The Treasures Of The Roman Field | Time Team | Absolute History

we've got a bit of a puzzle on our hands this week hundreds of roman finds have turned up in this suffolk field things like this roman key end it's really beautiful isn't it but so far there's no evidence of any building to go with all the fines the farmer who owns this field would love to know was they want a fancy roman door to go with this key time team i've got just three days to find out [Music] it's a very square field isn't it yeah um in in relation to some of the other field boundaries which are rather rather kington bench yeah there's no reason of course why it can't reflect the um you know the roman site so the boundary of the field might actually be the same as the boundary of whatever roman thing this is that's right because you know a lot of east anglia has got uh early field systems it doesn't have the common fields it doesn't have uh light implosion a lot of it so it might well reflect uh you know the actual layout in the middle why have you dug the trench slap bang in the middle of the field well that relates to the the geophysics uh their first sort of trawl across the area which has produced a lot of sort of dark lines on their plot and we're anxious really to see what those marks mean the first geophysics information is in the process of being superimposed onto this aerial photo of the field which has got some intriguing rectangular crop marks slightly bigger that's a pretty good match it is actually quite a good match because they're really quick on the photograph at all because it's faded adrian thorpe of the farmer has naturally become very interested in archaeology and is understandably keen to see the first geophysics results at the moment we've simply got plotted data from the geophysics survey which is showing magnetic anomalies in the soil but we are actually at the moment i'm putting in a trench across two of these lines to find out what is showing under the ground all the geophysics can tell us is it looks as if there's something interesting here that might be a ditch or something our first trench will allow us to test the geophys results while they provide us with a full survey of the rest of the field not too bad actually mick we're uh we're taking out the ditch section now over well it's showing up one but not showing up the other so uh that might give them something to think about over well already with bits of first and second century roman pottery showing up it looks like we're not going to be short of finds this weekend but what's remarkable about the finds from this field is that they're almost exclusively roman it's beautiful that verdigris isn't it it's fantastic that it's uh that it's bronze presumably isn't it we've got the roman key of course which someone's coming to look at later and there are literally hundreds of other finds including an impressive collection of coins this one's got the head of hadrian on it and dates to the second century so if we've got this really elaborate key and we've got delicate samian tableware and some really quite elegant broaches not to mention little hordes of money is it possible that this key would have opened the door onto something of quality high status building something well i don't see why not i know we've got we've got very little in the way of um permanent building materials you know there's not much stone there's very little clay and so on that's right you haven't very much of that have you um if you look at the present buildings around here they're all timber framed there's no reason why our roman ones can't be timber framed as well and um let's hope that we find some more things like this over there like this i think because in terms of you would rather let's get this clear you would rather you would rather have more of this yes than you would more of yes this we know we've got all this yes what we don't know so much about is the building materials you think i'm being bloody awkward again this is really frustrating because i know the viewers love to see these beautiful elegant things coming out of the ground this is what i want mick always to produce all mick ever wants is this cruddy old stuff because it gives you much more historical information that's very frustrating yes most of the metal objects were found by two dedicated detectorists who'll be helping us this weekend by checking the clumps of dried soil as they come out of the trenches all the fines from this site will be plotted by our survey team i think what you've got we've got some rather nice pieces of um roman cooking party yes a nice piece of rim some decoration on the outside and we've got several pieces that look as if they'll probably go together this is the stuff that came out the ground this morning yes it is yes so this is some of the first things we've had brought along to us to sort and clean wow as you can see by the potter's finger marks inside those match up so those speakers will go together that's not just pattern that is actually the potter's that's right that's where his hand was inside the pot when it was turning on the wheel yeah that is the interior but there's well with all this pottery turning up i'm beginning to think it's only a matter of time before we find evidence of a building here but what kind of building are we looking for i think quite probably basically timber building perhaps with clay walling as well and probably a thatched roof since we don't seem to have enough tile for a tiled roof you're thinking farm rather than temple or something in the trench we'd be looking for maybe post holes or a slot for a foundation beam to go in yes that that sort of thing certainly turns up quite frequently and you can get a quite a high status building after all made out of timber if our bet is that this is a roman farmhouse is what we mean that there were italians living there with english slaves and servants or are they english people who have become romanized it's more likely that a place like this would have been the local british farmers who'd been there for generations gradually taking on roman ways of doing things use of roman pottery roman coins socially upwardly mobile yeah so to use a term like ramana british really means the british during the period of roman connection really which is a bit of a culture shock to them when the romans did actually arrive but i think i think we we all think it changed overnight but it seems to me that it changes over some considerable time it starts before the conquest well it does in the southeast doesn't it yeah and we were quite close to colchester which was kamela dunham which was the center of a major iron age tribe that was trading with rome well before the course this is where the wine emperor coming in the drinking kit and that sort of thing also you have to remember when we're talking about along we've got material from the first century and from the fourth century from this side now you've got quite a it's probably something quite different going on that's as long as from here to the tudor period so the picture might be of a british farming family who are gradually getting influences from over the uh the water of roman life gradually becoming more romanized then the invasion takes place probably the grandchildren of that same family still there thinking of themselves much more as roman citizens until i wanted to take up the new ideas as it were just imagine the old boy sat under the tree when the first one of the grandchildren turns up with the toga on what the hell have you got on there yeah and our first trench has confirmed that one of the geophysics black lines is in fact a double ditch and probably had a bank and hedge on top of it but we've got a problem this second ditch found at the other end of this trench isn't where the geophys plot indicated so in these dry conditions we're picking up some things but not others this stitch is showing up on the geophysics so we know we can pick up ditches but a building isn't going to be defined as clearly that it's not going to have a huge great big ditch like that a building is probably going to be series of small post cells or a compacted floor or something like that but that's very difficult for us to pick up but from this we do know what is as john was saying the depth of the the material the depth of the natural the way in which strong features are showing up stuart's busy plotting the alignment of the two ditches found in our trench and it appears that they belong to two different periods of roman occupation our geophys plot is only picking up the boundaries from one period and they are clearly on a different alignment to the boundaries surrounding the field today but what does the full survey show do you think you have an obvious building because the building's what we're really looking for isn't it we're looking for a building which explains why these fines are here yeah i mean physics we've seen so far has shown us we've got a series of systems trackways small enclosures one or two iffy anomalies but nothing that sort of stands out to me might be a building well that's that's it it might be worth investigating show us something that the black lines the ditches are very clear to see and the trackway there's one interesting response that might just be half like looks like a burnt feature because of the shape of the anomaly and then stuart and cathy pointed out this sort of area here where if you squint you can see a possible rectangular shape that could be a compacted clay floor well it's 20 past four day one yep what are we going to do between now and the end of the day we can put those two trenches in straight away the archaeology here is literally just beneath the surface oh and no sooner has the topsoil been removed on trench number two then phil has spotted something significant hey come and have a look at this yeah you can have a look at this look it's all it's all bits of crushed pot slabs of it looking all the way around that's right look at the amount of charcoal and it's bits on top of each other look and there's a big piece there that looks like a roman river just wondering about some of this what's interesting it seems to be an isolated anomaly yeah there aren't a series of anomalies like this it's just one that we've picked out i mean we've got a ditch three or four meters underneath the jcb right but apart from that there's nothing else that's clear cut in this area i mean does this i suppose when we've got clearer idea of what it is we'll be able to work out have a better idea of whether it's like to be associated with the building or not because if yeah i mean it's just possible because all the geophysics is seeing is this burnt deposit and this burnt deposit is actually within a structure a timber structure that we're not seeing on the other hand it could be a rubbish pit in the middle of a carry on this discussion yeah let's get on the track [Laughter] so we think we've found a half which must mean we're getting closer to the settlement you're a born marksman yeah that that black stuff spot on trench two will now be extended to allow us to excavate both the possible half and the ditch showing on the survey here and we still have enough time today to open up our third trench here which if geophysics are right could reveal an actual floor surface the plan for both of these new trenches is to wet them down so that we can cover them overnight and allow the water to soak through and make digging a little easier tomorrow i thought you might just be interested to have a look at the uh the iron age coins that are the evidence for settlement on this particular site before the romans got here sure um this little one which is lovely is taskiavanus who was a king of the catchy of alauni the tribe just to the south of here and he was probably the son or grandson of the chap that resisted julius caesar when he popped across the channel in 55 bc yeah then after that we've got his son a chap called cunobilin or kyonobelinus who establishes his capital uh at colchester what about 20 miles away from here um those taken with the iron age pottery that's come up uh gives us reasonable certainty that there was iron age settlement here first century bc just before the romans arrived in 43 a.d under claudius so there's a good chance that uh as well as roman material we might come up with some iron age stuff this weekend oh absolutely yeah i mean and demonstrating the continuity right the way through for some 500 years super one thing we're not expecting to find much of in our trenches is roman glass because as a valuable commodity it was always collected and recycled typically adrian has found only the one piece of glass on this site but over the next few days we're going to attempt perhaps our most ambitious experiment yet to recycle some glass in a primitive furnace just as the romano british people might have done gilbert burrows a local farmer is getting the experiment underway by using his experience of pottery kilns to build our furnace which will be based on archaeological evidence i hear you've got to find here oh fine place is absolutely stuff full of fines i mean look at all this but it's true whole bag of porridge that's just come out of here yeah i know the whole trench is stuffed full of stuff and i ain't just talking about fines i ain't just talking about objects can you see there's these dark features here these dark splodges yeah yeah yeah see there's a there's a one that comes across here yeah there's one in there just beyond you there's another one down further they've all got fines in them and for just one trench we've got all these features in here descent descent what you find in a field we found it in a field not not in it not in a roman field people don't dig holes in the middle of field so what do you think it is i reckon we've got to be somewhere pretty andy the the settlement really we must be somewhere near it so a buoyant mood around the table as the wines poured and in keeping with our roman theme for this dig a chance to try out some replica roman pottery these were made by gilbert who's uh been working all day on the glass furnace he's an amateur potter but i mean he is fairly professional on these romans doing these samian parts and what what do you think of them i mean i think i think it's like it's a good thing he's written his name and dating [Music] 1995 it's nice to see the glaze fresh those ones have been underground so long but it's got dull but this is this is it as it would have been um when made yeah so are you happy with the way things have gone so far yes very very happy indeed i i know i'm watching your program you're always depressed at the end of day one end of day one and the big news is we're not depressed we reckon we're at the settlement or pretty close to the settlement tomorrow we're going to start the glass making experiment which i think everyone's quite excited about and i'm the only one without any wine see you after the break yeah these pictures are victor's projection of of what the key would have originally looked like it's not fiddling i've done it now i've done it what is it it's a replica roman lock and on but you know i'm a sort of person who can't do these sort of things and you've done it i've done it yeah anyway which of these do you think this key is more likely to look like originally and what sort of door would it have opened it could be either we have um examples of key handles like this in bronze throughout the roman empire both of these sorts of key would have been used with this sort of handle this sort of key has a more complex system in that the teeth here would engage into the lock lift it and then slide it along this one is more rotary key it's more like a modern mortise lock unfortunately i don't think either those would be used for front door they're more likely to be used for a large chest front doors tended to be uh locked using old me levers or latches i'm disappointed if it's not a front door key that's my theory shot down in flames i don't think it's so disappointing because um there are lots of front doors but uh chess it means that you've got real people who've got real belongings they want to look after this this is to keep documents in is it all valuable anything that you wanted to tuck away you're going to put in household linen in your clothes anything you wanted to look after so we're going to have to rethink our little dream of what was behind the front of the phrase what was in the big chunks well i suppose it makes sense if you think about it a timber farm building wouldn't need a sophisticated lock it would just have had something to stop the door blowing open in the wind but trench three which if you remember is rich in fines is still thought to be our best chance of finding a building here look at that that come out there yep there's another piece in the bag as well that's the base probably of a flag dragon that is rather nice like most of the pottery coming out of this trench this roman wine flagon dates to around the first or second century a.d so we've got three blokes working right john the archaeologist right ed glassblower and gilbert gilbert who's the hotter that's right and he's the man who made the samian wear yesterday how's it going it's going very well so far we're obviously going to have a few snags and problems because uh this is real experimental archaeology you haven't made one of these before and to my knowledge this has never really been attempted in such conditions it looks like a little tugboat doesn't it it's not going to float though so how does it work well this is where the timber is going to go in the front here then the heat is going to be concentrated here and drawn through the furnace gilbert's left the the front of the furnace this is eventually going to be domed over he's left the front open so you can see the pot inside there that pot is going to be holding the the glass we want to get temperatures of around a thousand a thousand degrees uh 1100 ed really wants to extract glass yes that's centigrade so hot and we cannot afford to lose that heat so what sort of glass or glass components are we going to use yes let me show you the glass now this in actual fact is 1 800 year old glass this last time it saw the light of day was during the time of the emperor hadrian and we're allowed to use this we are in this case normally so little glasses found on sites that it has to be preserved but this comes from a 55 kilogram it's almost 120 pound dump of glass from uh from london found in a single dump it is the the the dump the bottle banking effect of a roman glass worker in about 120 a.d so bottle banks are nothing new then absolutely not no the romans recycled as much as they could there's no evidence that glass was ever made in roman britain only recycled apart from archaeological evidence all we have to go on are images like this one found on a roman lamp dating to the first century a.d if you look closely you might be able to work out a figure on this side this guy here he's blowing glass we assume that what he's got here is a blowpipe with a vessel being formed at the end up in the air carrender and mick are on the lookout for more clues as to how our site fitted into the roman landscape there's nothing in that field that's really obvious what about is that another field next door it could be a road doesn't it does this sort of line on each side because you can see where the hedge the dart line where the hedge went but even either side of that there's obviously a lot more in its head straight across the time that's a nice shot very very road-like isn't it and it doesn't seem to be going the other side so it may stop at our site i wonder if that's the way in whether it's a dense trackway or something coming in that would that would be good wouldn't it this here looks like the edges of fields yes well that's good because we're trying to find a field system if we can get a field system that'll tell us that our settlement was within a whole patchwork of fields we've got more around the edge that's very clear-looking that's amazing like a brickwork yes yes regular small square fields i wonder what i wonder what that actually looks like on the ground because you wouldn't have thought that would show up in the stubble would you would you there's a nice moated farm at the back look which is we're not supposed to be looking at many years but it's difficult not to use dude that's the brevan road look oh yeah that's brilliant it's a lovely shot looking good yeah yeah it's so straight but it's got slight kicks in it all the way along you know yes well i suppose that's just over the years over the years around yes they're very spectacular on the landscape aren't they surprised you're not back on the ground peter murphy a local environmentalist has arrived to take some soil samples for us what we're hoping is that these charcoal deposits will have preserved some evidence of the environment here during the roman period carrenza's next task will be to study the crop marks seen from the helicopter there was this tiny little narrow dark band is just what the hedgerow was there's obviously something a lot bigger than the hedgerow itself while mick has been called out to look at the latest find from trench two what you got there terry's just found a silver coin cool with the detector in the end of this trench we have a lot of bronze uh this late period but yeah this is the first silver one isn't it that we have found you think it's second half of the uh fourth century don't you that's great where did he come from right i mean you say this is silver but it's actually it's actually quite green bits of it yes you're right it's not it's not copper is it with silver on the outside did they do things like that possibly a forgery a forgery what's the making i mean bronze and putting a silver coating i think it's probably just me being cynical it just looks a bit green i think you're right well this is a find that will probably need to be looked at by a specialist but clearly it's well worth our while checking the clumps of soil for small items that could so easily be missed in these conditions these latest geophys results come from walnut tree field and if we view the site from the north it's easier to see that these new ditches are set on the same alignment we've got ditches cutting across same sort of ditches similar things possible coming through but the really strong anomaly cathedral yeah i mean this by the way is the feature carrenza is referring to as salisbury cathedral due to the strength of the signal showing on this plot the question is what what we do with it i mean there's obviously not time to dig it if it is a kiln or slag working site but you could just take the top soil off close all off and reveal what's there i'm getting the impression mick that you don't think that we're going to be able to find this settlement using geophysics simply because it hasn't left any mark on the geophysical record it depends what people mean by finding the settlement we've already got it if you're actually talking about a physical building post holes and so on then the best bet i'd have thought is expansion of the existing trenches the third trench rather than starting in a totally new area yeah we're going to stand far better chance by having a wider area to see small post holes the trouble with timber buildings of course is that they don't leave much structural evidence behind and as far as progress within this field is concerned it's the pottery fines from our hearth entrenched two which are currently generating the most interest rather oh that's nice yeah try not to get too much drool on here wow look it's still going is this roman or is this it would be that that pre-roman style type fabric it's the belgic they tend to term at belgium uh they loved all these curves and shapes and carinations uh whereas the romans are much more much more sensible people and they tend to cut all this out and get straight on with that with the rainbows when you say almost pre-roman well it could have overlapped this could well be a transition period between the romans coming and perhaps between what 40 60 80 80 a.d but it's certainly very strongly native so is this the period of bodacia well yes to the north of here uh i mean she goes up the spout in the revolt of ad60 and we're on the boundary here between the ikani the kachovalani and the trinivantes this is the three different tribes celtic tribes that's right uh and when bodisea's revolt takes place she manages to raise the trinivantes in sympathy to march on colchester and on london uh and massacre according to tacitus's estimate seventy thousand people citizens and the like i mean murder and mayhem coming through here so when boudicco beaudacion lost presumably the romans would have come here and uh and could have smashed up this place yeah i mean the cause of the revolt was really uh that the romans had maltreated bodacia boudicca and her two daughters buddhica had been whipped and the two daughters had been raped and they dispossessed all the royal family of their lands and estates and quite naturally the icani revolted and of course when almost the inevitable happened and the might of rome really reasserted itself retook control and presumably ruled this area with a much an even harder iron hand than had been the case before so the farmers who lived around here could well have been the descendants of people who'd fought in boudicca's revolt or who the romans put in to displace them as being more loyal yeah well this is a bit of a surprise i'd expected that we would have found evidence of the last romano british settlement here but this pottery could mean we're finding evidence of the earliest phase i hope it doesn't all fall in in the first two hours eh so it is beginning it works it works what we've got to do is is treat the kiln and it's not even dry we've got to treat the kiln as if it were a piece of ceramics yeah yeah so the first few hours that's right they're crucial they're crucial otherwise what we'll do is split the thing apart i don't know if anyone's told phil but he'll be expected to be there around midnight tonight when our newly cleaned roman glass goes into the furnace jude yeah look at that butt beaker isn't it yeah butt beaker in there yeah what's a butt speaker a butt beaker is a first century pot that's sort of that shape that you could fit a lot of beer in [Laughter] it sounds like my sort of pot you got any idea what these clay red clay things up i mean it's all a bit reminiscent of how you make pots with fired clay bars there's a lot of charcoal around what do you mean by fired clay bars well a bit like the sort of prefabricated blocks to put inside something that way where you're firing something so like if you're making a pottery kiln you've got a basic shape and inside you have pre-fired clay bits to stack the pots on do you think that means that this wasn't just an ordinary farm settlement but might have been a specialized place for making things or do you think it's just that any farm would have had lots of little industrial processes going on it's very hard to tell but i do wonder if they've selected the site because it would be good for industry yes in that we're up we're in a wooded area so perhaps they've chosen to put a mainly industrial settlement with a bit of farming as well yeah yeah so important evidence here in trench two but i'm disappointed to report that we still have no sign of a building in trench three despite the fact that all the fines tell us there must have been one close by hopefully by extending this trench we'll have a better chance of finding it but i do feel i'm beginning to develop a clear picture of the people who lived here and it's items like these broaches which really help this one is probably the fanciest you can see that this whole surface has been covered in silver or tin so the general effect would be of a much more expensive boat than it was in reality usually if you hear about a site that's got lots of jewelry on it you think immediately of wealth but you're saying this is much more christmas cracker yeah yes it is yes i it may be that what we're talking about here is the sort of thing that travelling metal workers would make and and pedal round from farm to farm and the sort of thing which would fit in with their ideas there might have been itinerants around here or that these might have been farm people who also made some cheap jewelry yes indeed or it may be that people just kept their um old bits of broaches and such like so that when the tinker came round they could exchange a new one for the bits of the old one which again we know happened oh are you focused i am i am we now have some environmental evidence ready to show adrian okay we've got a few spelt grains at the top here yes yes some bits of um what is it called chaff mainly the husks yes oh yes are you saying pete you thought it might be a fuel well it was often used as a fuel um well it's quite woody um if you look at a modern ear you'd see it it's a lot tougher and more denser than the modern serial charges so it's got more thermal capacity really just the chaff was used as a fuel straw suggest it's not coming from far away anyway which she rather homes in on our sort of settlement and the processing in it pete's brought some spelt along and i bought a jar full of i've bought i think well they're rather nice these are ones i've grown in my garden that's what it looked like and that's what's come out of the each of those well rather small and thin by our way of thinking isn't it yeah i think they still grow them in germany don't they special sorts of bread so it's got to be iron age or roman from the uh material you have well i think i think that is a legitimate question how we can be sure of the date of this i think it's because it's coming from that yes that ditch with that roman potter in it isn't it and yes it's well below your plow level oh indeed yes and it can't be migraine that's fallen down a crack no no because you don't grow that no no in any case this is carbonized it's been uh yes it's it's been it's been burnt before it got into that deposit well i think you should bash on with that i think i think that's brilliant well thank you very much for showing me that you'll get some supper if you get any more out [Laughter] so as the end of day two approaches i can't help but feel that we really are making progress on all fronts and to end what could turn out to be an almost perfect day it now seems that our decision to extend trench three already looks like paying off i reckon this is a surface yeah like you say it is just lifted on it may well be a floor yeah it'd be really really nice to think that might be the floor of the building very early day three and despite problems with wobbly chimneys and a small accident with the roof of the furnace our enthusiastic team are delighted to be able to report that they've managed to reach a thousand degrees and are now ready to charge the furnace with the first shovel of roman glass we're going to be doing this you know half a dozen times at least tonight because it's going to take a few shovelfuls to fill the furnace right first time this glass has been warm in two thousand years well the sun is reasonably high in the sky before day three begins for the rest of us and as adrian takes a ride out to take a look at the floor surface in our recently widened trench phil and i are eager to see if our glass furnace survived the night how's it been going brilliantly never doubted it for a minute you could have done two turns thank you lots of little disasters well lots of little setbacks but plenty of climb backs you know it's brilliant so how far have you got well we've been we've been as high as 1260. well six days yeah yeah but that's probably flame temperature i don't think the refractories i don't think the pots got much above 10.50 but we got good glass in there with a lot of bubbles in it it looked pretty good to me last night when i left i'm just getting ready to stir it if this chimney was working efficiently then the bellows wouldn't be needed two chimneys it's now been decided would have made it easier to control the temperature but this furnace has done its job and soon we'll have the rare opportunity of trying some glass blowing with genuine roman glass but we still have a lot to do today if we're going to develop a clearer understanding of this site that's pretty good view from there isn't it in trench 3 it's a race against time to try and find evidence for a timber building i mean what is interesting about what we can see now is this is very typical of a lot of sort of british archaeological sites isn't it it's it's patches different colored uh areas of soil i'm sure a lot of people think you know we dig and we find walls and floors and mosaics and all that sort of thing they see on holiday in the mediterranean we should be so lucky well that's right whereas it's invariably these different colored soils which represent timber buildings and and buildings built of very perishable materials they just leave these stains and we just have to sort of carefully clean them record them dissect them to get the story out even though we don't have much information yet about the building we think we've discovered here we do have plenty of finds which can provide an insight into everyday life at the time and with adrian's wife jane as a volunteer we can also get a picture of how a romano british woman might have looked around 200 a.d you had to remodel your hairstyle as well and this seemed to be a combination of roman and slightly celtic is that right oh yes um iron age women tend to wear their hair down or in plait but when the roman women came to britain they wore their hair up they seemed to have brought the hairpin to britain celtic women seem to have adopted the style where they take the back hair up into a bun but they did seem to like to hang onto these plaits or in this case ringlets coming down on either side of the face and then they used to copy what later came off from empresses and coins yes that's right yes because the the garments themselves don't seem to change with these they didn't have hemlines rising and falling the thing that changed most often was the hairstyle and as you say the way to keep up to date was to look at the latest coins or the emphasis and see how they did their hair and immediately change it empresses actually were very nervous about being seen to be old-fashioned and you very often find in rome itself uh marble statues with detachable hair pieces so that if the fashion change they just take the hair off and we redo it and put it back on again so they never appeared to be out of fashion that's lovely now i don't think i'm going [Laughter] out at the furnace the learning experience continues and after several unsuccessful attempts to produce a new object with our roman glass we're now reaching the better quality purer glass at the bottom of the pot it's beautiful isn't it i mean it just looks so magical oh that looks wonderful so it's that you you blow the glass a little bit and then swing it to get it to yeah well you can make it elongate basically we're working with gravity so what sort of shape you're trying to make it basically a small conical vessel like a cone beaker it's going to be smaller than most of the archaeological ones that we've found that it's looking nice nice the harder it is the runnier it is right nice and hot oh really are we somewhere near there right yeah we're very yeah i'm not going to try too hard for conical here we've got a nice thickish bottom which probably means we'll have a crack i'm going to go in for the punty so you can just stay out i think i'm gonna have to stay off the i'm gonna have to stay off the doings yeah we'll try and do it as best as you can okay anytime you can come round all and sundry watch out because he's a danger with that thing in his hands yes okay yep i think we've got it and one of these fun days we're actually going to do this ed okay brilliant oh wow now you take that one got it magic get rid of it watch out for your hair all right all right all right so you'd be like a sort of almost like a stemmed wine glass you could leave it on could you well no because it's a very poor junction that's the whole point when we crack it off it should come off and just leave the scar that you find on handmade glass what are you looking for now at the that i mean warm it up enough to open it out i want to i want to go more conical with it because it's just a pretty nondescript little bag of a vessel at the moment wouldn't that do well yeah well i i mean i'm just ambitious that's awesome beautiful it's coming along nicely let's get to the sawdust and the rim is not gonna be finished any further no no well i mean there's no way i can actually straighten it and then just cover it straight up yeah now see that's the way that's why that joint is made that way it's crucial now that the glass is given time to cool down so it's probably going to be the end of the day before we can have another look at our conical beaker time now to catch up on trench four which is proving difficult to interpret but we've got various clues to go on evidence of burnt wood large roman nails and bits of first century pottery it's obviously a big hole isn't it it's very square it's been lined with wood by the looks of it um which has been burned and that's one episode of use and it's just been filled up with with rubbish really but we we really don't know why it was useful it's frustrating isn't it i mean it's a huge very nice regular feature the wonderful man burning it is still enigmatic for us oh yes yeah whatever the function of the pit this is more evidence of industrial activity here in the big trench as many people as possible are working on revealing evidence of the building here back at the barn carrenza can now show adrian the results of her work analyzing this earthwork which is evidence of a trackway leading into our site i think you can see how you could move along it as a level a level terrace that's probably been worn by people walking along it by studying the aerial photos carrenza thinks she's found evidence of how the trackway links up with one of the main roman roads in the area it clearly looks like a road because of the way it runs such a long distance in the same line it's a major axis and the ditches either side show that it's not just one boundary it's two boundaries either side of a route while carrenza's been working with the aerial photos stewart's been out looking for surviving evidence of the roman field system in the landscape this is that main spine boundary i keep referring to which is this one here on the map which i think is one of these big parallel boundaries in the landscape you see how it comes along and suddenly changes direction by the telegraph pole you can see the whole thing changing direction there well if you continue the alignment that's to the right of the telegraph pole it would go through that field there and into the field where the excavations are taking place and it lines up exactly one of the big ditches that came out on the geophysical plot it's by recognizing field patterns in the landscape that stewards identified more roman field boundaries still in use today this second set shows how the layout of the fields changed around the second or third century's a.d and created our square-shaped field but now it's time to pull together the various lines of investigation first the forged coin found yesterday i also think it might be a plated silver coin which is just exactly what they did i mean they in other words a disattempt an attempt to deceive and what were the dates of uh well that particularly that coin is 378 to 383 and on the reverse and it's got it's got sort of birthday wishes which helped to date it i like that congratulations for five years and you know all happy returns for the next five kind of thing daphne spent some time looking through adrian's coin collection do they tell us anything about the site but i would have said for a site that um was starting to be um come into its own sometime in the mid second century or late second century and then straight on through to the very end um yes i would say it was typical um but not of a a rural um simply farming side i mean it obviously had more to it than that they must have had access to a market and because they were getting fresh coin i mean this one one of constance this particular reform was short-lived and this coin is in lovely condition it obviously got there soon it's close to the day that would have been close to the data 348 to 350. and then if the coordination is replaced that ceases to have any monetary value i think the fascination of all this is that it spans the entire roman period of occupation and it conjures up this marvelous picture of this site that comes into existence lasts for 400 years and then dies because when the saxons take over in this area we know that they probably had no knowledge of of the location of this site they used the site as fields cultivated them and the knowledge of all this was lost until it started to come alive again well in adrian's hands and in those of his friends i don't think we've ever had as many finds to deal with on a time team program our survey team have had their hands full just trying to produce this record of the 558 metal finds discovered here to date this is really well splendid it's been decorated with stamp decoration and judy and i have been talking about this and we think it may be the sort that you tend to get from gold so we may be talking about cross-channel communication here are those little owls they don't look a bit like little owls don't they they seem to even to have the plumage this dates to the early 2nd century and it's a lovely addition to adrian's brooch collection but we also have this it's one of eight studs that would have been on a chest possibly the same one as our key opened but i think my favorite has got to be this just because i watched it coming out of the ground here it is in all its glory reconstructed by the graphics team it's a butt beaker made by the british people here before the market became flooded with mass-produced roman pottery there's no getting away from the fact that this is a complicated site but perhaps no more than we could have expected with four centuries of occupation here during the roman period but nevertheless we can still produce several pictures for adrian of the different phases of activity discovered here this weekend firstly the early settlement which the complete geophysics survey has shown to focus here these geophysical lines and features are the ditches trackways hearths and fields of a romano british farm and industrial site which could have looked like this around the middle of the first century a.d but it's in the second phase of activity here that we've actually found surviving evidence of a building as you can see we've got a complicated series of layers in trench three but we believe that this ditch this floor and these post holes belong to a timber building which could have looked like this this farm building dates to the late second century a d and reflects the change from traditional iron age round houses to a more rectangular roman style building so a productive three days and all that remains to be done now is to take a look at our recycled roman glass beaker sort of excavating for you isn't it phil yes a little bit yeah yeah there we go it was much bluer greenier when it went in there very small oh yeah yeah that will come off with a bit but that is steaming in it so was it worth having to miss all that sleep for yeah yeah yeah i'd do it again but not tonight

Channel: Absolute History

Views: 98,285

Keywords: history documentaries, quirky history, world history, ridiculous history, time team, tony robinson, absolute history, archaeology, roman treasures, romans in britain, roman britain

Id: bBuVef4WQR0

Length: 49min 55sec (2995 seconds)

Published: Tue Dec 29 2020