to tell me right okay well knowing what's happening in a bath house that hasn't been dug by someone and one that's obviously been dug into and elements removed elements explored taken away that's that's two different things really isn't it i mean it is a it is a it is a bit of a blow to the stomach though i mean we've shifted a lot of muck today and and and we've worked hard and and at the end of the day to turn around after all that graft and say we haven't got a foggy story here that's a better pill to swallow i don't think we're saying we haven't got the fog well you don't yes what you were saying to me what is it saying what is it more words what is it then the fact is no one knew what was here until three days ago no one knew and no one had made a problem right now you were saying we still don't no no we've made a proper document no i'm not saying that we've pinned down a range of possibilities and that is eminently better than having not the foggiest idea we've got thick deposits of of plaster and it looks like they've made a concerted effort to make some of these rooms perhaps watertight or at least to consolidate them so is this a bath house yes well there we go then i'm happy with that so possibly with a gun to his head ben's finally decided that this is a bath house so has this come from more than one room or from one room or can't you say it looks to me like it's probably come from one room and as the plaster we've uncovered in stephen and hillary's cops suggests it was once a rather plush suite of rooms roman walls are incredibly lurid by our standards they're very deep heavy hard colors that i think we would find very oppressive you'd walk in there and be really quite sort of crushed you'd probably feel really claustrophobic in a roman room but we do know that romans painted these very distinct zones on the walls it tends to have a kind of a bottom third then above that a series of vertical panels in which would normally have been some sort of much more decorative picture perhaps a mythological scene or maybe a goddess and had the antiquarians found any bits of wool plaster that had such a figure on it they would undoubtedly have taken that away this finely decorated bath house would have been a focus for any villa [Music] and thanks to the results from the test pits and the bits of radar john could get from the back gardens we think that the villa would have sat roughly in the area now occupied by these houses but truthfully that's about it we can't really say what the villa looked like or what its relationship is to the cemetery we've discovered and yet most of us feel we've still learned more about roman littlington in three days than all the previous antiquarian excavations we've got now a fantastic record for the first time where these walls actually are for the first time not just a rumor of a bath house and a couple of lines in a scrappy document we've actually pinned down where the walls are on what alignment they are nevertheless goose wild and chase are words which spring to my mind although not necessarily in that order i will admit there have been certain difficulties with pinning this one down um but that's partly the fault of following this antiquarian but importantly we've been trying to tread in their steps just what is it that they saw and i think we're now getting to grips with that we're starting to see it properly as they saw it they left no documents well almost everyone thinks we've done better i just can't get over this we're all so smug and self-satisfied there's nothing worse than a gang of modern-day self-righteous archaeologists banging on about the beelzy bubs sent down from hades who dug up and destroyed these sites a couple of hundred years ago along we come these saints the sun glazing on us from apollo we're so wonderful and perfect what's going to happen in a couple of hundred years time is that people are going to be looking at the kind of records we're churning out gps with what satellite what the one that burned up in the atmosphere 150 years ago that we can no longer possibly calibrate oh it's all recorded on this nice little bit of plastic oh although we haven't had a drive for one of those for the last two centuries at least with the antiquarians you can read the words they wrote well and you don't think we're going to generate a documentary record that's more impressive than this i'm sorry that's not 200 that shows a complete lack of faith we have gotten it much as i'd love to listen to this mature discussion for the next few hours because we could have just had that and a blazing three-dimensional multi-color hologram i've got an appointment with a few of the locals or maybe more than a few who are now keen to know what we've done with littlington's villa it's the whole village isn't it i said the whole village i thought they were joking welcome welcome you see the robust roman walls which you can't see them so you may think that the great villa of littlington doesn't exist but we'd like to show you something else come over this way it's been a frustrating and at times an infuriating three days here but at least the people of littlington now know what was going on here almost 2 000 years ago we do know that in parts of this building there were some really expensive floors we found not and in spite of some people's misgivings i have to say this site proves the benefits of digging into the past you do have a villa we believe it's under there and you have a bath house which hopefully generations of children will be able to visit and learn more about the romans from so thanks ever so much for coming and we had a good time i hope you did too thank you you

Channel: Timeline - World History Documentaries

Views: 41,794

Rating: 4.9452057 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, roman villa, time team roman archaeology, british digging, british history, archaeological documentary

Id: abwSvn2Mj_8

Length: 48min 2sec (2882 seconds)

Published: Tue May 18 2021