Time Team S06E02 Papcastle,.Cumbria

while they were building this extension to their house here in pat castle in cumbria the buckingham family discovered this piece of roman pottery can you see that little bird on the tree there but that was just the start of their discoveries they came up with these two quern stones hold boxes of fines and they've even got what appears to be the outline of a roman building right here being fans of time team they contacted us because they want to find out what an earth the romans could have been doing here in their back garden nearly 2 000 years ago and as usual we've got just three days to find out so which of the stones that you reckon a part of the roman building we've got a line of stones through here this one here yep yeah and this one then a line of stones through here there's the one under the retaining wall and there's a couple under these puddles so this one here yep through to there that's it why do you think that they're roman we found all the pottery in this area so i mean i'm assuming they are open because of the pottery if it is then presumably the whole building goes over your fence and into next door i think so so can we excavate there well unfortunately i've spoken to the neighbor he's not too happy about you disturbing his garden so we're going to have to concentrate on here yeah i think so meg what we're going to do well we've got to get rid of all that soil and water off the top so we can see what we're dealing with we want to be able to define different areas so we know which we want to dig but we will put a trench in oh yeah you bet great what are we waiting for and don't worry whatever happens we won't undermine your house oh well i promise trust me believe that believe it's been six months since ray down tools and contacted us so it could take a couple of hours to clean off the trampled soil yeah come on in what we want to do is start at that end and literally we just work our way back just peel the whole thing back as you can see ray's done a great job of making an accurate record of what he's found apart from scraping away the top soil and discovering the actual roman foundation stones he hasn't dug inside the building shape at all most of his roman finds so far have come from digging the foundation trenches for the extension look at this this is one of those dream finds mick tell him where you found it turn it onto the stones when we were digging the foundations we lifted the big cornerstone off of the building and this was underneath what we pray for that is a coin under a stone because well because whatever date this is and depending on how worn it is he'd have to the stone has to be later than that date can you tell anything from that well i'm thinking of sort of you know bouncing light across it and perhaps getting something out of that but it needs cleaning up and smashed at the edge anyway all right unfortunately i did that when i was uh excavating under the stone just clipped it with a pickaxe yeah which stone was it under there you found it under that stone there so it's under the corner of the yep it was about two inches below the bottom of the stone so i just wonder if someone actually laid it there before they actually put that stone on ray's drawing shows the position of more large stones which could be a corner of a second roman building going off in this direction under his lawn geophysics have been set the challenge of trying to find further evidence of it hence this new and rather strange looking piece of kit well it looks like one of those wooden towel rails i got in my bathroom yeah it cuts the grass as well it may look like a towel rail but this is state-of-the-art radar equipment specially brought in from sweden and it's our only hope of detecting more foundation stones deep down under two meters of garden soil you've got this phenomenal amount of stuff here helen i'm amazed you've obviously found a lot it's all been washed you've looked after it it's been sorted it's mind-boggling well we actually um started off by finding a few pieces of sewing wear and then it just you recognized it you knew it was old we'd been to the jorvik museum in york the weekend before and rey had said well if we find any of that stuff that's roman and you did the following weekend we dug our first hole and we pulled out this piece of pot well guy your samian's your thing isn't the same as what we all think of as the smart end of the roman pottery market but is it really high status it is high status to the extent that it was what the better people used but the real people with money had silverware so don't get the impression it was the best you could get it was second best in that sense your everyday table pottery it was every day it was everyday expensive table pottery yes we've got a whole range of stuff here what sort of date range do you think we're covering here this one is one i would pick out straight away is probably being late first century that's that's about 50 years after the romans invaded britain and maybe a little bit either side so are there any things that are particularly interesting the way the small fines yeah so the small fans there are several pieces um this is a piece of a pipe clay statuette it's one half of what's called a deonutrix figurine that's a nursing mother goddess yeah and that's the back of her basket chair and these were made in gaul pretty well in the same sort of area as the samian wear so that's rather nice little religious object which would be in somebody's house or something like that the buckinghams seem to have lots of second century roman finds some of them are really nice like this bronze lid featuring a tiny duck we've we've sat and looked at that and looked at it and thought what could it be of course you can see it now yeah this is similar to a roman jug lid lindsay has seen before and we can show helen how this might have looked also the religious statuette the goddess of nursing mothers which would have sat in a shrine in a roman home all we can say about the finds discovered in this garden so far is that they all appear to be domestic but perhaps we shouldn't be surprised that there's so much roman archaeology here in the buckingham's garden because their house is just a hundred meters away from a known roman fort what it looks like is if you've got the fort up on the hill uh the river down here and then you've got civilian settlement called they're called vegas um between the fort and the river a fort full of soldiers need lots of services and goods to supply them yes you get camp followers and you get people making bits and pieces for them can we also see how this fits into the general area around because that should have well soon has got a map of all the roman forts and the road system around here oh yes look at that okay well you can see that that's where we are here yeah now that suggests to me guy that this place is quite important in the middle of a whole series of other sites is that how you read it that's right there's an awful lot of thoughts over really quite a small area now it's worth bearing in mind that we're just to the south west of the end of hadrian's war which is built in the early second century so we're just north of carlisle that's right so we're just behind in that protected zone inside the northern part of rome and britain but it's still very very much a military area yeah and the reason the army's up here is not only a question of controlling the local people but it's also a question of controlling people coming in and raiding from ireland perhaps other people raiding down the west coast of scotland but then also from the roman point of view the wonderful part about this uh the wonderful point about this part of the world was the enormous number of natural resources and we know that lead was mined in northern britain well i was going to ask you that because to have that number of thoughts even if they're not all occupied at the same time suggest they're trying to hold down quite a big local population at some stage that's absolutely right and of course these faults in fact in the long term will have become completely integrated with the local population yeah soldiers didn't bring their own wives with them they generally intermarried with the local people and eventually perhaps the original purpose behind the fort had really been abandoned they just became living communities as well well we got some pottery over tony is that really that's roman samia and how long have you been cleaning before you started finding the fines oh almost immediately so the the first phones were starting to come up bones well and i mean yeah literally you can see we're getting phones from just cleaning it back so we're just scratching the surface ray has reused some of the roman stones he found in the garden it's a lot of archaeology in there isn't it it's possibly i mean one of the nice features we're gonna have to do is use the stones that we found in this area yeah they were trapezoidal shape i wondered if they were arch stones but we've been able to re use them again in this nice slope so they do sound like versus hang on trapezoidal and vooswear in one sentence what are we talking about the fact that they are wider here and narrower here you know i mean that's what you need if you're going to put an arch in yeah one that we've not used i mean you can see that you've got a square face and then all faces seem to go back to a slightly smaller square face yeah i mean if you imagine that in the top of an arch and then a series of them round like that then you've got the top of a doorway or window we were thinking so possibly the roman buildings in this garden had arched windows and looked something like this it's certainly a starting point and something to show the buckingham children who have now arrived home from school and look at the things we've been finding of course they're eager to see what phil's dug up a nice bit of roman pop do you think that goes that way up no yeah right that's right possibly because some of it is stuff they buried themselves they can also see one of the pottery finds reconstructed imagine what the rest of this pot would have looked like can you see do you think that looks a bit like that yeah then i've taken the texture in i've actually put this under my camera and i've grabbed it in and i've applied it to that shape i've just made there what do you reckon it's a big fish used for grinding stuff up here good printing printing however we have different plans for this piece of pottery the first bit the buckingham's found because we're going to try and go one better than reconstructing it on the computer we're going to attempt to make a figured samian wear bowl in just three days i think this is a bit of a long shot because it's made in several stages it's a bit like making a jelly you make the mold then you push the clay into it too so we've got to make the mold first right well gilbert's doing that he's making the mold the jelly mold but of course on the wheel you'll just get the smooth interior with no sort of features at all so you just get a completely round jelly so we've got to make stamps to press into that interior and what victor's doing is making the mold for the stamps once we've made these we can then press clay into them to get the shape standing out like that and then what we'll do when this clay is hard is push into the side of the bowl so we get the decorated pattern all round then we'll have to fire that mold and it's much harder than the clay the soft fresh clay gets pushed in rounded up on the wheel and then put in the kiln fire to go on the table our main problem is going to be getting the stamps dry enough that they will impress into the clay in time that's fine back in the buckingham's garden the results from our new swedish radar machine are ready to look at but first john's keen to explain how it works so what we've got here is radar pack it sends waves electromagnetic radiation into the ground you've got a transmitter here and a receiver he drags it over the ground signal goes in when it hits something it bounces back up and it's detected by that and what we actually get is a vertical slice of the ground and we can see deeply into the ground far more deeply than with the resistance yeah and have you had any joy well we think so look at that now it's difficult to interpret these they've not had a lot of time to do the work this is a vertical section of the ground we're getting these very strong reflections here and that's where we're going over the path so that's just the path just the path yeah and there's an electric cable below it yeah what's of interest is this arc here which suggests there may be a large stone or boulder how deep is that because well is that two meters so that's two meters down which is so happy to start soon wouldn't we i just wanted you to know that it was two meters down right time to talk to ray how fond of this garden oh yes well i want a pond here oh would you be okay if we dug something down to at least two meters yeah i suppose so the truth is that we can't wait for more radar information because we then wouldn't have enough time left to dig and excavating is the only sure way to find out what's down there it could be part of another roman building or just an isolated bit of stone day two and the hole in the lawn is getting seriously big caroline and jenny have already shifted loads of earth can i get in your trench of course and as you can see this is about a meter down there's still another meter left to go there's even talk of getting a bigger jcb in although how they're going to get it into the garden i've absolutely no idea and all this because our brand new untried untested swedish technology says there might be something down here last night the roman coin ray found in this area of the garden went to be x-rayed but it hasn't produced the results we'd hoped for but i must admit looking at the x-ray at the moment there isn't anything particularly obvious on the coin however amazingly guy our coin expert still thinks he might be able to identify it and this is the coin that you found under the stone yeah this one here is that okay so the best thing for me to do is to hold it up to the light and i can tell from the shape of the head that it's the emperor trajan which dates it to between the years 98 and 117 how can you tell that it's the shape of the head tony because trajan has a very distinctive uh roman haircut you mentioned the hair sort of cut down a little bit like an early beetle yeah but he doesn't have a beard you see the chin on there can you see the chin just above my little finger oh yeah every other second century emperor like hadrian antoninus paris and marcus aurelius they all have beards but this is not a first century portrait all those faces tend to be longer and thinner but trajan's got a very distinctive face so mr holmes tell us the dates again 98 to 117 a.d what would be the value of that in the roman zone well at the time we're talking about a roman soldier was paid 300 silver coins a year now each silver coin was worth four of these so a roman soldier would receive 1200 of these a year half of which roughly would be deducted for his food and supplies so he'd end up with about 600 in his pocket so imagine getting a couple of these every day roughly in your pocket probably felt like having a 10-pound note yeah okay but it's very very difficult to make an exact comparison very good that's what i've i've wondered that or not you know what these things were worth well just see if you can get around for a tenner down at the pub tonight and when we place ray's corroded coin against one in much better condition we can see more clearly what guy was describing and this coin does help a bit in that we now know the roman building phil's digging can't be any earlier than 98 a.d beyond that our only other clues so far are the bits of samia and pottery found here which indicate that we could be dealing with a building belonging to the early part of the second century a.d we still think the building was part of the vegas the settlement around the fort and lindsey and victor are currently speculating on what it might have looked like the people who lived in the in the viki were the people who would have to support themselves in some way so most of them were selling things or making things um so most of them the first room would be where they did the selling yeah the second room would probably be where they did the making and the storing and then they lived at the back so they didn't live above the shop they lived behind the shop quite long are they very long skinny buildings yes i mean they're called strip houses um literally because they do run from front to back in quite a long way and it's the narrow street frontage because everybody wanted to be on the main street so you have these very narrow strip houses as we're doing in medieval burgers as well that same sort of principle if the building remains where digging our strip houses then there should have been roman roads nearby ray has an idea that this lane next to his garden and this road leading to the river could be ancient roads that ran through the vehicus stewart is currently working here what does he think of this theory from the work i've been doing i'd support that theory entirely i've been trying to fit the context of the building in your garden to the wider roman settlement and fought here and what i've discovered is that the the fort uh has a south gate on top of the hill yeah and from that south gate this will be the line of a road down from it stewart has also been able to identify different phases of building up at the fort what i think we've got is a first fort established an early fort established up on top of the hill yeah and then at some later stage the fort is made smaller and another fort is placed over the top of it we've got that both from earthworks and excavation evidence then we have a series of roads one coming in from old carlisle yeah one coming in from uh mary port to the west and around this fort would grow a civilian settlement so we know that there's a road coming out the south gate down here the little cobble way that's between your two buildings could be like a back alley or a little roadway it's part of a network of small buildings and structures in the room next door the clay stamps are now dry enough to be used on the mold which if all goes well we'll be using tomorrow to make a figured samian wear bowl once it's stamped gilbert's plan is to try and pre-dry the mold in the buckingham's oven before it goes into the kiln tonight we are finding some nice bits of figured samian wear pottery in trench one some finds however are more difficult to recognize what you got there then oh that's rather close and it's just lying on straight on the top of that clay in it oh here look at that well hopefully one of our fine specialists will be able to tell us it's bronze because that's the color bronze goes in the ground now let's just see where's the input it came out from it's like a half second half circle yes we've got nothing coming up the side and the most obvious thing that that might be is perhaps a section of a roman mirror which will have to have it conserved properly to find out whether what they would put as a kind of silvering or tinning on the surface of the bronze to get that reflective surface they didn't have mirrors in the way that we have them we have to use metal mirrors but a standard roman shape for a mirror is a flat circle of bronze and it wouldn't have been anything like as good as a mirror we would have had nowadays but it would have been very effective on a day-to-day basis and likely to belong to a woman we're out in that settlement where we think some of the soldiers might have had their wives legitimate or otherwise out here living and maybe families as well children and everything else down here right phil we need to have a very very careful look in the ground around this piece of bronze and see whether we can find anything else any other pieces of it or perhaps a part of the handle if it's still there okay phil's first concern however is to make a decision on how we proceed safely with trench two wow about a meter twenty so the machine can't go much deeper so i don't like modern backfill being just left up in a near vertical section we've got to make this hole bigger we're going to make it wider we've got to make bigger bolts so that if anybody works down there it's safe is have only estimated that the archaeology is two meters deep under the lawn it could be deeper and as if we haven't got enough to do here gfis have now produced more exciting results from this field closer to the river yeah what's been going on well we've been looking at the earthworks in here and we've now got the geophysics results we think we're in the vegas this settlement next to the fort and so if we sort this out it'll help to place ray and helen's house as to what's going on in this lower part of the site that geo fizz looks good it's cracking colors isn't it it's only because the black ran out well what can we see there well i've got some high resistance features which are in in blue you can see that they cover an actual large area we think these are walls of buildings you say and we're just debating whether to put a trench somewhere through here just to test if it's roman or not well we know from fines there's roman finds that side of the road so we need to know if anything comes this side and a little earth works in here which uh geophysics are now showing there's something underneath us and also we've got antiquarian references from stucco in the 18th century which describes walls and flag floors and so on in sibby's brow and we know from the tithe map that this is sibby's brow so we may have something under here thankfully unlike ray's garden the archaeology here should be much nearer the surface and much easier for the residents of pap castle to watch what we're doing and test my knowledge of geophysics do your physics actually work on how the stone is actually compacted in the ground or is it to do with the actual types of materials of the stone or the soil of things john from the helicopter you also get a better sense of the size of pap castle so here i look here's the cliff where the river may have been below us and then the earth work across the front here which may have been the the edge of the vehicus and then we are changing behind it and where's ryan helen's house just a couple of hundred meters away look if you look down through that gap in the building i see it you see the little mini digger with the yellow arm on it so it's pretty close isn't it it is and we know that there are stuff underneath us here so the stuff between the two there's our bigger hole and then if we can stop jeff somewhere here we're looking right down now looking to our chances phil look dig in and down on the ground it looks like our swedish radar machine has been proved a success because we found more foundation stones in trench too up here look that's what the radar anomaly was quite nice isn't it i think soon just for her quite pleased with it decided at least i find yeah that's the first one first point first so it hasn't been so chock-a-block with roman pottery no nothing at all i was just breathing in to say do we know this is roman but presumably it's a first clue anyway the same way with the figure on it isn't it oh it's the it's the figured samian isn't it yeah that's what they're making up at the incident room what geophysics have given us we think is more evidence for a second roman building because these stones not only look like the ones ray found but they're at the same level and seem to be on a similar alignment however phil is digging here at the moment and he's up to his neck in sticky clay and cobbles which could be part of something entirely different how you getting on oh what he's digging away he's so wet you can't believe it oh dear oh had you planned on a water feature that could be a rain what on earth have you got there then phil well it's this enormous great ditch mech and it is just full up with cobbles and the thing of it is that if we got all this archaeology here and that is archaeology yeah this thing is cut through it in other words it's later than all that and it's going that way there's a hell of a lot of archaeology here yeah so it's going that way this ditch this ditch is running this way and you can see how steep the sides are and i assume it's going to be it's got to be a flat bottomed one so it's outside this building that turning on the outside outside the building so this looks like evidence of later activity here during the roman period which is only really what we should expect because we know from the range of fines that the romans were here for over 300 years meanwhile out in sibi's field the news is that we found more roman archaeology as predicted by geophysics but before i've even had a chance to have a look mix organizing another trench in this field what's happened tony is we put the trench across that anomaly yeah we've got a wall on both sides with what appears to be a road surface going through the middle yes we've now expanded the geophysics and if i just show you on a sketch there's the trench going across the two walls and the road yes we've now got this anomaly going under the bank and doing a right angle turn there possibly returning there in other words these aren't walls or buildings that we thought they're more likely to be streets or lanes yes i don't understand i thought avicus was a higgledy piggledy hole he looks regular understandably mick and john are getting quite excited because this could mean that roman pap castle was a much bigger and more important place than had been previously thought so as we approach the end of day two you could say that we're all feeling we're doing rather well in fact it seems to be getting more exciting by the minute and what we've got here look at this burning and ash and these stones looks like a half it does isn't it presumably we've got the fire in the middle of this room so just one more important job to do today and that's to take a trip to a local factory where we're going to put our pottery mold into the kiln to fire overnight well i haven't seen this since the decoration's been it's beautiful isn't it savour it before it goes in the kiln because there's presumably a chance it's going to break up in the firing no i think it's going to be okay let's get it i'll keep my fingers crossed day three and a quiet sunday morning in pap castle until we start work that is but there's lots to do today as rey is explaining to his neighbour because we now think we have evidence of at least two roman buildings in this garden we also have a rather large cobble-filled trench which we hope to get to the bottom of today phil ah tony we've got reinforcements oh what god ah strength in numbers have you had any more thoughts on what these cobbles might be most definitely yeah i think i've stood in an enormous foundation trench what makes you think that well because the sheer scale of it and look this material here all this clay on both sides it's not going to be very very substantial to build on so what they've done is they've dug an enormous trench right the way through and then down at the bottom here you get onto something that is really really firm that's the sort of thing that you'll be prepared to rest your foundations on do you think this is plausible tony yes i think you've got substantial clay and cobble foundations to a very very substantial building indeed a monumental building it puts uh it puts the vehicles at pap castle onto onto another plane really if you've got a monumental building of a sort that could sit on a huge foundation of that sort of depth and solidness so this is quite a significant trench oh yeah this one might have been on top of it at 1984 adrian olivier dug a site a little further away in the village um and he got a clay platform with really big stone foundations from the third century and he was interpreting a temple on top of that you can have more than one temple in the settlement of course or you can have um basilican building something like a big a big hall basically could it be a public building i think it's got to be with with fans the foundations of that size and i mean presumably it could have been either timber or stone on top of this well on top of this building you would certainly have had a massive stone foundation and i thought you wouldn't have bothered with you could afford to do this you wouldn't have worried about timber no i don't think so you would have gone and quarried some very substantial masonry well the buckinghams are going to be pleased they now have a third roman building in their garden but this one's much bigger and more important the question is what do we do next i think we've got to sort out the relationship between this big trench with the boulders and this building that ray discovered because you're saying that it's not clear which comes before which here and we're only going to sort that out by looking in this area down here one of the really nice finds that came out of this trench was the fragment of roman mirror and i'm pleased to report that we now have a conservator cleaning it up it doesn't look very much like a mirror at the moment does it yeah the soil is very soft it should come off quite easily is that the front or the back you're doing there um this is the front so it'd been the reflective side yeah yes we're hoping that we'll be able to find silvering or tinning which will be the reflective surface and if we're really lucky just where karen is scalpeling away there now there may well be decoration the mirror was found just here in trench one and rey's hoping that we might turn up something just as nice in trench two i think at the moment it's looking like this this area is outside right and behind you is the inside well that would tie up with what we believe we've got from our earlier work yeah but at the moment i'm just coming down onto all this this rubbish and what this is sort of floor surface or just rubbish i think it's demolitional rubbish building up against the wall it's not really coherent enough to be a flaw out in sibi's field geophys are working quickly to expand their survey in the hope that we'll get a better understanding of the roman archaeology we've discovered here the idea developed that we thought we might be dealing with either streets or lanes or buildings you haven't seen this and that's that's the bit there what we're doing is we're digging across here and across here yeah and you see this is very rectilinear with with this and if we if we can show that it's either like this or not like this over the whole of this area then the implications it seemed to me are enormous gosh lindsay was saying why can't it be a sort of corbridge type this is a town at the back of the wall that was servicing the troops at the front and that had quite a rectilinear plan i gather yes it does it doesn't and and you know grand buildings planned into the centre of it which would also display that opens up the question you know where does vikas stop and town start and what's the difference between the two well yeah in the south of england forts get v key around them the troops move north and the v key turn into yeah regular functioning cities that's right of course yeah um in the north you don't get that later phase you you've got right um right a fort which is there the garrison's there all the time throughout the roman period in addition to the cobbled surfaces and wall lines we're uncovering in this field we're beginning to get some interesting small finds oh it's a bronze dumbbell button this is quite a small one so it might be for clothing but i think it's more likely to be harnessed thread goes around there basically um to use like a toggle on a duffel coat second century third century they go on being used for a long time it's a very efficient way of attaching things we're also making new discoveries while cleaning the roman mirror i've been going through the mud and i found a small fragment and this does have some decoration on oh terrifically you can just see it it's not just a little stamp circular stamp yeah that's terrific that does prove it's roman that's that's wonderful it's not a big iron age hand mirror it's definitely a roman circular mirror so it looks uh victor as if we've got it right or whether you've got it right your drawings are actually splendid so basically we've got some decoration running just around the rim there not a lot but just a little to give it that emphasis in trench one phil's still busy in his cobble-filled ditch while a few feet away the hearth is becoming much easier to see the best pieces of masonry from these roman buildings would have been robbed away and reused elsewhere but is there a chance we might find bits of the buildings still in the garden well it's molding isn't it roman molding this is definitely roman i would think so yeah which does it move yeah that's incredibly heavy going clothing that's it but it's a nice crisp crisply executed bit of work this could be from the building that we that we've got down there i mean very easily out of four but what part of the building is it can we work it out is that a gutter yes i think well unless somebody can come up with some extra other explanations you don't think it is i'm not ever so certain um i'm just thinking about cornice's you know nice deep molded cornice rather than something for water to run along given that we're starting to build up a picture of a fort with a vehicus around it i thought it'd be very useful to try and look at the the types of v car that we actually know about what the layouts are because the more we look at your garden the more we look at sibba's brow alignments are starting to appear um you go from examples like this at carlisle where you get buildings developing along the roads around the fort so you get regular layouts of buildings but irregular patterns of roads that's one type of vehicles which is fairly common you get examples like at vinder lander where the vehicus clusters very close in into the gateway of the fort and it's very very compacted around there yeah two very large examples which like this one at brancaster there's they fought now that is a very very big regular planned layout and with the evidence that's emerging here at pap castle it looks to me as if we might be getting something like a very big vegas perhaps with an overall planned layout which makes it very very important not very good are we only near our agreement yes i think we've got it now and we've got it the right way up as well um this is really well told there's very very close tool marks on it's very fine work this is meant to be seen whereas the underside is a lot rougher so i think what we're looking at is the cornice from the roof bottom of the top of the roof line bottom the rooftop of the wall of a very good building again that piece tony is is up there that's right on the building yeah yeah and it projects out in the same way that that gutter does and throws water throws the water off the wall okay close to the wall comes off this way if it wasn't worn as if this wasn't worn by using it as a step you'd probably get some water wear which shows which would show how much of this actually protruded yes and what is that yes it's the same oh that's that's it they're right that is actually the line so that that's how fire protruded so far it's stuck out there at the local factory the moment has arrived when we have to take our samian pottery mold out of the kiln right do you think it's going to be a one piece scale but i'm really nervous about this i very much hope so yes let's have a look see yes fingers crossed it's perfect it's fine it's fine amazing i can't believe it's actually fired i have but no time to dwell on this success because the plan now is to use the mold to make a figured samian wear bowl and have it ready to show the buckinghams by the end of the day it's important to make sure that the clay is pushed into the decoration on the sides of the mold you realize this is the first time i've done this this is the first time you've done this this method really yes now you tell us gilbert is in fact one of the few people in the country with the expertise to try and make samian wear the trouble is of course that he's never had to do something like this in just three days hi karen how's it going really this is just about finished i've just been given the mirror the final thing and there's lots of silvering left on it because it's in really good condition that's absolutely amazing now let me move hand up now i actually see my hand and the ring glinting that's amazing i wonder if i can see my face in it actually i move my head up and down you can just about see it i'm the first person to look into this mirror for two thousand years in trench two the news is that ian has found a piece of roman pottery under one of the stones but unfortunately it's not a bit that helps estate the building and now as we approach the end of our weekend in pap castle it's time for phil's final thoughts on the complicated archaeology in trench one so phil did we manage to sort out the sequence between this big stone foundation and raised wall yes mick we did it it is it is as we thought these stones which farm formed part of ray's building yeah are definitely cut away by this really big building so that's definitely after that one that is definitely after that and did you get any have we got any dating material for any of that well we know that right at the bottom we are late first early second century and and interestingly enough we seem to have a big build-up of material which actually raising the level of the ground about then and then a whole series of buildings on the top of that well that's good in it right you're happy about that i think now when you put it into context you've tidied up the ideas that i had about this i mean it now makes sense and we've got better information from what i can gather from around the village so it's i think you've been very successful this weekend the next time you've got an extension you'll get archaeologists to do the digging doesn't it what we can say for sure is that this garden is packed full of archaeology just from the pottery finds alone we can tell the buckinghams that there was roman activity here for over 300 years and the earliest bit is this piece of black burnished wear and you can see on the screen there it's a flat bottom dish with straight sides and this is the sort of dish that the soldiers would be eating their dinners off in the second century although our trenches will now be back filled and rey plans to lay a patio around the extension the buckingham family will now know that just under their feet they have several phases of roman occupation possibly two domestic buildings seemingly on the same alignment which we think could have been strip houses and might have looked something like this around the early part of the second century a.d and there are also traces of a later monumental roman structure a building on a similar scale to this perhaps a public building and part of a zone of large impressive roman buildings in pap castle it's worth mentioning that we're not very far away from carlisle and in the sixth century we know from monastic writings and things that there was a working fountain and an arch there were such substantial buildings they were still in working order 200 years after the end of the roman period we think the roman period that's right right up here in the very part of the country we're in at the moment so this is the moment of truth isn't it gil but don't worry don't panic it is the moment of truth you sound very nice the problem is whether it will actually come out of here this is this oh god this is what we are it's worked god that's amazing it's beautiful look at it almost always stanks you made victors oh come back come kill but you're right you need oxygen it's worked and although we haven't got time to fire it in the kiln gilbert wants to make the footing for the bowl before we show it to the buckinghams nick hi there time's up i know the villagers are messing yeah how far have we got with this well it's still very complicated like it was this morning but we're getting some smashing finds out of here uh where's that piece of simon where that was there we are phil this was in a proper context wasn't it yeah it came from a sealed context right so that's that's the sort of stuff we're getting wow look at that well so what does that mean what we've got here is something we call a form 37 bowl very similar to the one that gilbert's making up in the incident room and i can date it from the decoration to around the year 75 to 95 a.d firmly within the first century and we're getting stuff like this as well look which is roman brick and it guy it's a very large piece of roman brick it's so thick it almost certainly comes from a very substantial piece yeah maybe used for flooring maybe part of the of the walls here then the other trench over there we've got a roman wall we've got a piece of nice amphora from it so you know it's all coming together and what does it mean well uh i mean subject to what the geophysics shows us we think we're in a you know domestic area yeah but it's more than the vegas we've been dealing with mick it's beginning to look much more like a full-sized town this is much more important than just here you're gonna have to get the instant room closer to the field so we've got the same pattern going on have we look more results um this is where the one trench is this is the other trench and this is the the bank the later bank but the street system continuing across the whole field more roads going off at right angles and buildings outside and buildings alongside the street possibly something on a different alignment here so there's certainly quite a lot of phases so we're still thinking of the idea of a vehicus a civil settlement always just there's nothing to alter our basic idea from this morning no real change right it's just a bigger area just a bigger area so it's substantial it's planned it's more than one place and it's much more important probably than just an ordinary v because it's got much grander buildings in which is you know a substantial advance in what we knew three days ago so are you ready to tell the uh the local people what we think it all is yeah i think so especially we've got things like this the charm as well and it looks like most of the village has turned out to see how we've got on and what we can now tell them is that the reason so many of them have roman finds in their gardens is because the vegas here at pap castle occupied a much bigger area than was previously thought and could have looked like this one theory suggested is that pap castle could have been an important staging post on the frontier in the early period of occupation and then developed into a roman town and administration center for all the forts on the coast just as corbridge is thought to have serviced the forts on hadrian's wall 10 stages there it is and look you can see that's the piece from ray's garden and that it's exactly there see the bush and the birds sitting in it we've only just realized the birds actually facing the other direction but gilbert did a wonderful job it's absolutely amazing it's going to have to be fired before it's really finished we haven't got time to do that so this style of pot would date from where about 75 to 100 a.d you know the very end of the first century who knows over the next few years maybe an archaeologist will actually pull one as pristine as this out from somewhere around here i wouldn't bank on it and this is how the samian bowl looked after it had been fired in the kiln you

Channel: Reijer Zaaijer

Views: 320,634

Rating: 4.8804059 out of 5

Keywords: time, team, full, episodes, season

Id: B64Wc2uh8GE

Length: 47min 0sec (2820 seconds)

Published: Mon Apr 29 2013